Haunting History

For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past

Ethan Kleinberg

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781503603387, 9781503602373
• eBook ISBN: 9781503603424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This book argues for a deconstructive approach to the practice and writing of history at a moment when available forms for writing and publishing history are undergoing radical transformation. To do so, it explores the legacy and impact of deconstruction on American historical work; the current fetishization of lived experience, materialism, and the "real;" new trends in philosophy of history; and the persistence of ontological realism as the dominant mode of thought for conventional historians.

Arguing that this ontological realist mode of thinking is reinforced by current analog publishing practices, Ethan Kleinberg advocates for a hauntological approach to history that follows the work of Jacques Derrida and embraces a past that is at once present and absent, available and restricted, rather than a fixed and static snapshot of a moment in time. This polysemic understanding of the past as multiple and conflicting, he maintains, is what makes the deconstructive approach to the past particularly well suited to new digital forms of historical writing and presentation.

§ 1 Haunting History

We begin with a ghost story or rather a Geist story. It is both a Geistgeschichte (intellectual history) and a Geistergeschichte (ghost story) of the specter of deconstruction that has been haunting historians since it first began appearing and disappearing in the late 1960s. Like most ghost stories, this one involves a phenomenon that is hard to explain and has engendered varying responses. A small cadre of historians have welcomed this spirit as a benevolent guide to reveal aspects of the past and the future hitherto undetected. A larger and more vocal group takes this spirit to be a malevolent Poltergeist hell-bent on causing mischief and ultimately destroying the historical profession. Yet others see deconstruction as a conjuring trick performed with smoke and mirrors by disingenuous charlatans. But the vast majority of historians view deconstruction as they do most ghost stories, with bemused skepticism and guilty fascination. Most have read or heard about it secondhand in the works of the historians aforementioned or perhaps in works by other historians who have cited them, and as with most ghost stories, this has led to exaggerations, inaccuracies, conflations, recastings, and revisions. The ghost is at times a monster or a demon. Furthermore, deconstruction is but one spirit among many that have haunted the historical profession since the early 1980s under the general terms of postmodernism, poststructuralism, or the linguistic turn. “Archaeology,” “genealogy,” “emplotment,” and “deconstruction” are often lumped together, as are figures as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Clifford Geertz, Richard Rorty, and Hayden White.

But in terms of the practice and production of history, I would suggest that the term specter is more appropriate for deconstruction and the figure of Jacques Derrida than for the other figures and methods mentioned. This is because while deconstruction, invariably linked to the person of Derrida, is repeatedly invoked in attacks against the dangers of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and the linguistic turn, it has seldom been applied in the historical profession. Practically speaking, there are very few historians who actively use deconstruction as a historical methodology; thus, this target has always been a phantom. The death of Jacques Derrida in 2004 and the pronounced death of postmodernism and the linguistic turn in works such as Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt’s Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999), Ernst Breisach’s On the Future of History: The Postmodern Challenge and Its Aftermath (2003), Gabrielle Spiegel’s Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn (2005), Michael Roth’s “Ebb Tide” (2007), and Nancy Partner’s “Narrative Persistence” (2009) appear to have put the final nails in the coffin.¹ Twenty-first-century trends in historical writing and the theory of history emphasize the return of agency, the primacy of experience, memory, testimony, and, most recently, the importance of “presence” for the project of history. Even stalwart proponents of the deconstructive project for history turned their gaze toward a more critical encounter with the work of Derrida, as in the case of Dominick LaCapra or Joan Scott. All indications seem to be that the postmodern moment has passed, the linguistic turn has moved to the great beyond, the subject has returned as the solid empirical ground for historical investigation, and the poltergeist has been exorcised from the historical profession. All that is left is to inter the remains of deconstruction.

But as this is a ghost story, it is precisely after death that the plot thickens and the deeper and perhaps darker purpose is revealed. After all, one cannot kill a ghost. This is certainly the lesson to be learned from Derrida’s Specters of Marx. With the “death” of deconstruction, facilitated by the death of Derrida, one can now revisit its historical life. It is a past artifact to be reconstituted so as to reconstruct its impact and emplot the narrative of its influence or lack thereof. But by disturbing the remains, by revisiting deconstruction, we also raise it from the dead and bring back the past, and this act, implicit in all historical work, reveals a key aspect of the relation between deconstruction and history. To push this further, I will argue for a deconstructive approach to the past that makes explicit the links between différance, history, and what I call the latent ontology of the past that is.

In broad strokes the deconstructive strategy is to approach a text (historical or otherwise) as a site of contestation and struggle, where one tendency in that text asserts itself as the source of order and thus establishes a hierarchy of meaning. The hierarchy is constructed in an oppositional binary that is presented as neutral and thus conceals the organizing principle (good and evil is a simple one). The intention of the author is rendered irrelevant for the deconstruction because the construction of the text may very well lie on unconscious, unquestioned, or implicit assumptions that are at work in the ordering process. The deconstruction exposes the binary construct and arbitrary nature of the hierarchy by revealing an exchange of properties between the two tendencies. Furthermore, much can be gleaned by what is left out of the text, and this, too, can be used to unsettle authoritative pronouncements.

In the case of this chapter, one could point to the privileging of “presence” over “absence” as provoked by the specter/ Geist/ghost or in the implicit assumption that because most historians do not “do” deconstruction, it is not of practical use for the writing of history. As it turns out, most historians don’t employ deconstruction (an absence) that is the prime motor of this chapter despite the fact that this exploration of deconstruction is justified by drawing attention to the disproportionate number of articles attacking it (a presence or event) as dangerous for the practice of history. Here the binary is exposed and the hierarchy unsettled by the exchange of properties (absence is at work in presence, and presence is at work in absence). In general, the writing of history is concerned with the construction of narratives highlighting events that occurred in an attempt to make them present to the reader or listener. Historians are much less concerned with what didn’t happen although that certainly plays into the analysis as well. One could argue that it is precisely the constructive nature of the project of history (the assembly of information, the architecture of the argument, the presentation of a comprehensible narrative) that makes deconstruction such an inappropriate strategy. The historian is building something, and the end result would be a cumbersome two-step if one were to deconstruct each part along the way.

In one of the earliest critiques of deconstruction (1976), Hayden White, who in most cases haunts the postmodern mansion hand in hand with Jacques Derrida, warned against the dangers of Derrida’s “absurdist criticism” because with Derrida “there is no ‘meaning,’ only the ghostly ballet of alternative ‘meanings’ which various modes of figuration provide.”² Here again, the historian, and not just the historian, is warned to keep clear of the “ghostly ballet” unleashed by deconstruction and the damage it is capable of inflicting. In response to this threat, White dismisses Derrida with this question: “When the world is denied all substance and perception is blind, who is to say who are the chosen and who are the damned? On what grounds can we assert that the insane, the criminal, and the barbarian are wrong?”³ The diagnosis of deconstruction’s incompatibility with the project of history on the grounds that it disallows the possibility of concrete statements and opens the door to moral relativism is certainly to be expected among those “proper historians” who, White contends, “seek to explain what happened in the past by providing a precise and accurate reconstruction of the events reported in their documents.” This is because these historians construct their narrative by “suppressing as far as possible the impulse to interpret the data, or at least by indicating in the narrative where one is merely representing the facts and where one is interpreting them.”⁴ But this diagnosis of deconstruction is somewhat surprising coming from White, given his subsequent claim that “in metahistory, by contrast [to proper history], the explanatory and the interpretative aspects of the narrative tend to be run together and to be confused in such a way as to dissolve its authority as either a representation of ‘what happened’ in the past or a valid explanation of why it happened as it did.”⁵

Deconstruction can certainly serve the purpose of metahistory by dissolving authority but, according to White, does not serve the greater claim that “there can be no proper history without the presupposition of a full blown metahistory by which to justify those interpretative strategies necessary for the representation of a given segment of the historical process.”⁶ Ostensibly, deconstruction goes too far because it does not allow a space for critical judgment and justification but only endless critique, and here again we encounter the understandable argument that at some point history must build something while deconstruction is ceaselessly “unbuilding.” But White also reveals his desire to find an Archimedean point, a moral ground from which one can make judgment. The desire for an Archimedean point to ground history is prevalent to many conventional historians as we will see.

The question is, why did White see deconstruction as the point of no return, where the ballet turns ghostly and all judgment, discrimination, and perspective are lost?⁷ In his 1978 review of White’s book, Dominick LaCapra suggests that “one way to see White’s reaction is as a turn toward secure ‘sanity’ and conventional irony in the face of the ‘other,’ who actually articulates things that are ‘inside’ White himself—but an ‘other’ whose articulation is perhaps too disconcerting or at least too alien in formulation to be recognizable.”⁸ In deconstruction White saw the ghostly reflection of himself and recoiled with dislike, much as Freud had done when he saw his own reflection in the window of his sleeping compartment on the train.⁹ Freud notes that, as with White, rather than being “frightened by [our] ‘doubles,’ [we] simply failed to recognize them as such.” Freud goes on to ask, “Is it not possible, though, that our dislike of them [the reflection] was a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the ‘double’ to be something uncanny?”¹⁰ Here Freud is referring to the archaic reaction of fear and anxiety produced by what he terms the unheimlich (uncanny). The uncanny itself seems to be produced by a slippage or inversion in which the “other” turns out to be the “same” (as in the case of Freud’s reflection), but it is also produced when established orders break down (thus the ghost story also produces an unheimlich sensation). The “other” posited by LaCapra turns out to be White himself because “the things Derrida discusses are inside White.” White’s initial rejection and distrust of Derrida can thus be read as the repression of those tendencies inherent in White that are made explicit by Derrida.

To take this a step further and gain some separation from the figures of White and Derrida, let us be so bold as to state that deconstruction reveals history’s darkest secret and in doing so provokes the fear and anxiety of the uncanny, which is met by repression. The fear, rejection, and repression of deconstruction are linked to another tendency inherent in the historical profession. The reconstruction of a historical event requires imagination in constructing a compelling argument and narrative. Deconstruction exposes the ordering of the events or argument, laying bare the authorial choices that also become apparent in the work of Hayden White. But the relation of imagination and reality are also brought into question in such a move. It is true that one can discern this interplay without recourse to deconstruction, for instance, in Robert Finlay’s critique of Natalie Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre.¹¹ But this critique was posited from the position of a historian who was out to set the record straight and get to the available facts. In response Davis put on her historian’s robe to present the full complement of footnotes, archival data, and source material that served to legitimate her imaginative narrative. A key issue in the exchange was whether Davis’s historical monograph was simply too literary, and both Davis and Finlay seem to agree that being overly “literary” or imaginative is a bad thing for historians; thus, each privileged the real over the imaginary. I would argue that the deconstructive critique is more radical because it does not begin from a position that assumes facts serve as the foundation of historical investigation or writing but seeks to unsettle the hierarchical order that assumes facts take priority over imagination. Indeed, it questions the assumptions about the workings of time on space that underpin the ontological realist understanding of the past and history. In doing so it announces the possibility that imagination is equally crucial to the historical endeavor, whatever its relation to “reality,” which is quite an unsettling proposition for the working historian. In relation to the project of history, the point is not to force the historian into a position of total relativism, White’s “ghostly ballet,” but to bring to light the conditions surrounding the construction of a historical narrative both in terms of content and form. The proposition that imagination plays so active a role in the writing of history is unpalatable to a discipline that models itself as a science. In response to the “uncanny effect [that] is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced,” the historian does not engage this possibility but denies it.¹²

The “Linguistic Turn” and the Metaphysical Concept of History

Given the demarcation between the imaginary and the real, it is of interest that the exchange between Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra, both historians by training, did not take place in journals devoted to the historical profession but in journals dedicated to literature and literary theory. White’s piece was first published in 1976 in Contemporary Literature and became of historical interest when it was included in his Tropics of Discourse in 1978. Similarly, LaCapra’s review article, which engaged Tropics of Discourse and thus pushed the issue into a historical framework, was first published in Modern Language Notes (1978). It was the later republication of this review as a chapter in Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language in 1983 that coincided with the entrance of Derrida and deconstruction into historical discourse in the United States. LaCapra was instrumental in bridging the gap between literary criticism and the writing of history through the aforementioned work but also through his article “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” published in History and Theory in 1980 and, more important, republished in the 1982 volume Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives.¹³

This volume was based on the proceedings of a conference held at Cornell University in 1980 that brought together a group of “younger older (or older younger) scholars” such as Roger Chartier, Martin Jay, Hans Kellner, Mark Poster, E. M. Henning, Keith Baker, Peter Jelavich, David Fisher, and Hayden White.¹⁴ In the introduction Kaplan and LaCapra asserted that “for at least a decade, intellectual historians have had a growing belief that their field is undergoing a far-reaching change. The change in direction is still difficult to discern. But the recent invasio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• § 1. Haunting History
• § 2. Presence in Absentia
• § 3. Chladenius, Droysen, Dilthey: Back to Where We’ve Never Been
• § 4. The Analog Ceiling
• § 5. The Past That Is
• Notes
• Index
• Series List