1
The Limits of Empiricism: The Utility of Theory in Historical Thought and Writing
Recent attempts to reframe concepts of theory and empiricism and the
relation between them seem to me highly symptomatic of developments within the
field of history generally, ones that have been in place for some time but now are
coming to the fore in defining both the substantive and theoretical approaches to
historical thought and writing currently deemed most appropriate. For those of us
reared in the environment of, and embracing at least to a certain degree, what came
to be called the “linguistic or ‘postmodern’ turn,” the return to prominence of
empiricism comes as something of a surprise, and even more so the rehabilitation of
those “epistemic virtues” of accuracy, impartiality, objectivity, fairness,
attentiveness, perseverance etc. that for so long characterized criteria for a
professional mode of behavior that would guarantee the credibility of the historian’s
account. These are virtues, at least on the face of it, which have long been associated
with the traditional, Rankean paradigm of historical scholarship and would appear
to signal its revival.1
Whatever the precise significance of these developments, it is clear that there
has been a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the linguistic turn’s overly
systematic account of the operation of language in the domain of human endeavors
of all kinds. To be sure, the “linguistic turn” constituted a fundamental
epistemological challenge for historiography and represented a massive shift in our
2
understanding of the character of history, the methods of research we might
legitimately deploy in seeking to recover the past, and the nature of the truth claims
that could be asserted about the products of our labors. Proponents of the linguistic
turn argued that insofar as even the most empirical stance towards research and
writing about the past depends – as it certainly does – for the most part on
documents, hence textuality, reference itself is an effect of the particular language
systems inhabited by both the contemporary historian and the “sources” (which are,
of course, texts) being scrutinized. Thus “reality” -- history—is itself mediated by
linguistic codes that it is impossible for the critic/historian to bypass in the
recuperation of past cultures. Once the fundamentally textualist character of
historical research, “all the way down ” as one says, is recognized, the founding
postulates of the older positivism would appear to be untenable. As early as 1989,
David Harlan clearly labeled the emergence of poststructuralism an epistemological
crisis for historical study in the pages of the American Historical Review, asserting that
the
“linguistic turn” has “ questioned out belief in a fixed and determinable past,
compromised the possibility of historical representation, and undermined
our ability to locate ourselves in time. The result of all this has been to reduce
historical knowledge to a tissue of remnants and fabrications concealing, it is
said, an essential absence.”
Thus it could be argued that it had a significant impact on how historians construed
their basic tasks and procedures and the language in which they were conducted,
although for the most part, I believe, the actual methods employed by historians as
they went about their research remained fairly stable.
3
Critiques of the “linguistic turn” in an earlier period tended to modify its
encompassing linguistic constructivism, yet recognized the insights it proffered for
historiographical investigation. As Ronald Grigor Suny noted in 2002, “if there is a
noticeable trend at the moment, it is not so much an abandonment of the ground
gained by the turn toward discourse, language and culture, but a reassessment of the
place of the material and the structural, or what is often referred to as the social.”2
Similarly, one could, I argued in 1990, deploy a textualist approach to past materials
while recognizing the need to preserve the ability to frame and understand the social
contexts in which they were produced according to traditional historiographical
practices, hence my argument concerning the “social logic of the text”, as:
a way of looking at the inextricably interrelated nature of social and
discursive practices, of the material and linguistic realities that are
interwoven into the fabric of the text, whose analysis as a determinate
historical artifact in turn grants us access to the past. And it is by focusing on
the social logic of the text, its location within a broader network of social and
intertextual relations, that we best become attuned to the specific historical
conditions whose presence and/or absence in the work alerts us to its own
social character and function, its own combination of material and discursive
realities that endow it with its own sense of purposiveness.3
But to approach the past in this manner entailed, as I acknowledged then, reliance on
two different, and at the time considered wholly contradictory, epistemologies: one
remaining indebted to the empiricist foundations of the discipline, while the other drew on
literary theories of interpretation and figuration, including deconstruction. Such an
approach thus left the relationship between theory and empiricism basically unexamined,
with little attempt to reconcile them into a single methodological and theoretical practice.
Similarly, and much more recently, Paul A. Roth, has argued on behalf of preserving
4
empiricism for the retrieval of historical evidence as traditionally construed, while accepting
the hermeneutic tradition that derives, ultimately, from Richard Rorty, the philosopher who
did the most to disseminate the term “linguistic turn.” This is not to argue that history as a
discipline is necessarily confined to the use of a single epistemological framework as it shifts
its foci of attention and objects of research. At a minimum, as Jacques Revel compellingly
demonstrated, the play of scale as one moves from micro- to macro- (or global) analyses of
historical phenomena often involves changing epistemological frameworks.4
Perhaps more relevant has been the current tendency to reject the sort of
encompassing narrativism associated with Hayden White’s Metahistory as “anti-realist”
and therefore standing in contradiction to history’s primary goal of gaining legitimate and
authentic knowledge of the past. Although White acknowledged, indeed insisted, that the
components out of which historians construct their narratives were “singular existential
statements” (i.e. facts), he was equally insistent that the stories created on the basis of such
facts were, borrowing the words of Louis Mink, “made not found, ” hence imaginative
recreations organized according to a variety of literary modes of troping.5 For White, as is
well known, historiography is an essentially literary endeavor, shaping the past into
narrative structures, or what Ankersmit has called “narrative substances.” To the extent that
we can identify the narrativist approach to historiography with postmodernism (a term that,
in fact, seldom appears in White’s work), then Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen is correct in stating
that ”postmodernism in historiography accepts and endorses the fundamental distinction
between lower order and higher order entities of knowledge…that is, it commits to the
5
distinction between “facts” and “narratives” and to the difference in epistemic status
between them.” 6 And it is precisely over the question of the precise nature of the epistemic
status claimed for each that current questions of epistemology and empiricism have arisen.
Joan Scott, one of the earliest and most forceful advocates of the “linguistic turn” in
the United States, sees the revival of claims about the validity of empirical methods as a
conservative reaction generated by a yearning for certainty, security and stability. For
historians, she believes, this search takes various forms:
a renewed emphasis on empiricism and quantitative analysis, the
rehabilitation of the autonomous willing subject as the agent of history, the
essentializing of political categories of identity by the evidence of
“experience”, the turn to evolutionary psychology for explanations of human
behavior, the endorsement of the timelessness of universal values and the
trivialization and denunciation of the “linguistic turn” – an attempt to deny it
a serious place in the recent life of the discipline.7
Scott is correct insofar as a great deal of recent work by younger historians, at least in
the United States, appears to be dedicated to a revival of materialism and the
wholehearted embrace of empiricism as history’s governing methodology. As one
young scholar, Nathan Perl- Rosenthal, who participated in the American Historical
Review forum on “historiographic turns” put it: “younger scholars seem to be
taking positivist stances towards their sources and in some cases even believe
themselves to be reconstructing the objective reality of the past.”8 Gary Wilder
concurs, identifying the current moment in (American?) historiography as witness to
“the untimely return of elements of the ‘doctrinal realism’ that Hayden White
identified with the legacy of Leopold von Ranke: documentary evidence, descriptive
6
particularism, and “explanation by narration” in the service of a reconstructive
history of ‘what actually happened’”. 9 For Wilder, this return to descriptive realism
and archival objectivism is all the more striking in that if follows what we had earlier
believed was an epistemological break initiated by the linguistic and cultural
movements in historiography, currently giving rise to what is coming to be termed
“postist” historiography – i.e. post-poststructuralism, post-postmodernism and the
like. The central tendency in this development has been to banish theory and return
to the kind of pure empiricism, objectivism and historical realism that had earlier
reigned.
In light of the implicit return to some variety of empiricism signaled by the
topic of this conference, it is perhaps useful to look at which aspects of the older
empirical model are no longer tenable, given the past decades of theory’s
undermining of some of its basic postulates, as noted above. What are the dominant
forms of historical epistemology currently in play, what methods would seem to
negotiate the “middle ground” between linguistic constructivism and social
materiality, on which historians currently seem to be taking their stand, and what is
the nature of the truth claims advanced by historians?
Clearly, the first casualty of recent theoretical debates – whatever their
orientation – has been the older {Rankean] notion of objectivity, although not
necessarily its functional correlate of advocating the historian’s commitment to
impartiality and openness to unanticipated findings. Whether informed by a sense
of the individual historian’s psychological investment in a particular view and
7
understanding of the past, his or her moral and/or political values, or the acceptance
of one or another version of the structuralist /Foucauldian notion of the cultural
construction of the self, it is inconceivable that any working historian today would
claim that historians’ reconstructions and interpretations of the past proceed
according to rules and procedures governed by a strict objectivity.
What seems to me new in recent years is the call for an ethics of historical
work that strives for, even if it can never quite fully attain, the older requirement of
objectivity. Thus Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob in Telling the Truth
About History, after proclaiming the end of postmodern history, propose that the task
of historiography now is “elaborating models for the future of history, models for
understanding the search for historical truths within the framework of a revitalized
and transformed practice of objectivity.”10.
But just what is entailed in this view of “objectivity,” assuming that such a
posture can be realized within the context of a fundamentally humanistic, rather
than scientific, domain? In what does the “revitalized and transformed practice of
objectivity” consist? Even if we grant that the postmodern notion of the discursive
constitution of consciousness à la Foucault no longer holds sway, surely no one
today would argue that selves are not culturally, as well as biologically, constructed
beings, whose modes of thought are deeply marked by the cultural contexts and
cultural codes within which they operate. As Joseph Margolis argues, to admit that
selves are cultural artifacts means that
Objectivity must be a construct of some sort, but if so, then it can be such
8
only on the supposition that the norms of rationality or legitimation on
which it depends will be as much a construct as any other…11
It is precisely the sense of responsibility towards those norms of rationality and
legitimation that Jörn Rüsen believes historians should practice as a corrective to the
excesses of narrativism and its accompanying forms of constructivism and
subjectivism.12 The upshot of such approaches to the question of objectivity,
therefore, locates it somewhere on a “sliding scale” between objectivity and
subjectivity, navigating between what is construed as the ontological objectivity (or
perhaps more nearly objectivism) of reality and the necessarily inflected, hence
subjective, perception of it.13 Such an approach, it is hoped, would offer, in the
wonderful phrase of Vaclec Havel, “an objective way out of the crisis of
objectivism.”14
One might be tempted to attribute current attempts to rehabilitate objectivity
and empiricism to the burgeoning of new topics of historical research such as affect
theory and the history of emotions,15 “deep history” and the brain, as in the work of
Daniel Smail,16 memory studies,17 transnationalism, postcolonialism, globalism,
comparative and diasporic history, the latter all clearly related to the current
generation’s experience of globalization and requiring the kind of empirical
investigation traditionally accompanying new areas of historical concern. But as
Wilder has also noted, while “disciplinary history today is distinguished by a
proliferating succession of topical turns,” there is nonetheless a poverty of theoretical
9
questions and historiography would seem to be “regressing methodologically to the
status ante quo, in which “conceptual arguments are countered by a realist
epistemology that only recognizes truth in concrete, observable phenomena,”
displaying a form of intellectual conservatism characterized by “antipathy to theory,
archival fetishism, methodological essentialism, and professional xenophobia… 18
So why are we now witness to the return of precisely those elements of
historiographical practice that were most in dispute during the 1980s and 1990s, if not into
the twenty-first century as well? The simplest answer is to see the current turn to
empiricism as a generational impulse, guiding the rising generation of young scholars to
find their own motifs and topics to explore and abetted by the vastly widening range of
areas now routinely under consideration. As Nancy Partner has pointed out, the discourse
of “turns” was theoretically supported by Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of the Scientific
Revolutions, which asserted the notion of discontinuous patterns of thought enshrined in
dominant paradigms that governed, for the period of their acceptance, the discourses by
which historians operated,”19 but destined to change when they no longer spoke to needs or
motivations of researchers. This was a position which drew on and was supported in the
work of anthropologists such as Bourdieu and more generally the structuralism stemming
from Saussurean linguistics, the structuralist anthropology of Lévi-Strauss and the symbolic
anthropology of Geertz, followed by the notion of epistemic regimes (or discourses)
advanced in the early work of Foucault, all of which came to be placed under the label of
postmodernism, despite the fact that they were not coherently integrated or even necessarily
compatible.
10
The logic of Kuhn’s notion of the disparate and changing structures of governing
scientific paradigms would seem to support the idea of generational change and evolution.
However, it is precisely representatives of the younger generation, such as Judith Surkis,
who most strongly reject this kind of generational thinking, preferring instead the notion of
a genealogical approach to historiographical theory that maintains the presence of multiple
strands of critical interrogation variously interwoven over an extended period of time,
without exhibiting the sort of sharp break or rupture implied by the terminology of
“turns”.20
If we consider Surkis’s genealogical model as symptomatic of more recent
attitudes concerning modes of theoretical reflection, then it is not surprising that one
of the more prevalent approaches to historiographical theory is to forge a
combination of constructivism – or at least a modified version of it -- and
empiricism, otherwise phrased in terms of narrativism (anti-representationalism)
and realism (or representationalism). This is precisely where Jouni-Matti
Kuukkanen’s Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography takes its stance. He rejects a
purely narrativist approach on the grounds that narrativism “cannot provide an
epistemologically or otherwise cognitively meaningful evaluative frame to explain
how we can keep the essence of the narrativist insight but also formulate a
cognitively meaningful approach to evaluation in historiography.”21 Kuukkanen
thus seeks to negotiate the tensions between a non-representationalist account of
historiography – basically the narrativist strand stemming from Hayden White –
with a modified version of “representationalism”, or the theory of correspondence
11
(the notion that our historical texts reflect and correspond to the history we study);
in effect the Rankean paradigm shorn of its claims to objectivism and “truth.”22
Kuukkanen’s impulse, thus, is to preserve what is most valuable among the insights
generated by narrativist literary theory, accepting its premise that historical writing
depends on a priori plotting or troping, while maintaining the ultimate goal of
historiography as that of justified (i.e. empirically grounded, hence “truthful”) and
warranted assertions about the past. 23 But in contrast to the “social logic of the text”
and its dual epistemologies, Kuukkanen seeks to generate a synthetic approach in
which elements of narrativism and empiricism are equally in play and continually
modify one another in the production of historiographical representation and
meaning. And what makes this initiative possible, is precisely the “new empiricism”
and its realist orientation. This is not, therefore, a return to a Rankean, positivist
paradigm, for in the judgment of Kuukkanen and others pursuing this path, what is
required is a new philosophy of history and a new notion of historical ontology, that
is to say, a theory by which to integrate constructivism and empiricism.
There are, needless to say, inherent problems with an attempt to synthesize
constructivism and empiricism, given their quite different and distinct
epistemologies. How does one, in fact, integrate into a single system linguistic theory
and empiricist approaches, even granting what Kuukkanen has called the
“undetermination of theory by data”?24 How does history maintain its fundamental
claim of providing an accurate and justified, “objective” picture of the past while
accepting the incontrovertible insights that the constructivist approach has taught us
12
about the textual nature of both the historical materials we study and our own
production of history, with its inevitable relativism given its reliance on culturally
determined perspectives on the past. In short, how does one combine referentiality
and anti-realism, objectivism and subjectivism, documentation and narrativity, in
effect empiricism and theory? As Reinhart Koselleck has noted, “between linguistic
usage and the social materialities upon which it encroaches or to which it targets
itself, there can always be registered a certain hiatus.” 25 And for Koselleck, that
hiatus induces an “epistemological aporia” that lies at the heart of the
historiographical endeavor.
One possible benefit of such an epistemological aporia is the notion,
advanced by Alun Munslow, that one can, indeed must, make one’s own, personal,
choice of governing epistemologies, and hence of the resulting ontological forms
those epistemic decisions produce, which Munslow would like to label “epistemic
genre choices.”26 And as appears to be the growing tendency these days, Munslow,
like Kuukkanen and Pihlainen, sees the future of historical theory in some (in this
case individually generated, it would seem) combination of reconstructionist and
constructionist epistemic genres, or what he otherwise calls practical realism and
representationalism, manifesting itself in a “joint investment in empiricism, analysis
and representationalism”27 ultimately combined in fashions shaped according to the
historian’s choice of narrative trope.
Any eventually successful synthesis of empiricism and constructivism will,
however, require a theory that inflects and modifies the basic postulates of both
13
components, a theory that has yet to be fully worked out. As Adrian Jones has
argued, “after Foucault and de Certeau, there can be no question of history rejecting
discursive framings of the actual. But nor should history ignore old social scientific
notions of the actual as structural, residual contextual.”28 Yet the precise means by
which one can engage the past simultaneously on both these levels is not entirely
clear. For the fundamental reality of all historiographical endeavors is the ontic
absence of the past in itself, and thus, as John Zammito has said, “the consequence
that history is cast necessarily upon the artifices of its theorization to retrieve what
the past meant.”29
So, how might one reconcile the presumed anti-realism of constructivism and
the desire to recover the past, if not exactly wie es eigentlich gewesen, at least in a
credible, if necessarily interpreted, representation of what it might have been.
Clearly, as noted above, all historians, whatever their theoretical orientations, are
dependent on texts, whether we choose to call them “sources” and documents to
indicate our belief in the veracity of what they portray or acknowledge their literary
framing in a variety of forms of textuality. There can, therefore, be no unmediated
access to the past. For empiricism to be reborn, however, we must return to the
notion that texts of this kind do provide some kind of window on the past, but
achieve this not, as Ranke believed, through their transparency, but rather, as Kalle
Pihlainen suggests, because of the “materiality of the referent.”30 He adopts this
term because he believes that “materiality best describes the intransigence and
concreteness of the materials for factual building blocks of historical
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representations.”31 In his view, it is precisely this materiality of the historical
referent – its ability to disrupt narrative coherence and disprove hypotheses with
unanticipated facts -- that constitutes history as a genre distinct from other
humanistic modes of textual investigation. And, he believes “the disruptive potential
of historical sources (in their aspect of being somewhat uncontrollable textual
elements) for questioning the oppressive effects of narrativization still remains
largely unexplored.”32 This is not, as it might seem at first glance, a rejection of
constructivism but rather an attempt to integrate a constructivist view of the
historian’s specific form of writing with a functionalist view of the historian’s task,
which Pihlainen continues to conceive, in ways comparable to Kuukkanen, as the
representation of warranted assertions about the past. From this perspective,
historiography is necessarily a combination of “fact” and “fiction”, and in
Pihlainen’s approach, tends to give greater weight to its factual content because of its
disruptive potential. Historians cannot, he avers, bend fact to form like their literary
counterparts and the “material” that makes up their narratives “constrain not only
the form and tools of expression… but also the core formal structure that lends the
work much of its effectiveness.”33 Moreover, Pihlainen rejects the normal view that
the literary goal of historical representation is to provide a coherent representation of
the past that is interpretively persuasive, advocating instead complexity,
fragmentation, even incoherence so that historical texts will be more effective in
creating “experientiality” and thus transfer the responsibility for meaning making
15
onto readers.”34 The literary construction of the past – the mode by which it attains
intelligibility and meaning – is thus thrust upon readers rather than writers.
To the extent that this view of recent developments is correct, it is hardly
surprising that the new master concept in post-linguistic turn historiography is
“experience.” Current views of “experience” as the source of knowledge of the past,
as in David Carr’ Experience and History Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical
World,35 tend to emphasize its socially intersubjective character, hence its cultural
and psychological determinants and it is therefore, as Martin Wiklund notes in his
review of Carr, “through membership in some community for which those events
are historically significant that its past can become part of “my past,” although I
have no personal experience or memory of it.”36 Carr seeks to craft a
phenomenological approach to history that puts experience in the place of
representation and memory as, he asserts, “the central focus of a philosophy of
history.”37
One obvious philosophical (and epistemological) consequence of the
emphasis on experience, as Carr’s work makes clear and as I argued in Practicing
History,
is the restoration, albeit in a now de-essentialized form, of a version of
phenomenology akin, although not identical, to that phenomenology against
which the generation of French theorists who articulated the basic premises
of poststructuralism struggled. Although it is premature to say that historical
writing has managed, through this refocusing, to “save the phenomena,” that
is, to return to a notion of history as an objective science capable of describing
past reality “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” it has nonetheless reached a point
where it is on the verge of “saving the phenomenological,” of restoring the
historical actor and writer and his or her consciousness of the world,
16
however thoroughly mediated by discourses of one sort or another, to the
center of historical concerns.38
Perhaps the most extreme form of the belief that “experience of the past” is
possible (and, indeed, the goal of historical study) is that framed by Dominick
LaCapra, whose writings on the Holocaust led him to a thematic preoccupation with
questions of trauma, transference, empathy, identification, and the psychoanalytic
concepts of ‘acting out” and “working through,” by means of which, he avers, the
historian re-lives, in effect re-experiences, “problems and processes active in the texts
or artifacts we study” which “are repeated in displaced and often disguised or
distorted form in our very accounts of them”39 Indeed, LaCapra goes so far as to
claim, in Representing the Holocaust, that our transferential relation to the past is that
which “binds us to the past and through which the problems we investigate are
repeated in displaced form in our very discussions of them.”40 Critical to this
process, in his thought, is the vexed question of the role of memory and testimony
whereby the historian, he has argued, becomes a “secondary witness” in the study of
past traumatic events, assuming – once again – the transfer of past experiences to the
lived present (and psyche) of the historian.
To the extent that the means by which the historian becomes a “secondary
witness” is by undergoing a transferential relation to the primary testimony – a
process that, he notes, implies the tendency to become emotionally implicated in the
witness and his or her testimony – it almost necessarily produces the tendency to act
out an affective response to them. To guard against this, LaCapra insists that
17
“secondary memory” should be the result of critical work on primary memory and
sees the elaboration of an accurate, critically tested secondary memory on the basis
of primary memory and other evidence as the specific task of the historian. His
recent work has sought to provide the historian with the kind of critical and selfcritical –- or more generally “self-reflective-- theoretical apparatus that would enable
him or her to avoid the pitfalls of acting out by advocating the goal of “objective”
distancing in the study of past traumatic events, without at the same time endorsing
the older notion of “objectification” that went by the name of “objectivity “ in the
Rankean paradigm. And the task of such distancing is, precisely, to enable the
historian to “work through” those inevitable transferential relations to the past in a
way productive for historiographical endeavors. Despite such prescriptions, I
suspect that in the main, for LaCapra, rather than correcting the misprisions of the
past, the historian simply repeats them, “acting out” etc. in his own narrative the
traumatized, sublimated, or displaced disorders inherent in the past, a process that,
as he describes it, threatens to engulf the historian in an endless experience of
melancholy. Yet what is interesting, from a theoretical point of view, is the ways in
which LaCapra’s theories intersect with current efforts to rehabilitate a version of the
historian’s experience of the past.
The opposite extreme of LaCapra’s immersion in the traumatic past, but
equally concerned with a – here quasi-mystical – experiencing of it, can be seen in
the recent work of Frank Ankersmit, Eelco Runia, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and to a
lesser extent Ewa Domanska,41 who similarly argue on behalf of the presence of the
18
past. In their work, the past itself – not merely its remnants, monuments or ongoing
influence -- is (somehow miraculously) conjured into being by the historian’s contact
with its traces, a process that Ankersmit has argued is precognitive (hence nonepistemic?) whereby the past surges into the historian’s consciousness through a
process that Ankersmit calls “sublime historical experience.” Such an experience
overcomes the “otherness” and distance of the past, and brings it ontologically into
the present, hence available to be experienced. Or as Ankersmit asserts: “Since what
is being represented is part of reality, the same must be true of its
representation…the ontological status of being part of reality is…transferred from the
represented to its representation.”42 Whether or not one would designate such as
process as “empirical” in the usual sense of that word, it does focus on sense
perception as the source of both knowledge and, ultimately, a kind of transcendence
of the separation of past and present in the claim that the past can be recuperated in
the present. While many historians would agree with Michael Roth that “the
acknowledgment of the past in the present is a necessary ingredient of modern
historical consciousness” and, hence, Roth suggests,” of modern freedom,”43 it is not
equally certain that they would endorse the possibility of a “sublime historical
experience” of it. From a theoretical point of view, these strivings to re-experience
the past represent a clear departure from both positivist and poststructuralist notions
of the “death of the past,” although exactly how such experiencing of the past occurs
remains somewhat unclear, at least to those of us who have yet to partake of it.
19
Clearly implicit in the notion of the “presence” of the past is a novel
understanding of the nature of historical temporalities. Indeed, from a theoretical
perspective, transformations in the approach to the nature of history’s temporal
regimes has probably undergone the most extensive revision over the past decade or
so. Not only has the notion of the necessary rupture between past and present that
de Certeau44 stipulated as the founding gesture of modern historiography been
abandoned – as is clear in the late work of Ankersmit et. al. – but a somewhat new
consideration of multiple temporalities, persisting as “layers of time,” has come to
the fore in recent discussions of historical time, as can be seen initially in the work of
Reinhart Koselleck45,46 who abandoned the older notion of historical time as a single,
linear, neutral medium of human activity in favor of a more complex and
heterogeneous notion of temporality. For Koselleck, time is “ multi-layered”
governed by “dichotomies between [the] natural and historical, extra linguistic and
linguistic, diachronic and synchronic time.”47 Thus, for Koselleck and others who
seek to reverse the older notion of neutral time, time itself has its own historicity
(and indeed, its own tempo, accelerating as rapid change overtakes the world) and
our understanding of it will, of necessity, change “with the times.” (pardon the pun).
Thus Lynn Hunt has argued that globalization as a process has already had and will
increasingly produce effects on our experience of time itself, although she continues
to adhere to the desirability, as she says, of “
using the universal, homogeneous, totalizing category of time developed
from the 19th century onwards, because it enables us to imagine ourselves as
20
living in one shared world with one shared past, albeit a past with many
diverging traces.48
In contrast to Hunt’s allegiance to the traditional view of time as
homogenous, other scholars such as Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz share with
Koselleck a belief in the relativity of time and see the current movement in
conceptions of time as part of a process that they term “breaking up time.” Behind
the idea of “breaking up time” stands a concern with memorial testimony, as in
Bevernage’s work on “transitional justice, – that is, “justice associated with periods
of political change, characterized by legal responses to confront the wrongdoings of
repressive predecessor regimes.”49 Such legal responses often took form in judicial
tribunals like the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that sought to address past
grievances as nations such as South Africa, Sierra Leone, Argentina and others
underwent the transition to new “beginnings,” but could not do so successfully
without addressing the injustices of the past and the persistence of grievances and
traumatic memories of that past. In that sense, there was a felt need, as a matter of
public policy, to manage the legacy of violent pasts. At stake in the operation of the
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions was the hope that, in rehearsing past
grievances by creating a forum for memory, reconciliation between the need of the
past to be voiced and the need of the country to move on could be reached, thereby
avoiding the simple declaration of an amnesty based on amnesia, on forgetting. In
effect, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions became fora for the adjudication of
competing political imperatives, one centered on past injustice, one directed to
21
future development and hoping to put the past at rest. Thus imbricated in these
differing foci were two conflicting visions of the past, one that insisted on its
persistence in the present – an unmastered past that would not pass until and unless
the burden of history was addressed – and another that sought to declare the past
absent, a transient or fleeting past of that which has already taken place and is no
longer (i.e. our traditional understanding of history). As such, they entailed not only
two different ways of figuring the relationship between past and present but, as
Bevernage seeks to demonstrate, two different, and competing, politics of time.
Interestingly, in these cases, it is the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions which
seek to move on to the future and leave the past definitively behind. Thus, in the
context of transitional politics, history does not represent continuity, but it used
performatively to provoke a rupture in time and a sense of discontinuity, in order to
create a present free of a haunting past.50
Current trends in historiography that seek to nuance and revise our notions
of time, objectivity, and empiricism require, therefore, theoretical reflection, since the
sort of “givens” that the older Rankean paradigm of empiricism embraced clearly
are no longer viable and the “limits” placed upon their use would appear to be
insurmountable, hence the utility of theory. If we can agree that history is the
product of contemporary mental representations of the absent past that bear within
them strong ideological and/or political imprints—and it seems unlikely that any
historian would today disagree with this, whether framed in terms of discourse,
social location, or some other form of the historian’s fashioning—then it seems
22
logical to include within the determinants of historical practice the impress of
individual psychological forces in the coding and decoding of those socially
generated norms and discourses. And thus the historian is imbricated in the cultural
and psychological forces at play in the construction of the past and a strict
empiricism, based on older notions of objectivity, would seem impossible to
rehabilitate.
In the end, what is at stake in these discussion is not an epistemological
question of “truth” but a turn from epistemological to ethical commitments in the
study of the past, creating a place (and a plea) for a new historical ethics. In that
sense as Rüsen has similarly argued, a viable and productive ethics of history
“reaches into the operations of research as well as into the narrative procedures of
shaping the past as history.”51 There is, therefore, to borrow Geoff Eley’s phrase,
“no need to choose,” whether between hermeneutics, (the “linguistic turn”) and
empiricism, textuality and historical materialism or what Rüsen prefers to call
“theoretical and practical reason.”52 If this posture calls, therefore, for the
rehabilitation and/or modification of a formerly rejected form of empiricism, it can
do so without abandoning the fundamental insights of hermeneutics, narrativity and
the linguistic turn. In short, it calls for a historiographical posture that seeks to join
together theory and empiricism.
Notes
23
It is interesting that de Certeau considers that, insofar as historiographical
processes consist in “promoting a selection between what can be understood and
what must be forgotten, to obtain the representation of a present intelligibility,” he
believes that the “shards created by the selection of materials, remainders left aside
by an explication” nonetheless return and hence “symbolize a return of the
repressed, that is, a return of what, at a given moment, has become unthinkable in
order for a new identity to become thinkable.” Michel de Certeau. The Writing of
History, trans. Tom Conley (Columbia University Press, New York, 1988), 4.
1
Ronald Grigor Suny, “Back and Beyond: reversing the Cultural Turn?” American
Historical Review, 107 (2002), 1488.
2
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History, Historicism and the Social Logic of the Text in the
Middle Ages,” Speculum, 65 (1990): 59-86.
3
One of the few works to systematically investigate this problem that I am aware of
is Jeux d’échelles: La micro-analyse à l’expérience, Jacques Revel, (ed.), (Paris: Gallimard,
1996).
4
For a discussion of Hayden White’s narrativist historiography and understanding
of tropes see my articles: “Rhetorical Theory/Theoretical Rhetoric: Some
Ambiguities in the Reception of Hayden White,” in Philosophy of History after Hayden
White (Bloomsbury Studies in American Philosophy), 2013: 171-182. and “Above,
About and Beyond the Writing of History: A Retrospective View of Hayden White’s
Metahistory on the Fortieth Anniversary of its Publication,” Rethinking History,
(2013) 1-17.
5
Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography (Palgrave
MacMillan, London, 2015): 149.
6
Joan Scott, “History-Writing as Critique,” in Manifestos for History, ed. and
introduced by Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow (London and New
York: Routledge, 2007), 20. See also the review of this volume by John E. Toews,
“Manifesting, Producing and Mobilizing Historical Consciousness in the
‘Postmodern Condition’”, History and Theory, 48 (2009), 257-275.
7
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, “Comment: Generational Turns,” American Historical
Review, 807.
8
Gary Wilder, “From Optic to Topic: The Foreclosure Effect of Historiographic
Turns,” AHR Forum on Historiographic ‘Turns’ in Critical Perspective,” American
9
24
Historical Review, 117, no. 3 (2012): 723. However, it should be pointed out that
Rosenthal believes this “supersessionist” view is wrong. According to him, “the
emergent work does not reject the preoccupations and insights of the previous
generations. It executes instead two subtle but crucial shifts of emphasis in subject
matter and approach. First, while the emergent scholars emphasize the study of acts
or behaviors rather than discursive texts and statements, they do so not to reject the
study of meaning but in order to give a different account of the relationship between
acts and culture. The languages of practice, process and networks that they employ
focus our attention on the power of habitual action and symbol – poor practices to
create meaning. Second, in part because of the central role it gives to process and
practice, this scholarship emphasizes the physical and social factors that constrained
how early modern people made meaning in their everyday lives.” Ibid., 808.
10
Telling the Truth About History (New York, Norton, 1994), 237.
Joseph Margolis, “The Limits of Ethics and History,” in The Ethics of History, Ibid.,
175.
11
Jörn Rüsen, “Responsibility and Irresponsibility in Historical Studies: A Critical
Consideration of the Ethical Dimension of the Historian’s Work, in The Ethics of
History, Ibid., 209.
12
This is, in brief, the position put forth by Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of
Historiography, p. 172. And, once again, Pihlainen essentially agrees with this,
arguing that “The choice for the historian is not one between a belief in objective
representation and a complete disavowal of the past involving quite extreme
positions of epistemological relativism, anti-referentialism or even anti-realism.”
Kalle Pihlainen, “Rereading Narrative Constructivism,” Rethinking History: The
Journal of Theory and Practice, 17,4 (2013), 517.
13
Cited in Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, “Agency in the Discursive Condition,” History
and Theory, 40 (2001), p. 52. For a review of the evolving positions on “objectivity”,
from Ranke through Richard Rorty to Alun Munslow from the point of view of the
philosophy of history see Marek Tamm, “Truth, Objectivity and Evidence in History
Writing: A Pragmatist Perspective,” Journal of the Philosophy of History, 8 (2014): 265290.
14
On affect theory the principle work, grounding affect in autonomic neurological
responses, is Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
(Penguin Books, London, 1994). For a discussion of the current treatment of the
history of emotions and how it is to be distinguished from affect theory see
15
25
Stephanie Trigg, “Introduction: Emotional Histories – Beyond the Personalization of
the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory,” Exemplaria, 26, 1(2014):3-15.
See Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, (University of California
Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2007) as well as the edited volume, Deep
History The Architecture of Past and Present, Andrew Shryock and Daniel Smail, eds.
(University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2011).
16
Work on memory is legion but for a discussion of the varieties of memorial
consciousness now being integrated into historiography see my recent article on
“The Future of the Past: History, Memory and the Ethical Imperatives of Writing
History in the Contemporary World,”, Journal of the Philosophy of History, 8 (2014):
149-179.
17
Gary Wilder, “Foreclosure: On the Insidious Logic of Historiographic Turns,”
paper delivered to a Roundtable on Historiographic Turns in Critical Perspective,” at
the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, San Diego, 2010.
18
19
Nancy Partner, “Theory in the Humanities: What is it For? How Does it Work?” 4.
Judith Surkis, “When was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy,” AHR Forum on
Historiographic Turns in Critical Perspective.” American Historical Review, 117, 3
(2012): 700-722. On Surkis’s article see, Julia Adeney Thomas, “Comment: Not Yet
Far Enough,” Ibid., 796. Wilder tends to agree, asserting that “at the time, historians’
talk of suddenly turning away from a realist epistemology ( what Rorty called a
correspondence theory of truth) also struck me as ahistorical and presentist.”
“Foreclosure, On the Insidious Logic of Historiographic Turns, Ibid., 3. For an
examination of the philosophical basis for the end of positivism its empirical basis
see Paul A. Roth, “The Disappearance of the Empirical: Some Reflections on
Contemporary Culture, Theory and Historiography,” Journal of the Philosophy of
History, 1 (2007): 271-292.
20
21
Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography,” 148.
Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Ibid.,, p. 65. Or as he also says, “we need to speak of the
justification of historiographical theses without the presumption of their truth.
Against the background of traditional epistemology this may appear problematic,
because the point of justification has typically been seen to consist of its relation to
truth.” Ibid., 143.
22
23
Ibid.,122.
26
24
Ibid., 117.
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith
Tribe (Columbia University Press, New York, 2004), p. 85. On Koselleck see John
Zammito, “Koselleck’s Philosophy of Historical(s) and the Practice of History,”
History and Theory, 43 (2004): 124-135.
25
Alun Munslow, “Genre and history/historying,” Rethinking History, 19, no.2
(2015), 158.
26
27
Ibid.,162.
Adrian Jones, “Word and Deed: Why a Post-Poststructural History is Needed, and
How it Might Look,” The Historical Journal, 43, no. 2 (June. 2000), 439.
28
John Zammito, “Koselleck’s Philosophy of Historical(s) and the Practice of
History,” History and Theory, 43 (2004), 134.
29
Kalle Pihlainen, “Realist Histories? When Form clashes with Function,” Rethinking
History, 19, no 2 (2915): 184.
30
31
Ibid., loc. cit.
Kalle Pihlainen, “Rereading Narrative Constructivism,” Rethinking History: The
Journal of Thinking and Practice 17, 4 (2013), 520.
32
33
Kalle Pihlainen, “Realist Histories?,” 186-7.
Ibid., 187. One might compare this with Kuukkanen’s advocacy of colligation as a
way of drawing together fragmentary evidence of the past into a loose, yet coherent
picture of the past. See Jouni -Matti Kuukkanen, “Colligation and Epistemic Values
in Historiography,” Paper presented to the International Conference on Philosophy
and Theory of History, Ghent July, 2013) ,18.
34
35
36
Oxford, University Press, 2014.
Review published by INTH, www.inth.ugent.be/reviews/
David Carr, Experience and History Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical
World, 2.
37
27
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Introduction’ to Practicing History New Directions in Historical
Writing After the Linguistic Turn, ( New York and London, Routledge, 2005): 1-31.
38
Dominick LaCapra, “The Personal, the Political and the Textual: Paul de Man as
Object of Transference,” History and Memory: Studies in the Representation of the
Past 4 (1992): 5-38.
39
Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust ( Cornell University Press, Ithaca
and London, 1994), 34.
40
See for example Frank R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, and Ibid.,
“Presence’ and Myth,” History and Theory, 45 (2006), 328-336; H. U. Gumbrecht,
Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004)
and Ibid., “Presence Achieved in Language (With Special Attention Given to the
Presence of the Past), History and Theory, 45 (2006), 317-327 and Eelco Runia, “Spots
of Time,” History and Theory, 45 (2006), 305-316 ; Ibid., “Presence,” History and Theory,
45 (2006), 1-29; Ewa Domanska, The Material Presence of the Past,” History and
Theory, 45 (2006), 337-348. For a discussion of Ankersmit and Runia and the
differences between their approaches to the presence of the past see Anton
Froeyman, “Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia: The Presence and the Otherness of
the Past,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 16 (2012): 393-415.
41
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience Cultural Memory in the Present ( Stanford
University Press, Stanford, Calif., 2012), 56.
42
Michael Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History Essays on Living with the Past
(Columbia University Press, New York, 2012), p. 85.
43
See Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley ( Columbia
University Press, 1988).
44
See P. Zawadzski. “Malaise dans la temporalité”. Malaise dans la
temporalité. Sous la dir. de P. Zawadzski. (Publications de la Sorbonne, Paris,
2002).
45
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. with an
introduction by Keith Tribe (New York, Columbia University Press, 2004).
46
On Koselleck’s theory of temporalities see Helge Jordheim, “Against Periodization:
Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities,” History and Theory, 51 (2012): 151171. For a discussion of Koselleck’s position in relation to other attempts to reexamine the relationship of past to present see Ethan Kleinberg, “Introduction: The
New Metaphysics of Time,” History and Theory, Virtual Issue, 1 (2012): 1-7.
47
28
Lynn Hunt, “Globalization and Time,” in Chris Lorenz, eds., Breaking up Time
Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future (Vendenhoeck & Ruprecht,
Göttingen, Germany, 213), 214.
48
Bevernage, History, Memory and State-Sponsored Violence, Violence Time and Justice
(Routledge Approaches to History, Routledge, New York and London, 2011), 6.
49
50
Ibid., passim.
Jörn Rüsen, “Responsibility and Irresponsibility in Historical Studies: A Critical
Consideration of the Ethical Dimension of the Historian’s Work,” in The Ethics of
History, 210.
51
52
Ibid., loc. cit.