Culture and Power
Culture and Power:
The Plots of History in Performance
Edited by
Rubén Valdés Miyares
and Carla Rodríguez González
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Culture and Power: The Plots of History in Performance,
Edited by Rubén Valdés Miyares and Carla Rodríguez González
This book first published 2008
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2008 by Rubén Valdés Miyares and Carla Rodríguez González and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-0017-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0017-4
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of illustrations.................................................................................... viii
Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix
Introduction
“The Facts Being Fixed about the Policy”
Rubén Valdés Miyares................................................................................. 1
Part I: Ends and Perspectives
1. On the Necessary Conditions of Possibility for a Radical History
Keith Jenkins ............................................................................................. 41
2. The Historical Imaginary and the Politics of History
Hayden White............................................................................................ 55
3. On the Plotting of a 21st-Century History from an Environmental
Perspective
Jonathan Coope ......................................................................................... 69
4. Methodological Remarks on the Teaching of British History
and Culture at a Spanish University
Eduardo de Gregorio-Godeo ..................................................................... 80
5. Killing (in) History. Neo-Nazi Propaganda and History
as Absent Cause. A Few Thoughts from a Hospital Bed
David Walton............................................................................................. 88
Part II: Visual Rhetoric
6. History and Visuals: Some Reflections on the Transformation
of the Past for Visual Consumption
Michihiro Okamoto ................................................................................. 103
vi
Table of Contents
7. Historiographic Novel. Representations of WW2 and Holocaust
in Three Polish Comics
Pawel Schreiber ....................................................................................... 111
8. Visual Rhetoric and the Construction of Heritage in
Museum Exhibitions
Susan L.T. Ashley ................................................................................... 118
9. Memorialising the Slave Trade in Britain
Chris Weedon .......................................................................................... 125
10. On History, Cultural Politics and the Birth of the Black Subject
(After Foucault with Assistance from the Artist Tom Feelings)
Glenn Jordan............................................................................................ 133
Part III: Reading Performance
11. Historiographic Metatheatre—The Formulation of a Genre
Alexander Feldman ................................................................................. 145
12. Reading History through the Stories Told in Restoration Drama
María José Coperías Aguilar ................................................................... 153
13. John Osborne’s Angry Look Back on the Declining British Empire
María José Álvarez Faedo ....................................................................... 163
14. Stoppardian Drama: Imagining History and Historifying
Imagination
Zekiye Antakyalıoğlu .............................................................................. 172
15. What are we Laughing at? Reading History into Comedy. The
Case of Monty Python’s Hell’s Grannies (1969)
Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy ............................................................. 178
Part IV: Historic Fabrications of National Identities
16. Manufacturing Workers’ Traditions in Socialist Eastern
Central Europe: Cultural History in Czechoslovakia and
East Germany 1972 – 1989
Blanka Koffer .......................................................................................... 193
Culture and Power: The Plots of History in Performance
vii
17. From Local to Cosmopolitan Nationalism: Common Sense
in Scotland and Catalonia
Sara Martín Alegre .................................................................................. 203
18. Benevolent Kings, Warrior Queens and Student Martyrs: The
Master Plot and Subplots of Thai History
Maurizio Peleggi .................................................................................... 211
19. The Media and the Plots of European Identity
José Igor Prieto Arranz ............................................................................ 219
20. Nationalism and Discourse in Puerto Rico: Edgardo
Rodríguez Juliá’s Fictions and New History
Eduardo San José Vázquez...................................................................... 227
Part V: Literary Emplotments of History
21. Questioning of Historiography: Michel de Certeau and the
Fictions of History
Esther Sánchez-Pardo .............................................................................. 239
22. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code: The Power of a Conspiracy
Master Narrative
Sonia Baelo Allué.................................................................................... 246
23. A Land out of History: Alasdair Gray’s A History Maker
Carla Rodríguez González....................................................................... 254
24. Ian McEwan’s Atonement: Revisiting History and Rereading
Fiction
Eva María Pérez Rodríguez..................................................................... 262
25. Historical Plots and Cultural Form—Adorno and the Essay in the
Aftermath
Tania Roy ................................................................................................ 271
Contributors............................................................................................. 279
Index........................................................................................................ 285
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 7-1. Final image of “Kaczka”, by Jacek Frąś ................................... 112
Fig. 10-1. Untitled, from Tom Feelings, The Middle Passage, 1995 ...... 136
Fig. 10-2. Untitled, from Tom Feelings, The Middle Passage, 1995 ...... 138
Fig. 10-3. Untitled, from Tom Feelings, The Middle Passage, 1995 ...... 139
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is a collaborative volume in more than the obvious formal sense.
It originated in the 12th Culture and Power Conference, “The Plots of
History”, held at the University of Oviedo in September 2007, where oral
versions of most of the chapters in this book were actually “performed”, in
very different versions in some cases. It was in the course of the
conference that the performative aspect of historical emplotment began to
evolve as an idea for the book. Professor Hayden White made a key
contribution with his interventions and particularly his emphasis on
historical presentation over representation, and his ideas have been a
decisive source of inspiration, before and after the event, as witnessed by
the high number of times his writings are quoted in many parts of this
book. Another crucial influence has been Professor Keith Jenkins, whose
radical approach to historiography has proved very stimulating, and who
kindly revised the Introduction. Also fundamental to push forth the idea of
the conference has been the support of members of the Iberian Association
for Cultural Studies (IBACS), including Chantal Cornut-Gentille, Felicity
Hand, Sara Martín and María José Coperías. Special thanks are due to
David Walton, the coordinator of IBACS, for his continuous encouragement
and for revising the Introduction. Professor Chris Weedon made very
valuable corrections to it, too. We are grateful to Jonathan Coope and
Glenn Jordan for generously contributing their papers, especially written
to complete this volume. We would also like to thank Amanda Millar,
Carol Koulikourdi and other staff of Cambridge Scholars Publishing for
their early interest in the project and for their prompt and solicitous
technical support. The director and colleagues at the Departamento de
Filología Anglogermánica y Francesa have been as friendly and supportive
as ever hosting the conference and throughout the preparation of this
volume, and so has been the Fundación de la Universidad de Oviedo, with
their financial advice. Finally, our gratitude goes to the Tom Feelings
Estate and to Jacek Frąś for kind permission to reproduce their original
works.
INTRODUCTION:
“THE FACTS BEING FIXED ABOUT THE POLICY”
RUBÉN VALDÉS MIYARES
“History—the past transformed into words or paint or dance or play—is
always a performance.” Greg Dening
“Historical discourse is a fudged up performative.” Roland Barthes
“All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players.” William Shakespeare
Writing the drama of history
This is a book about the dramatic possibilities of history. It assumes
that the contents of any history are inextricably related to its written or
visual form, and that this form can often be metaphorically associated with
theatre and other means of literary performance. Mark Danner’s (2007)
feature article on the transcript of the meeting of the Spanish Prime
Minister José María Aznar with President George W. Bush at his ranch in
Crawford, Texas, on February 22, 2003, may help us bring the point home.
Danner means the reviewed text to be regarded as one of the documents
explaining the Western intervention in Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein,
and his article is written in a provocative manner which might recall
Clifford Geertz’s (revision of Jeremy Bentham’s) concept of “deep play”
and his explanation of the Balinese cockfight by means of King Lear,
Macbeth and other literary allusions along with anthropological ones
(Geertz 1991, 254-69). Danner, too, invites his readers to understand
human actions in terms of theatrical acting.
The quotation that Danner chooses as a title, “The moment has come to
get rid of Saddam,” expresses the immediate relevance of the turning point
described by the text under review. However, that historical “moment”
reaches us, readers, variously mediated by other moments, texts and
translations: first, it is based on the notes of the Spanish ambassador in
Washington at the time of the meeting, Javier Rupérez, who was entrusted
2
Introduction
with taking the minutes; secondly, the ambassador’s text of the minutes
which he saw fit to send to the Spanish newspaper El País (and the version
that the paper saw fit to publish). Thirdly: when The New York Review of
Books asked El País for the original transcript in English, according to the
latter paper (Ekaizer 2007, 8), and they were told that the minutes were
originally in Spanish, the editors felt the need to debate it before
proceeding, as “it was unusual for an American publication to transcribe
the words of the US President translating them from Spanish into English”
(my translation). Fourthly: it seems, according to the same source, that it
was Mark Danner’s intervention that convinced the editors of the historical
importance of the “document”, which he compared to the Downing Street
Memo of 23 July 2002, in which Bush, in a meeting with the UK Prime
Minister Tony Blair, considered the war as inevitable, famously letting on
that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed [by the US] around the
policy” of removing Saddam Hussein from power. Fifthly, The New York
Review of Books, commissioned a translation of the Spanish text by a team
of specialists, to be published in full together with Mark Danner’s review
of the document. Thus, Danner’s article is an example of how something
that happens is turned into “an event” through a complex process of
interventions and textualizations before it reaches the general reader as a
piece of “history”. The essays in this book offer various critical accounts
of such textual mediations of history and their implications for
contemporary culture.
Mark Danner’s authorship should not be understimated. Not only did
he prevail upon The New York Review of Books, according to El País, to
translate and publish the Bush-Aznar interview; in order to do so, he had
to convince the editors of the historical relevance of the text, and he did
so, moreover, by comparing it to another text whose well-established
status as a “document” had been proved by its impact on British politics
when it was published by The Sunday Times on 1 May 2005, during the
last days of the UK general election campaign. Given this antecedent, the
hesitation over translating is understandable: even the linguistic difference
between US and British English led some like Robin Niblett1 to say that
“fixed around” actually meant “that it was being used to support a predetermined policy,” or Fred Kaplan2 to argue that its meaning in British
English is “bolted on” rather than “altered” to fit the policy, trying to
soften or neutralize the negative connotations of “fixed”. Perhaps one of
the effects of Danner’s accompanying commentary is precisely to distract
attention from possible problems of sheer linguistic texture and to draw it
to “historical” form.
“The Facts being Fixed about the Policy”
3
Danner poses the historical problem, contextualizing it in the following
terms:
Surely one of the agonizing attributes of our post-September 11 age is the
unending need to reaffirm realities that have been proved, and proved
again, but just as doggedly denied by those in power, forcing us to live
trapped between two narratives of present history, the one gaining life and
color and vigor as more facts become known, the other growing ever paler,
brittler, more desiccated, barely sustained by the life support of official
power.
The issue here is greatly simplified, reducing it to a black and white
opposition between the narratives of “those in power” and the “facts”
which come up reaffirming the “realities” they “doggedly denied.” The
interest of Danner’s approach for our purposes, however, lies in his
characterization of history in narrative terms, admitting that the “facts
[which] become known” also sustain a narrative of present history. Even
the “realities” come to us through narrative, which implies, as Munslow
(1997, 118) puts it, that “History is first and foremost a literary
enterprise.”
Danner then goes on to picture his “post-September 11 age” scenario in
sombre terms, declaring that “At the center of our national life stands the
master narrative of this bifurcated politics,” which is none other than the
Iraq war story, characterized by “the weapons of mass destruction that
turned up not to exist” and a “victory celebration [which] almost instantly
became a national embarrassment.”3 Even worse, the contours of that
master narrative are ill-defined, for “the war’s ending and indeed its
beginning […] have long since vanished into contested history.” Far from
making sense of the world, history turns into an idiot’s tale without
beginning or end, rhyme or reason. The article in El País with the
discussion held between Bush and Aznar in Crawford nearly a month
before the war is “The latest entry in that history,” which “some quickly
dubbed the transcript Downing Street Memo II.”
After emplotting the history in such an absurdist mode, Danner
suggests the repetition of the Downing Street Memo tragedy as farce in the
Crawford transcription. He quotes the notorious passage where the “facts
were being fixed around the policy,” and where the policy was to obtain a
UN resolution justifying force, even if that meant the “fixing” of “facts”
such as the existence of weapons of mass destruction, to argue that
4
Introduction
It is on this point that much of the drama of the Crawford transcript turns,
making it into a kind of playlet pitting the sinuous, subtle, and
sophisticated European, worried about the great opposition in Europe, and
in Spain in particular, to an American-led war of choice with Iraq (“We
need your help with our public opinion,” Aznar tells Bush), against the
blustery, impatient, firing-straight-from-the-hip American cowboy.
The characters in this “kind of playlet” are pictured through gross clichés
so that they sound like actors in an operetta, with a slight touch of Henry
James’ novels on Americans in Europe. Later they are further contrasted
as “Aznar, a right-wing Catholic idealist who believes in the human rights
arguments for removing Saddam Hussein, finds himself on a political
knife edge,” against “the President of the United States spouting threats
like a movie gangster.”4 The hero’s tragic flaw is shown by Aznar’s
reluctance to follow suit immediately, so that Bush “issued an order that
was not obeyed, thus demonstrating the limits of his power. (The Iraq war
itself, meant as it was to ‘shock and awe’ the world and particularly US
adversaries, did much the same thing).”
Having represented the Crawford meeting as a play, Danner proceeds
to draw moral lessons about history from it. The first is that a leader
should not self-righteously assume himself to be guided by “a historic
sense of responsibility,” and Danner quotes Bush further asserting, by
means of the trope Hayden White calls “historiographia”, that “When
some years from now History judges us, I don’t want people to ask
themselves why Bush, or Aznar, or Blair didn’t face their responsibilities.”5
Danner criticizes Bush for setting his personal faith above “an independent
analysis of the facts,” and makes the crucial point that “He has confused
rhetoric, however uplifting, and reality. Aznar, the sophisticated European,
comments wryly on this. It is the most Jamesian moment in the playlet of
Crawford.” Curiously enough, it is the American, not the Spaniard, who
appears quixotic. But here Danner’s commentary palls, through his
insistence on a sharp distinction between “facts” and “reality” on the one
hand, and “rhetoric” on the other. The main interest of his article lies
precisely in its literary (i.e., rhetorical) representation of history-making.
The only history Danner tells is literary: its other, the reality outside,
remains absent from his narrative, as a vague referent he calls “the facts”,
suggesting they are incontrovertible. He writes as if those facts were not
different for different people, ranging from the various religious factions
within Iraq to Baudrillardian approaches to post-modern war.
Ultimately, Danner’s article shows a concern with the effects that
rhetoric may have on the world, on history. It depicts Aznar as a realist, at
least compared to Bush’s aggressive idealism, but fatally swept along by
“The Facts being Fixed about the Policy”
5
it: “It is worrying, as Aznar remarks, to rely on optimism grounded only in
belief […] Faith cannot replace facts, nor can a historic sense of mission.
Both may be personally comforting—they plainly are to George W.
Bush—but they don’t obviate the need to know things.” This adds a further
entry to the list of things which Danner opposes to rhetoric: “reality”,
“facts”, and now “knowledge”. For, as he then says, “Bush came to office
a man who knew little of the world” (my emphasis).
It was the perceived attempt to hide knowledge of the real facts that
would cause the downfall of Aznar’s government in Spain. Danner turns
this into the tragic catharsis of his farcical “playlet” in the last paragraph
of the article:
“This is the policy, what happened?” As a subtitle for a history of the Iraq
war, one could certainly do worse. Prime Minister Aznar is gone now,
having been fatally weakened by his support for the Iraq war and the
failure to obtain United Nations support for it; almost exactly a year after
the war began, jihadists targeted the Madrid train station, killing nearly two
hundred Spaniards and sending the prime minister to electoral defeat. Tony
Blair, the star of the Downing Street Memo, is gone as well, his popularity
having never recovered from his staunch support of the war. George W.
Bush, on the other hand, […] stands as lead actor in his own narrative of
history, a story that grows steadily paler and more contested, animated
solely by the authority of official power.
In a sense, Jeremy Bentham’s concept of “deep play” had become true for
Aznar.6 His conservative government based part of its reputation on their
uncompromising defence of the unity of Spain and their combat against
organized terrorism which in Spain had normally been associated with
Basque separatists. The likely connection between the Spanish intervention
in Iraq and the Madrid massacre decisively affected the result of the
general elections which were held three days later: Aznar’s Popular Party,
which was leading in the opinion polls, was defeated by Rodríguez
Zapatero’s Socialist Party. The Aznar government’s discredit had been
greatly increased by what many voters perceived as an attempt to hide the
jihadist origin of the attacks and to suggest the involvement of the Basque
terrorist organization ETA. In other words, it was widely believed that
Aznar and his aides had been trying to hide under the familiar history of
ETA terrorism a new chapter in Spain’s history, whose “reality” had
violently burst in. Though Danner does not mention this additional factor
in Aznar’s fate, it seems to confirm his thesis of Bush and his European
“gang” (in official power) fixing history with relation to their policies, and
finally being defeated by the real “facts”. It is all as clear in the article as
the uncovering of a conspiracy.
6
Introduction
While Danner’s representation of how history unfolds in the form of
drama is stimulating, one cannot but object to the simplistic way in which
he opposes “reality” to it. For in his reading “knowledge of the facts,” like
murder, will out. It seems as if there were no plural histories, only one
history (manipulated by “official power”) and one reality (eventually
known by everyone). Moreover, it is as if uncovering the lies sustaining
history would give us safe unmediated access to knowledge. Yet
experience tells us that neither histories nor knowledge are ever complete
or definitive. New “facts” are constructed and new histories emerge from
them. Even the most perspicacious of Cultural Studies works may lapse
into the trap of the absolute “real” outside history. This is well illustrated
by Nic Panagopoulos’s review of Catherine Belsey’s Culture and the Real.
Despite her Lacanian assertion that “we have no access to the real” (130)
because “language will always come between us and direct contact with
the real” (5), she also claims that Lacan allows for “the invasion of the
signifier into the real” (63), and even that “knowledge is capable of
making inroads into it” (50). More crucially, she interprets the 9/11 attacks
in New York in order to argue that “These planes were not a repressed
fragment of our own psyche but, on the contrary, a violent material
intrusion from outside” that “impugned the sovereignty of American’s
defences and the reliability of Western intelligence” (60). Now,
Panagopoulos’ review concludes by reminding his/her (Belsey’s) readers
that
However, as more and more facts emerge about what really happened on
the day that essentially changed postmodern history, it appears that this
was indeed one big orchestrated media spectacle designed to shock the
American people into going to war against an essentially imaginary enemy
and in the process acquiesce to the sacrifice of tens of thousands of
innocent lives, as well as the surrendering of their constitutional liberties
and human rights. These “planes” (and the object that hit the Pentagon
does not seem to have even fit this category) actually came from “within”
the system: this was the reason why nothing was done to stop them and not
faulty intelligence or inadequate civil defence. In hindsight, the only thing
real about 9/11 is the cost in human terms of trusting other people about
what “real” means.7
Another ramification of the great conspiracy of “official power”? Hard to
prove. Panagopoulos does not make a greater claim to “reality” than
Belsey. The fact remains, however, that “real facts” remain open to new
historical reviews which replace them with new ones. And so on
indefinitely.
“The Facts being Fixed about the Policy”
7
It is wrongly assumed that postmodernist history denies the existence
of the real. What it does is radically question that we have direct access to
it. Our knowledge of facts is always an effect of discourse in the sense that
Foucault, above all, gave to that concept.8 After Foucault, it is difficult to
accept Danner’s easy assimilation of historical discourse with power and
his opposition of knowledge to it. In the present book historical discourse
is a playground wherein various approaches to the problem of representing
the past are offered, none of them with a very strong claim either to
accepting more conventional representations or to posing their own as
final.
The historical impasse and beyond
Foucault’s ideas, which signalled a crisis of historical consciousness, were
part of what came to be known as the “linguistic turn” in historical (and
other “scientific”) studies.9 Since the 1960s Structuralism has issued a
“semiotic challenge” which was voiced most forcibly by Roland Barthes,
significantly citing Nietzsche: “There are no facts in themselves. It is
always necessary to begin by introducing a meaning in order that there can
be a fact,” and further on, “In other words, in ‘objective’ history, the ‘real’
is never more than an unformulated signifier, sheltering behind the
apparently all powerful referent. This situation characterizes what we
might call the realistic effect.”10 As Hayden White has shown (1973, 46)
modern academic history developed along with nineteenth-century literary
Realism and other cultural movements competing to provide a more
realistic understanding of society. Barthes’ ideas were also sustained by
J.L. Austin’s notion of the performative, which he used in opposition to
the philosophical prejudice that utterances always “describe” or “constate”
and are therefore always true or false; instead, for Austin performative
utterances are “happy” or “unhappy” as regards the action they express.11
Barthes even asserts that “historical discourse is a fudged up
performative.” This would mean that a historical narrative is successful in
any given cultural moment in so far as it is a plausible or/and authoritative
(linguistic) performance of the reality it represents. The status of historical
discourse as “the privileged signifier of the real” was definitely thrown
into disarray.
By the end of the twentieth century, however, poststructuralism tended
to become trapped in “formalizing” and “essentializing” premises,12 in a
“determinist fix”13 subjecting all individual human agency to discourse.14
Thus viewed, individuals are no more than characters in a historian’s play,
or signs deprived of individual initiative in a cultural structure. For
8
Introduction
example, Althusser’s concept of “interpellation” explains through
Structuralist linguistics the process by which ideology addresses the
(abstract) pre-ideological individual effectively producing him or her as
subject, but this can scarcely account for the individual’s (admittedly
relative) freedom not to turn round when hailed by the police in the
street.15 In order to overcome such deterministic impasses, Spiegel argues
for a renewed emphasis on agency, experience and practice, as part of a
“post-linguistic turn” (Spiegel 2005, 18) in which culture is recast as a
“performative term:” “Historical investigation, from this perspective,
would take practices (not structures) as the starting point of social analysis,
since practice emerges here as the space in which a meaningful
intersection between discursive constitution and individual initiative
occurs” (Spiegel 2005, 20). Spiegel therefore describes the current rise of
“Practice Theory,” with Biernacki, “at the intersection of language and
material practice,” which, while willing to retain some of the insights of
poststructuralism in its “weak versions,” “returns historiography to its ageold concern with processes, agents, change, and transformation, while
demanding the kind of empirically grounded research […] with which
historians are by training and tradition most comfortable” (Spiegel 2005,
25, 228).
Practice Theory partly advocates a “comfortable” return to “age-old”
empiricism, as a reaction to deterministic textualism. But as Andreas
Reckwitz explains (in Spiegel 2005, 253-8), it also involves a
theoretically-informed way of seeing the body, mind, things, knowledge,
discourse/language, structure/process, and the agent/individual. Social
practices in this theory are sets of “routinized bodily performances” and
“mental activities” carried out by agents with the “things” (material
means) which enable or limit such activities, and with a particular
knowledge, that is, a particular way of “understanding the world,” which is
largely implicit and culturally specific. Reckwitz’s placing of routinized
bodily performance “at the core of practice theory” recalls Judith Butler’s
notion of performativity (1990 and 1993). As Reckwitz regards discursive
practices as “one more type of practices among others,” language loses its
“omnipotent status” (Spiegel 2005, 253, 256).16
Another sign of the return of historical empiricism under a new guise,
in addition to Practice Theory, is F.R. Ankersmit’s (2005) defence of the
“sublime historical experience.” Ankersmit is cited by Spiegel (2005, 23)
among the narrativist schools of White, LaCapra, Kellner, “and the like,
who argued that no historical account is possible without some form of
troping or emplotment.” Yet Ankersmit claims that his book involves “an
extreme variant of empiricism” (2005, 8) and “an uncompromising attack
“The Facts being Fixed about the Policy”
9
on all that came to be known over the past twenty or thirty years by the
name of ‘theory’,” including Hayden White´s seminal work on the
tropology of the historical text, Derrida’s il n’y a pas dehors texte, and “all
the (quasi-) transcendentalist conceptions we may find […] also in
hermeneutics, deconstructivism, (post-)structuralism, or semiotics” (10).
In order to escape what Nietzsche called “the prisonhouse of language”
(4), Ankersmit aims to search “the experience of the past underlying the
language used by the historian” (14). Ironically, however, he is “the first to
admit” that his “book will remain a tributary to ‘theory’ and the linguistic
rationalism it criticizes and wishes to transcend,” as its argument is
dominated by a literary category, that of the sublime, and a poetic notion
of feeling derived from Romanticism (10-11). Thus, Ankersmit
demonstrates that the escape of historical discourse from language,
literature and tropology can only be relative.
Both Spiegel’s “Practice Theory” and Ankersmit’s “Sublime Historical
Experience” sound like history’s eternal return to the empirical, but what
they mean is not the old claim to experience the past “as it really was:”
they rather suggest that history in some form (e.g. in video games) will
continue to be a relevant experience, and that, despite postmodernist
doubts, history writing continues to be practiced, more aware of linguistic
theory but not totally constrained by it; history is, by most definitions,
endless (Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay on the end of history could just
refer to the outmoding of a particular historical genre, the HegelianMarxist grand narrative model). As Breisach notes, the harvest of qualified
postmodernist historiography has not been as rich as that of theoretical
writing (2003, 201).17 Yet many historians would probably agree that it
will need to be practised according to “three much needed qualities” that
Southgate (2005, 147) sums up thus:
first self-reflexivity—a consciousness of ourselves, and of what we’re
doing and why; second, as we’ve just considered, linguistic awareness—an
alertness to how language is used and abused, adapted and modified in the
interests of specific agendas; and third, an ability to live with ambiguity—
with sometimes inconsistent and contradictory elements in ourselves and
other people, as well as in the past.
Southgate discusses several examples which actually illustrate these
qualities, including Robert Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine: American
Encounters with Mieji Japan (1988). Alternatively, the present practice of
history writing, once we have accepted the relevance of narrative, may be
classified according to the genre position adopted by every historian. This
is Jenkins and Munslow’s approach: “As literature has poetry, drama and
10
Introduction
the novel,” they argue (2004, 6), “so history has ‘reconstructionism’,
‘constructionism’ and ‘deconstructionism’.” Reconstructionist historians
believe in the Rankean power of empiricism to access the past as it
actually was; constructionists, influenced by positivism and sociology, are
more sceptical of objective knowledge of past reality, and prefer to
emphasize structures over human agency, but still believe in the
possibilities of accurate representation in language, while deconstructionists,
among other things, stress that as our language is part of the reality being
depicted, whenever we think about the past we should start by
deconstructing our basic assumptions about it. To these three genres,
Jenkins and Munslow add a fourth: “endisms”. Endist writers insist on the
closure of history writing as a theoretical possibility: “they are those—
historians and others—who think that it is unnecessary to have histories
‘as we have known them’ or, maybe, even histories at all; that one way or
another, we can look forward to, or be conscious we may be coming to,
‘the end of history’” (Jenkins and Munslow 2004, 5).
Endism is not the main focus in the present volume, which is more
concerned with actual performances of historiographical criticism and
history writing, responding in assorted ways to the qualities and genres
mentioned above. But our collection of essays is opened by a more
theoretical section which begins purposefully with Keith Jenkins
discussing history from an endist perspective. When in his essay Jenkins
says that “we shall, courtesy of differance, never know what the nature of
history is,” this, especially coming from a co-editor of The Nature of
History Reader, is, via Derrida, an instance of the ironic mode of
consciousness which according to Hayden White in his decoding of
Foucault, would prevail in the (post)modernist age (White 1978, 255).
Jenkins’ “On the Necessary Conditions of Possibility for A Radical
History,” though perhaps not a manifesto “in its own right/write” (Jenkins,
Morgan and Munslow 2007, 2), does analyse the necessary conditions for
one.18 Its starting point is Rorty’s view that the world exists but it is
unknowable except as reality constructs made of discourse, so we are
locked up in a world of readings. Whatever exceeds that closure is the
sublime, which is “forever unpresentable:” Jenkins does not share
Ankersmit’s optimism about our capacity to experience the historical
sublime. Such radical antirepresentationalism, however, does not prevent
him from finding in the (metaphorical) naming-process “one expression of
the (power) political: history.” He then goes through the various levels of
violence involved in bringing meaning into the world, from mere writing
and realism (ignoring differance) to “the everyday empirical violence of
exclusion, rape, murder, war, genocide,” to propose that the radical
“The Facts being Fixed about the Policy”
11
historian should be committed to opening up the mind-closures that such
violence involves. Finally, he sketches out six areas which the (postmodern) radical historian should work through: authorship (the
“representors” of history), the problem of referentiality, epistemological
aspects, rhetoric, aesthetics, and narrativity. The way ahead for the radical
historian—the way past the impasse—may not be easy, but it is open and
well signposted.
The area for the radical historian Jenkins mentions last (and not least),
narrativism, is, as he emphatically acknowledges, the one “which Hayden
White has pretty much made his own.” Hence it is appropriate that
White’s own essay should follow, and state his position. Here he analyses
the relations between history, politics, and the imagination. Politics is
considered “in its aspects as participant in a struggle to engage, discipline,
control, and educate (the) imagination,” while “history” (or “historical
consciousness” or “historical knowledge”), is “one of the instruments
deployed by dominant social groups in the effort to ‘control the
imagination’ of the multitude or at least of elites destined to control the
multitude.” “Imagination”, on the other hand, “is strangely resistant to
definitive analysis.” White’s starting point is Althusser’s blend of
Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, from which the notion of
interpellation takes him back to Hobbes’s “coaction” and “Freud’s
substitution of the theory of the drives for the older notion of
imagination,” and from there to Hegel’s move “from the discourse of the
past imaginary to its investment by the symbolic system,” and finally to
“Foucault’s notion of a doubly articulated historicity [which provides] a
kind of equivalent of the psychoanalytic concept of psychic phenomena.”
White quotes Foucault at length because his explanation of history as an
environment which (like Plato’s pharmakon) simultaneously fixes and
undermines, determining a cultural area and destroying its claims to
(universal) validity, helps explain how “political discourse can invest the
‘imagination’ of the multitude by techniques of ‘coaction’ […] to
construct a secondary content that gives value or quality to what otherwise
might appear only as fact or quantity.”19 The new techniques, “represented
above all by the kind of ‘special effects’ met with in contemporary
cinema,” are more sophisticated than those used in traditional rhetorics
and may turn a politician—“the preacher”—into “a larger than life player
on the political stage.” Their power of coaction/interpellation enables these
modern media techniques to combine an “address to the individual’s (or
group’s) conscious moral sensibilities and intellectual commitment and at
the same time to its unconscious anxieties and wish-fulfilment fantasies.”
Among the examples White gives of this kind of discourse are the figures
12
Introduction
of “the terrorist” and “weapons of mass destruction,” and the significant
trope of historiographia, like when, in Danner’s “playlet”, Bush appeals to
the time “When some years from now History judges us.”
It is important to stress, in the context of the present book, that White’s
essay describes the historical imaginary in terms of Freud’s idea of primal
scene, which is of course a theatrical metaphor:
a “scene” on which a drama unfolds of which the subject is at once both
(imagined) observer and (imagined) actor. In the dream state and also in
reverie, these scenarios play themselves out more or less completely as
either anxiety ridden farces, wish-fulfilment romances, or some
phantasmagoria that threatens the dreamer by its failure of plot resolution.
I believe this is an important move in White’s thought. His interest in
Freud is well attested elsewhere, demonstrating how “Freud has
reinvented, rediscovered, or simply recalled the traditional theory of tropes
as found in nineteenth-century rhetoric and poetics” (White 1999, 124).
The implicit analogy between Freud’s tropology of dreaming and the
nineteenth-century historians’ tropology that White explored in
Metahistory, becomes evident in the present essay. At the same time the
passage quoted above implies a partial correspondence between White’s
notion of emplotment in history-writing and a psychoanalytical idea of the
performance of a psychic drama of wish-fulfilment and dream-plot
resolution. The allusion to current political affairs and characters in the last
part of the essay suggests that historians should be committed to a struggle
which is now taking place through new technologies and in our
imagination (which does not mean that it is not “real” enough) as much as
in actual theatres of war.
White reaches back to Freud’s idea of the primal scene by means of
Foucault’s description of “the great upheaval that occurred in the Western
episteme” when, between about 1775 and 1825, “it was discovered that
there existed a historicity proper to nature; forms of adaptation to the
environment were defined for each broad type of living being […];
moreover, it became possible to show that activities as peculiarly human
as labor or language contained within themselves a historicity that could
not be placed within the great narrative common to things and men.” It is
with this doubly articulated historicity of the natural environment and
human interests that Jonathan Coope’s essay takes issue: can twenty-first
century history be emplotted from an environmental perspective? Coope
argues how postmodernism and environmentalism can be mutually
informed in their perspectives and histories. After all, one of the results of
the postmodernist critique of history is that historians no longer need to
“The Facts being Fixed about the Policy”
13
pretend objectivity and non-commitment. The environmentalist historian is
openly committed to producing histories that will affect people’s ways of
thinking about the responsibilities of humans in their ecological systems.
In this sense Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient
Truth (2006) may be forgiven both for being too “realistic” for enjoyment
and for containing up to nine “untruths”, as ruled by the High Court in
London.20 Moreover, there are important lessons to be learned from
environmentalism by historians in the postmodernist age: that ecocentrism
need not be “foundational” or fixed; that truth may well be what makes
sense to the senses, as David Abram suggests; that historical reflexivity
should also reflect on our blindness to “the more-than-human world
around us,” and that the burden of history (in White’s sense of a final
synthesis of past events) that requires critical deconstruction is, above all,
(in Roszak’s words) “the lie of believing we have no ethical obligation to
our planetary home.” In short, Coope exemplifies a response to warnings
like Belsey’s (2005, 60) to the effect that “the irreducible real is beginning
to put up resistance to our wasteful, culturally scripted habits and to make
itself knowable in the form of melting icecaps, floods, forest fires and high
levels of skin cancer.” Historians, even postmodernist ones, if they are to
have a social function at all, can only ignore this at the peril of human
lives.
While Coope illustrates one way in which history-writing is still
necessary after post-modernism, Eduardo de Gregorio-Godeo’s essay
shows, from the practical perspective of teaching at a Spanish university,
that traditional academic history is not the only place where one meets the
problem of narrativizing history. The case is illustrative of the general
“cultural turn” (for a critique of this, see Biernacki in Spiegel 2005, 232)
in historical studies, which in Spain has perhaps been more noticeable in
the Faculties of Philology, particularly within Departments of English
Studies, than in History Departments. The area, as de Gregorio-Godeo
notes, is still “English Philology,” but it seems to be undergoing a
transformation recalling Vico’s attack on the philological method in the
antiquarian historiography of the time when he wrote and expanded the
New Science (1725, 1744), according to White (1978, 145-6), “which
assumed that it was enough to know the history of words and their
etymologies without enquiring into the more basic problem of the function
of language in the process of civilization.” It is hardly surprising that
changes have taken place within English Departments rather than History
Departments, as de Gregorio-Godeo puts it, “integrating various subjects
which in previous curricula […] had taken shape in such subjects as
14
Introduction
History of Britain, British Geography, British Art or British Institutions”
into disciplines with a more cultural, textual focus.
Many of the shortcomings and contradictions of academic history,
philology, and other humanities subjects and social sciences may be best
addressed outside their own disciplinary constraints, in the open,
interdisciplinary, non-methodological field of cultural studies. De
Gregorio-Godeo echoes the doubts about the status of cultural studies as a
discipline with a methodology, arguing that it certainly has an “overall
methodological orientation” and is therefore “a distinctive discipline,”
though the “epistemological and methodological basis for the subject,” as
he concludes later on, is its “interdisciplinary nature” (see also White and
Schwoch 2006). One needs only remember the many (upper-case) Cultural
Studies textbooks, including histories of Cultural Studies, published in the
last twenty years (a few of them are in de Gregorio-Godeo’s references)
and notice their similarities of approach. However, two things should be
borne in mind with respect to cultural studies in Spain: that, as another
contributor to this volume, Chantal Cornut-Gentille protested long ago
(1995)―and her reasons for complaining are still largely relevant―the
position of “cultura” in the Spanish curricula is doubtful,21 a factor which
has maintained cultural studies on the margins of the academia. On the
other hand, this has not prevented cultural studies from showing a
vigorous existence both in international specialized seminars (especially in
the annual Culture and Power conferences, this book being a result of one
such occasion) and in practical lecturing, as noted by de Gregorio-Godeo,
and as exemplified by the heuristics produced by yet another contributor to
this book, David Walton (1995, 2007). Its status as a plural nondisciplined discipline on the margins, sustained by experimental,
experiential, practical teaching, helps qualify cultural studies for the
innovative approaches to history plotting collected in this book.
De Gregorio-Godeo proposes teaching British cultural history through
texts―meaning by “texts” a wide range of “documents”, from literary
excerpts and political pamphlets to TV programmes and welfare
brochures. The question remains, is there anything outside the texts? This,
and the abuse of this post-structuralist doubt in the hands of Neo-Nazi
revisionists, is the problem David Walton tackles in his contribution. In
addition, Walton’s “heuristic” discussion is an excellent example of the
self-reflexivity that Southgate (in our quotation above) and Jameson (in his
notion of “metacommentary” quoted by Walton) mention as a paramount
quality in a historian. Ideated from his hospital bed after a terrible
motorcycle accident, Walton’s essay considers how he should respond if
someone, in the name of extremist textualism, denied the historical cause
“The Facts being Fixed about the Policy”
15
of his pain. In Jameson’s commentary on Althusser, “history is not a text,
not a narrative, master or otherwise, but […] as an absent cause, it is
inaccessible to us except in textual form.” Given extremist uses of such
notions, like Neo-Nazis arguing that the Holocaust is just a literary
fabrication, Walton’s argument suggests the necessity of falling back on
some kind of engagement with a referential world outside the text,
emphasizing that “contemporary cultural theory, in its insistence on
textuality, rhetorical mechanisms and absent causes, has not always
explored in fine detail the intricate relations between the writing of history
and history understood as absent cause.” Walton leaves us wondering how
this referentiality is to be recovered without renouncing the strengths of
post-structuralist theory. I believe that at least some of the essays in the
following sections in this book will provide examples of how that critical
operation is actually performed.
Conspiracy theory and the problem of referentiality
One of the best ways to understand what cultural studies is all about is
to call it a history of the present. As Simon During (2005, 53) reminds us,
“Ordinary life is saturated with the past,” and “Sometimes too it seems as
if old formations suddenly reappear, uncannily, the past flaring into life.”
The point is made, for example, by Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon
(1995, 280-2), relating the politics of apartheid in the popular American
television programme “Blind Date,” where “if one of the participants is
Black, all of them are,” with Hitler’s “Law for the Protection of German
Blood and German Honour of 15 September 1935” forbidding racemixing. No doubt many in the audience of “Blind Date” considered it
quite natural that races should not mix, while on the other hand they
regarded the Holocaust as the worst evil ever perpetrated by the human
race. Perhaps some of them even condemned apartheid in South Africa,
without a conscious feeling of contradiction. All except a few cunning
viewers were probably oblivious to that kind of cultural and historical
referentiality in “Blind Date.” Of course it was not to learn history that
they were watching the programme. Yet perhaps they were learning it
unconsciously, and the “wrong” way, the way Hitler would have it:
learning, that is, that avoiding race-mixing is the natural thing to do.
The reason why the uncanny return of the past may be worrying has to
do with White’s explanation of how modern technologies impact on our
unconscious “primal scene.” Michihiro Okamoto’s essay in turn explains
that those technologies represent the latest mode of doing history and,
“because the past represented through visual and aural means is often
16
Introduction
derived from the feeling of reality we get from our experience of the
present,” the resulting “virtual reality” created by the visual media “erases
the differences between past and present and collapses separation by
time.” The “radical transformation of people’s grasp of the past from
something foreign and unfathomable to something similar to the present,
something with which one can empathize,” as Okamoto claims, “will
undeniably make historical studies more fertile;” but then he reminds us
that “In present-day society, knowledge exists asymmetrically between
those with power and those without it,” and that “Moreover, the
knowledge called history is deeply connected with power,” therefore “we
must not forget that the history conveyed through visual media is
constructed by those in power, as may be equally said of reality.” Danner’s
portrayal of the younger Bush as “a man who knew little of the world” is
rather naïve; surely a US president has privileged historical knowledge,
and, much more crucially, the means to fix the historical facts about his
policies, that is, the technologies to produce that knowledge, and myths
out of history.
When Barthes studied myth in the 1950s, he was thinking of visual
culture above all, and of how the messages it delivered were read. He
explained the process in basic Structuralist terms describing, in his famous
analysis of the black soldier in a French uniform saluting a French flag on
the cover of Paris-Match, how in myth the signifier becomes form, a
“pure” visual image, “the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it
empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates” (Barthes
1973, 117), but though “the meaning loses its value” (its supposed
historical “reality”), it nevertheless “keeps its life, from which the form of
the myth will draw its nourishment” (118). Structuralist reasoning still
counted on the existence of “real” meaning outside the sign, and therefore
on dichotomies such as history/myth, or content/form. With poststructuralism we begin to hear of the “content of form” (White 1987) and,
by the same token, of the myth of history. Myth acquires a positive sense
in Ankersmit’s “historical sublime,” where myths are liminal phenomena,
as they “typically focus on the boundary separating time from what
preceded time […]” “demarcating the phase of the subjective mind from
that of the objective mind,” so that “for a civilization, this must be the
equivalent of what the birth of trauma is for the human individual.”
Furthermore, our crossing of the liminal threshold between (historical)
time and (timeless) myth is “accompanied by a true storm of
historicization or narrativization” (Ankersmit 2005, 364-5).22 As a result, it
has now become possible for a historian like Felipe Fernández-Armesto to
write a history of Truth stating that “Doubt is the truth of our times”
“The Facts being Fixed about the Policy”
17
(1997, 206). History, like myth, must have form in order to be narrated,
and narrating it makes it akin to myth, though its claims on the true/real
are different.23 Beyond doubt there is only myth in the Aristotelian sense
of mythos, that is, a recurrent narrative plot.
In current visual, media-dominated, culture, conspiracy theory is one
of the most successful forms of historical narrative and myth-making. As
Sonia Baelo argues in her essay for this book, “people need to be assured
that there are no random happenings, that there is a hidden pattern in all
the terrible events that take place.” A Spanish book on “great conspiracies
of history” written by a journalist points out that the twenty-first century
might well be “the century of paranoia:” as “information flows free,
suspicion has settled down in our hearts,” “no vision of reality is entirely
true,” and “conspiracy theory is a paradigm, a working hypothesis to
approach knowledge of our reality, neither better nor worse than
Communism, Christianity, or firmly believing what the media offer us”
(Camacho 2003, 13-14; my translation). One of the justifications for a
conspiracy myth, especially in an officially democratic state of large
proportions, is a perceived inequality of power-knowledge between
government and citizens. Undoubtedly there is conscious secret plotting
(conspiracy) in politics—but there is certainly another form of plotting
(and of emplotment) in uncovering and depicting a political plot, the way
Danner emplots Bush and Aznar’s plotting scene. Some degree of fictional
plot-making, or myth-making, is inescapable, as soon as events are turned
into a story of a specific kind (White 1999, 9). This is happening all the
time in the present stage of doing history, as defined by Okamoto: “history
brought forth as a cultural commodity in consumer society; history
delivered through television, comics, movies, novels, dramas and the
internet.” White (1999, 68) has discussed Oliver Stone’s movie JFK
(1991), for which the director was accused of “fostering paranoia by
suggesting that President Kennedy’s assassination was a result of a
conspiracy involving highly placed persons in the United States
government.” Stone indeed seemed to be “bringing under question the
very principle of objectivity, on the basis of which one might discriminate
between truth, on the one side, and myth, ideology, illusion, and lie, on the
other.”24 The value of conspiracy theory thus resides in questioning and
counteracting the violence of univocal official truths.
The problem returns when conspiracy theories are not just consumed
as alternative “ways of confronting reality” (Camacho 2003, 15) and
questioning univocal truths, but they replace doubt with certainty, entering
the power-knowledge field. This is correlative to the problem of truth in
the representation of events which are crucial to our ethical, political and
18
Introduction
historical consciousness. The paradigm of such events is the Holocaust. Is
there a final solution to our understanding of the Final Solution? Even to
frame a playful question about such a terrible event can make us shudder.
Those who doubt the reality of the Holocaust are often unfeeling towards
the human suffering, or even approving of genocide. Contrary to the
opinion of some whose historical outlook is very traditionalist and
suspicious of postmodernist historiography, “Holocaust deniers, of course,
are not deconstructionists” (Jenkins and Munslow 2004, 14). Walton
reminds us how Neo-Nazi revisionists deny the existence of the referent.
What they do in suggesting that the Holocaust is just a myth, is to recall
the paranoid founding myth of anti-Semitism: the conspiracy theory of the
“hidden hand.”25 The evidence of the enormity, however, is undeniable,
though its emplotment as history may be traumatic, not least because it
lays it open to (mis)judgement and (mis)interpretation.
Pawel Schreiber pinpoints the problem compellingly in his
contribution, by asking: “Can one doodle over a relic of the painful past
and change the dying children into grotesque, toy like clowns?” In a
challenging approach to the Holocaust reminiscent of Gadamer’s
Wirkungsgeschichte (“effective history”) (2003), Peter Novick (2000),
instead of attempting to narrate it, focuses on how it has been historicized
with different emphases in the US since it occurred. The Holocaust, like
the 9/11 attacks, did occur, even though there is no single standpoint from
which it can be “truthfully written”—the point is how we emplot it
(Southgate 2005, 109-10). In that respect there are critical views of the
representation of the American Holocaust museum. Gilad Atzmon (2007)
notes how it excludes stories that “simply don’t fit into the heroic and
righteous American self image:” “for instance, it will not tell the passing
crowd that the American government adopted a highly restrictive
immigration policy that was never modified between 1933-1944, in order
to block Jewish immigration.” But the Holocaust has played a crucial role
especially since 9/11 and the Iraqi war.26 Hence President Bush’s visit to
the Israeli Holocaust museum and his comment after seeing aerial maps of
Auschwitz: “we should have bombed it.” However, the Secretary of State
Condolezza Rice, “asked by reporters on the plane to Kuwait about the
comment, said they had been discussing the reasons why the wartime
allies had not bombed the railway lines to Auschwitz” (my emphasis)
(Erlanger and Myers 2008). Of course bombing Auschwitz itself might
have killed many of the prisoners.27 Historical plots, even hypothetical
ones, demand continuous qualification. The only way not to get the picture
wrong may be, as in the Polish comics Schreiber analyses, to present the
past, Walton’s “absent referent”, through its very absence.
“The Facts being Fixed about the Policy”
19
Museums need to work out solutions for their visual display of traces
of the past. In this book Susan Ashley and Chris Weedon are both
relatively optimistic about, in Ashley’s words, how today’s museums at
least try to respond to the demands of “non-dominant players”, that is, “to
criticisms of gender, class and racial bias by opening up the process of
representation.” “Or, perhaps,” as Ashley adds, “to honour Hayden
White’s language, move from representation to ‘presentation’”. Ashley
examines the strengths and the drawbacks of a style of exhibition with
marked performative, indeed theatrical, elements: museums exhibits “act
as a stage”, as their “display is a public act”, “a performance about social
identity and about history.” On the positive side, the Royal Ontario
Museum exhibition of 2002 that she studies had an “engaging, theatrical
style [which] did offer a more dialogic approach to the contents of the
exhibit.” But the “aura of authenticity or historical truth” which “this kind
of experiential theatre” produced is shown to be beguiling, as the textual
message ended up with “a performance of ‘safe’ Black culture:” “A new
mythology of the noble Black settler seemed to have replaced the old
stereotypes of Blacks as victims.” Ashley finally discovers “a conflict
between the unconscious visual and experiential communication of the
exhibit media on one hand, and the words or text on the other.” For
visitors who were not wary of the power of technological, especially visual
effects, to impose myths on their own primal scene, or historical
unconscious, such exhibitions may become ideological snares. This is why
it is important to train students (as de Gregorio-Godeo does, for example)
in the critical analysis of texts.
Chris Weedon reflects on the final disillusionment of a community
with the results of some attempts to memorialise their historical
experience. While the British government’s many initiatives to
commemorate the Act of Abolition of slavery of 1807 are praiseworthy,
their attempt “to shift dominant narratives of British history and to
construct new forms of collective memory in ways that would write the
role of the slave trade and slavery into the national story” misses the mark.
Weedon cites three criticisms that were common in the responses to such
commemorative events by Britain’s black communities: the emphasis is
largely on white abolitionists, there is no celebration of the survival of the
protagonists of slavery, and no “recognition of slavery’s many actual,
negative legacies in the present”—we may remember, for example, the
apartheid practised in TV programmes like “Blind Date.” We may
conclude that, though exhibitions and other commemorative activities are
sometimes disappointing, they are very necessary. As During (2005, 59)
points out, “Upon occasion cultural studies academics have helped to
20
Introduction
historicise and preserve cultural memories of beleaguered communities,”
and the example he cites is that of the Butetown History and Arts Centre,
founded by Glenn Jordan in Cardiff, in which Weedon was also involved.
The Centre organised a museum and archive, and published oral histories
of the old multicultural, working-class port community of Cardiff’s Tiger
Bay which outsiders had often either demonised, or, in complete contrast,
romantically praised (Jordan and Weedon 2000). A critical role of cultural
studies, as well as literature, consists in the analysis such representations,
in order to motivate the performance of more relevant presentations.28
Glenn Jordan makes the last contribution to the “Visual rhetoric”
section by highlighting the links between cultural criticism, history writing
and artistic representation in “Black history as a cultural-political
practice.” When such representations are performed, say, in a museum,
film or book, historical texts become “sites of struggle—where
marginalised minorities and voices compete with hegemonic ones.”
Reflecting on his own work, Jordan acknowledges it is Foucauldian in its
interest in questions of space and power, power being not simply
repressive but also productive, and adding a visual dimension that is
seldom present in other Foucauldians. His privileging of the visual is aided
in this paper by Tom Feelings’s images of the Middle Passage. Jordan and
Feeling share a concern with the problem of representing a history for
which there are virtually no accounts from its protagonists, the African
slaves, and precious few photographs, and an interest in the birth of the
Black subject through “oppression, coping and resistance.”
Representation, presentation, performance
There has always been a fundamental ambiguity in the idea of history,
which has been expressed in many different ways. From the point of view
of cognition, “a rigorous study of the mind should point to a
comprehensive theory of mental representation, where respectively the
notion of presentation (Vorstellung) deals with the dynamic forms of
cognition while representation (Darstellung) is mainly bound to an
abstraction level”.29 In terms of the study of history this is partly
correlative with the old difference between presenting “the facts”
themselves (res gestae) and how they are represented as disciplined
knowledge (historia rerum gestarum), more recently explained as the
distinction between “history-as-event and history-as-account” (Stanford
1994).
Examining “History as the re-enactment of past experience” in our
minds, R.G. Collingwood (1946, 300) tried to disentangle the dilemma