When Rethinking History invited me to write this
essay using the mode of personal history, I was delighted. Having been
neglected all these years by David Frost and Oprah Winfrey, at last comes my
opportunity to tell my story to a candid world. But almost immediately a
problem arises from the disparity I find between what is personal, which in
that never-to-be-had TV interview could be mere gossip, and what might be
‘history’ in the sense that term ordinarily implies. That is, ‘history’ as a
universal sequence of events motivated by causalities so efficient that, even
when individuals do not perceive them, they operate anyway, rather like the
ineffable rules of that related, often dysfunctional fiction, The Market.
History was a format congenial to the revolutionary new ideas of, among others,
the Enlightenment philosophers who, building on the achievements of three
centuries, theorized a new politics for a common ‘human’ world of rights,
equality and progress: a world accessible to all and sustained by all; a world
literally held in common, incompatible with secretive privilege which
extinguishes candour, consensus and mutuality, which forecloses on democratic
institutions and substitutes for them a shadow realm of coded recognitions and
secret handshakes. Historical conventions uphold this candid world but, at the
turn of the twenty-first century, that unified vision seems almost a dream and
its founding subject largely a myth. The personal history of intellectual
development turns out to be more problematic than first appears.
My long term investment
in historical conventions has been largely involuntary in the sense that it is
largely a cultural inheritance. I grew up believing in that candid world of
common denominators which historical thinking has done so much to inscribe, and
I grew up mistrusting the secret worlds that, despite the occasional nice
people in them, still function invisibly outside most ‘history’ and put the lie
to its claims to universality. At the same time, however, I have become
interested by the postmodern critique of the cultural disposition that supports
history, the candid world of common denominators, and ‘human’ values. This
critique forecloses on some old opportunities certainly, but it also offers new
ones, some of which help to illuminate what has seemed mysterious to
Enlightenment assumptions: for example, why the cultures that believe in and
promote ‘human rights’ continue to produce so many atrocities; what alternative
to history postmodernity offers and what its costs might be. Over several decades
and in many publications especially two books, Realism and Consensus (1998; 1983) and Sequel to History (1992), I have explored
the powers and the limitations of two competing and at least partially
contradictory systems of cultural values, perhaps even two cultural paradigms,
which can be named by the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodernity.’ I have pursued
this agenda because I think so much is at stake for western Eurocentric
societies and democracies, and because I think the way to deal with an established
and non-trivial challenge is to look it in the eye, not put your head in the
sand.
Explaining these explorations autobiographically is tempting but it
would not be adequate. That is because individuals do not produce ideas or
cultural systems; ideas and systems are there already and individuals,
including myself, get born into them just as they are born into a language and
into an entire set of assumptions about identity, conduct and How Things Work.
No doubt I developed my interest in the arts, history and the candid world
because of family influences, encouragements, inhibitions. I learned to listen
to all kinds of music and to try all kinds of sport. I was blessed with an
unproblematic genetic inheritance and challenging siblings. I learned the value
of multiple perspectives by having to adopt different ones from a fairly early
age; after that perhaps it was just a question of waiting for the right theory
to reach me. But how to trace the causal trajectory of a single life, even my
own, from the mess of discursive networks that conditions every reflex? Do I
mention the one or two really .ne college teachers and the mass of fairly
conventional class work at several well known educational institutions? Perhaps
I recount how, in at least one of them, I actually learned how to learn, and
got support and encouragement to boot (thank you, Owen Jenkins). Perhaps I
could summarize how much I learned on my own, from different friendships and
academic jobs that introduced me to important books and experiences: phenomenology,
the classical texts of ancient Greece from Hesiod to Plato (these in a
Humanities course where Plato was to be taught as Truth and where Athenian
slavery and misogyny were never to be mentioned); the experimental texts and
practices of the 1960s; the women’s movement of the 1970s (not to be confused
with its academic shadows); fashion magazines and advertising images; the
misogyny of the insecure regardless of sex; the ambitious, encouraging,
hit-and-run essays from France collectible (more or less) by the term
‘post-structuralism’; the travelling; the living abroad; the repeated visits to
art museums and galleries in Europe and the USA; the experience of different
cultures. But how does any of this explain the capillary actions that fed a single
person’s course, or the blockages and deflections that deformed it, or the
chance encounters and omissions that sent developing forms down this track
instead of that? History claims these pathways are traceable. I wonder. And
when we are done tracing them, what then? What interests me most, historically,
is not the activity on the tracks, clickety clack, clickety clack, but the
thresholds at which whole systems of tracking mechanisms of uncertain origin,
whole paradigmatic commitments, can undergo mysterious mutation into something
else, and without much of the difficulty that history, with its ancient roots
and protracted causalities would lead one to expect. At such points, it is not
so much a matter of mediation and transitions, but of choices, and that is not
usually a quantitative matter.
In order to explain my
views and interests historically, I would have to begin asking questions like
‘how?’ and ‘why?’ How did I come to this? Why did my thoughts develop in these
directions? History is unavoidable. Try to write without it. In any discussion
that raises the question, ‘why?’ –whether the subject is personal life,
international monetary influences or the history of theatre– no sooner do you
raise the question, ‘Why?’ then you embark upon history. ‘Why? Well, you see,
there was this guy. . . .’ There is no escape from history and to anyone who
thinks there is, I defy you to spend a single 24 hour period without using the
terms, ‘develop’, ‘result’, ‘plan’, ‘implement’, ‘destination’, ‘because’,
‘just like’, or ‘fairness’ – to name only a few of the terms made resonant by
history. It is dif.cult to avoid the temptation to explain phenomena by
treating them as historical results, to tell their ‘story’. Why did the child
die brutally? Why is the Middle East hostage to tribal warfare? Why did
Concorde explode? What are the actual practical results of intervention by the
IMF and the World Bank? Why did X get elected and Y sent to jail? There is no
end to the continuities of history; we may reach outside it now and again, but
not often and not easily because it has become instrumental.
And yet, it was not
adequate for me. History was an explanatory mechanism that had been assumed,
not explained, and I left school feeling the need of some theory or new
explanatory mechanism that would be adequate to the full range of my experience
and values. I was not satisfied at the prospect of simply choosing one –say
Marx or Freud– and then wielding it for all it was worth: an activity that
would only be more of the same and that would end, not by providing a way to
open doors and create something new, but only by confirming Marx and Freud in
much the same way using historical conventions confirms the validity of
history. I learned all this slowly, by following a pathway of recognitions and
researches that was prompted by who knows what pre-dispositions. For example,
as a student I was weaned on Middlemarch, John Stuart Mill, national history and all kinds of related humanist
and realist narratives though I didn’t think of them that way at the time. I
enjoyed reading them because they provided certain confirmations and
recognitions. Yet when I read anti-humanists and anti-realists, especially the
narratives that flout history, even though I did not understand them at firrst
–probably because I was still seeking the confirmations of Middlemarch– I found them to be
equally interesting and enjoyable: it was more like listening to music than
reading history. I liked the rhythm, the risk-taking, the lack of conventional
piety, the experimental and analytic edge. I began to notice, as I read
narratives by writers like Robbe-Grillet, Borges, Duras, Nabokov and Calvino
that the narrative medium of historical time had virtually disappeared in their
work, in much the same way as the space of traditional realism had virtually
disappeared from the best early twentieth-century painting, and as the
symphonic resolutions of nineteenth-century music had virtually disappeared in
the newest composition of the twentieth. My own experience as a musician had
taught me to appreciate the lack of symphonic resolution in the still half
polyphonic music of the early Renaissance. Some of the experimental writers of
the twentieth century even referred back to medieval art as a more congenial
precedent for contemporary experiments than subsequent great work in the long
representational tradition from the Renaissance.
This sorting process took
place under many influences. One constituent of my experience came through the
weird employment rituals of academia –on both sides of the Atlantic– in which I
became responsible at different times for teaching the major texts of ancient
Greece from Hesiod and Aeschylus to Plato and Euripedes, and the major texts of
the English tradition beginning with Tudor history. At the same time I
developed, where possible, an interest in the cinema of Bergman, Godard,
Bresson, Truffaut and the rest of the French New Wave. Another constituent was
the women’s movement which got underway about the time I began my academic
employment in the early 1970s and which made a lasting difference in how I see
all practices, including and especially my own. Two other factors, minor but
professionally significant have been, first, the total lack of academic
mentoring with which I entered my career –my innocence on that point now seems
to me staggering– and secondly, the world of academic publishing, where it is
so often Amateur Night and where conventionality reigns –especially at
Princeton University Press, a particular problem that I am not the .rst to
mention in print. Name names, I say. (In this vein I want to express thanks for
the late Jean-Francois Lyotard’s published complaint on the subject of
publishers. If any publisher reading this wants to take a chance with me, I’d
consider a book on the subject, so powerful an influence are the commissions
and omissions of publishers on the health and longevity of the demos. Do I
digress?) Also, lest I sound like I have spent most of my life reading books, I
should mention my long-term interest in singing, women’s solidarity,
continental travel, dancing, conversation, skiing, solitude, the condition of
democratic institutions, political marches, having a good time, family, the
landscape of the western United States, the details of a frozen garden, the
‘minims’ of nature. The range and variety of possibility encourages me still
and has always sponsored my intellectual adventures.
As my interest in
anti-realists grew, so did my recognition that, in their oppositional zeal,
they used realism as a straw man and provided no serious, certainly no generous
analysis of what realism actually was or what it accomplished. If we are to give it up, what is at stake? I had decided to write a
book about anti-realism, but in order to do so, it seemed essential .rst to
establish what the term ‘realism’ might mean. Nothing I read from Auerbach
onward seemed even to approach the dimensions of the problem, and many seemed
tendentious or tended to assume the very things that needed proof. My tendency
seems to be to step back, to get a bigger picture or prior explanatory grid.
Historian at work.
In this case, the step
back took six years and resulted in Realism and Consensus (1983, 1998), a book that
might better have been called ‘The Modern Condition’. It traces a not-so brief
history of history, framing its development by comparison with classical and medieval
precedents and connecting its rise to the emergence of representation (mimesis)
in politics and empiricism in science. The book on anti-realism, Sequel to History (1992) took another ten
years. Sequel sketches out my
understanding of the mutation of historical conventions in postmodernity, a
term I now prefer to ‘postmodernism’ because it suggests a chronologically
inescapable condition and does not sound so much like the dogmatic slumber of
‘ism’s. With the help of interdisciplinary resources from post-structuralism,
postmodern narrative and arts generally, and feminist theory I explore the
postmodern reconfiguration of identity and sequence that has such profound
implications for history. Realism and Consensus and Sequel to History constitute a two-volume
study of modernity and postmodernity. Several spin-offs have developed further
some implications of the central arguments for identity, agency and our use of
the past (Ermarth 2000), for our conception of time (Ermarth 1995) and
neutrality (Ermarth 1998a), and for democratic institutions (‘Democracy and
Postmodernity: The Problem’, part of a collection called Rewriting Democracy currently seeking a
publisher). Presently I am exploring further the alternatives to historical
writing that I touch on briefly at the end of this essay.
My intellectual ‘development’ has really been an exfoliation under influences from a motley lot of interdisciplinary and practical sources: art of all kinds especially contemporary and experimental art in drama, dance, theatre, architecture and above all in language; democratic politics in theory and in practice; science from empiricism and Newton to relativity and quantum theory, the galvanizing argument about social justice collected under the term ‘feminism’; philosophy from Plato –may he rest in peace– to phenomenology and post-structuralism. A handful of texts have been seminal for me but my tastes may be idiosyncratic and not easily transferrable. Foucault has been a substantial influence even though I probably would not sign on to most of the particular statements he made; the same could be said for Derrida, and for feminist theory: all especially useful because they were relentlessly interdisciplinary and operated
beyond the same old same old. Hayden White’s willingness to think beyond the
confines of academic history has been a perpetual sign of possibility. Two
delightful little books on art history inspired the early and formative stages
of my thinking about history, Art and Geometry (1964) and The Rationalization of
Sight (1973) by the late William Ivins, Jr, a curator of pots at the
Metropolitan Museum during the mid- twentieth century who occupied hours of
Aegean crossings by making notes on interdisciplinary cultural history. His
books still seem to me the epitome of simplicity and elegance. But what was
seminal for me might not be for others, and anyway my so-called ‘secondary’
reading always took place in tandem with other reading, of narratives, or
artworks and buildings and cities, of social relationships and of other
discursive writing without words. In all this reading, history has been the
troublesome, enabling language for threading together some possible thoughts
about personal and cultural meaning and value. Even the finding of interdisciplinary
similitude is the gesture of an historian. And still, it was not enough.
When I first turned away
from unquestioning use of the historical conventions with which my education
had been saturated, it was through my discovery as a postgraduate student of
phenomenology, which questions the distinction between subject and object, and
thus the possibility of ‘objectification’ that, as I was later to explain to
myself and in print, was the main business of representational conventions,
chief among them history. So I pursued it, through the work of Bachelard,
Merleau-Ponty (Heidegger came later) and Hillis Miller, and I wrote my
dissertation on George Eliot using it as a methodology. This deeply offended
the reigning narrative theorists at University of Chicago where I had (I now
think stupidly) transferred from Berkeley after my first marriage. My effort
was dismissed; ‘Too much influenced by Hillis Miller’ was the comment reported
to me. Thus was the aspiration represented by phenomenology reduced to one more
small-minded, internecine, academic conflict.
But
when did the connections between all these sources kick in, and what accounts
in the first place for my apparently constitutional inclination away from
methodological business as usual or for my sense that the available maps didn’t
account for what was obviously there in my peripheral vision? Like many in my
time, I was aware that the political and ecological catastrophes of the
twentieth-century suggested the presence of unacknowledged limitations on the
long-standing assumption that knowledge of the past can improve the future. Like many I recognized that even the physical description of nature
had changed so that different ‘inertial systems’ could be recognized where once
only a single system had been. Like many I recognized that
Picasso and Braque, Bergman and Godard represented encouraging, generous new
departures in method and ideas. Like many I was, as I continue to be deeply
influenced by feminism. In an era of professional feminists, I should also say
that I am a professional and a feminist, so that my grasp of the civil rights
issues that animate the women’s movement among others, has played a significant
role in my choice of formulation. My long-standing feminist commitments have
not been left at the office, nor trotted out for rallies, nor used as a
template for measuring others, but instead factored in as part of a wider
intellectual adventure. (The term ‘feminism’ means entirely different things in
the UK and the USA, so I have no doubt this brief comment will leave everyone
dissatisfied, but then, what formulation would not when it comes to matters of
social equality?) Did my particular use of all this have anything to do with my
valiant mother’s lifelong effort to maintain independence, or her professional
attachment to music, or her assumption of universal social equality? Did it
have something to do with my father’s genius for diagnosis, his ability to go
far beyond the usual explanations, or with his talent with the trumpet? Did it have
to do with their lack of reverence for the Big Bow Wow? Did my shyness or my
strength have anything to do with their long unhappy contest, or with my own
experience with the institutionalized smugness of provincial 1950s social
cliques, or with the relative freedom and privilege of my early childhood where
I learned what it was possible to expect?
But here I must pause because this is threatening to become a history
and there was more to it than that. The ‘more to it’ cannot be explained
through personal history. In order to explain this impasse, I revert to the
more theoretical explorations which, it seems to me, are necessary guides to
personal definition and even conduct: theoretical explorations that are
intimately important, but not intimate. What resulted from my dual interest in
history and its discontents was a lot of writing and lecturing, but in
particular the two books and related articles written over two decades that
represent my central arguments concerning what is at stake between modernity
and postmodernity, and between history and whatever lies beyond history. In
them I confront an entire shift in Eurocentric societies across the range of
practice, away from classical and medieval paradigms to modernity, and then
again, away from modernity to whatever is ‘post’ modernity. In this frame the
term ‘modernism’ applies to a profound but relatively local event at the turn
of the twentieth century, a phoenix fire of modernity, and ‘modern’ applies to
a much longer epoch. The theoretical arguments involve revision of
long-standing and deeply personal beliefs about identity and about sequence,
and thus about what actually constitutes the ‘personal’ and ‘history’ in the
first place.
Realism and
Consensus outlines the emergence and mutation of what I later began calling ‘the culture of representation’: that is, the
culture that succeeded the middle ages in Europe and that developed across the
range of practice some powerful new formulations and values that produced
representation in art and in politics, that produced empirical science, and
that eventually resulted in the development and dissemination of the idea of
history, the social form of representation. Realism and Consensus explores the way the
Renaissance objectified and unified the world. We can call this the One World
Hypothesis (Ermarth 1998b; 2000). That hypothesis posits a world of agreement,
not about this or that idea but about the formal possibility of agreement
itself: about the possibility of a world held in common, a common or ‘candid’
world. Such a world first appears fully fledged and disseminated in the spatial
neutrality achieved by Renaissance painting and architecture; their production
of single, potentially unanimous arenas undivided by Manichean contests and
unsusceptible to pluralizing discursive systems. The spatial neutrality of
those Renaissance artefacts –encapsulated in the grammar of single-point
perspective– announces and validates the power to make mutually informative
measurements among widely separated instances: a power available only within a
single comprehensive system of universally applicable measurements. It is not
too much to say that without this production of conditions favourable to
mutually informative measurement, modern science and technology would have been
impossible and, as Ivins says, was impossible to the middle
ages.
In writing this first
book I taught myself how to use disparate materials in ways that were not
super.cial but not timid either. This methodological effort was essential for
locating the central motivating cultural values that would otherwise remain
invisible to narrower disciplinary vision. I have the greatest respect for
discipline, but I also know that it is a preliminary, not an end in itself:
especially if I want to get anywhere close to the springs of practice. For
example, the formal assertions of potential union discoverable in Renaissance
perspective systems produce the value of neutrality, a value most crucial to
representational conventions not only in art, but in politics and science and
history as well; neutral space is the main product of the formal consensus of
Renaissance perspective systems. A similar formal consensus appears after the
Enlightenment, when history came into its own; neutral time is the main product
of the formal consensus produced by modern historical writing. History, in other
words, is a version of the perspective grammar of Renaissance painting. But to
see this connection at all, it was necessary to go outside disciplinary bounds.
Temporal neutrality acts in narrative just as spatial neutrality does in
painting: as a common-denominator medium, infinite and unconfigured, containing
all culture, all theory, all physical events across the potential range from a
supernova to a ringing telephone. While the neutral time of history only became
fully deployed and disseminated in nineteenth-century narrative, it had already
been codified by seventeenth century empirical science, politics and
philosophy.
These related forms of
perspective grammar were widely separated in time but shared a primary agenda:
nothing less than the objectification of the world. The perspective grammar of
realism –in painting or in history– transformed the physical cosmos from one
riven by competition between good and evil and divided hierarchically and
qualitatively to one unified as a single arena of explanation and measurement.
Once the world is a single, thus objective arena of possibility, mutually
informative measurement becomes possible. And because these enabling realist
conventions are nothing if not circular, the reverse is also true: because
mutually informative measurement is possible, the world is a single, thus
objective arena of possibility.
The nineteenth-century
neutralization of time and its antecedents back to the Renaissance
neutralization of space, seem to me to belong to the most astonishing
accomplishment of the culture of representation as it has existed over five
centuries. I am still pursuing its implications and I certainly have used its
methods in making mutually informative comparisons among widely separated
instances in order to discover the emergent forms of history. This complex,
extensive cultural event reflects a rationalization of faculties that belongs
to modernity: it stems from the late-medieval, early Renaissance, and
Reformation roots of modern Eurocentric societies, and it is much older than
the Enlightenment though not as old as Plato, notwithstanding the claims made
in some recent French analyses. It is a cultural achievement born from the late
middle ages and one with an importance that is dif.cult to overestimate. It has
supported such common-denominator projects in the culture of representation as
empirical science, realist art, democratic politics and even, to an extent,
capitalism and socialism; it still vastly influences our most fundamental
conceptions of identity and sequence. We are well beyond ‘master narratives’
here, to the very structures of experience, the tools of thought, the
discursive sets that make and foreclose possibilities.
This objectifying effort
contains a hubris that can lead to colonial atrocities; but it is a hubris that
also has inspired much of what Eurocentric societies value. It is the hubris of
the explorers who sought the Orient and the cartographers who supported them,
the architects of representational government, the international peacemakers,
the champions of ‘human’ rights, the scientists mapping the human genome, the
historians charting the obscure course of cultural change. And if there is
hubris, there is also charity in the One World Hypothesis that history
maintains: a kind of potential generosity that Meyer Schapiro once called ‘the
immense, historically developed capacity to keep the world in mind’ (1937: 85).
Such capacity cannot
belong to individuals, however. Instead, it thrives only as a complex function
of collective agreements, most of them tacit and inexplicit. Too often the
power to keep the world in mind has been mistaken for an individual achievement
and has become the enabling ‘optical illusion’, as Herbert Butterfield once put
it, for a certain class and culture (1963). How these issues produced their
political and social implications in nineteenth century England I have taken up
in an interdisciplinary book on the use of h‘history’ in that era as the
primary form of social narrative (Ermarth 1997). History came into its own
rather suddenly after 1848 in Britain, changing almost overnight from a
marginal practice to a universally disseminated narrative format to be found in
the work of the brilliant and original Sir Walter Scott and his many heirs
(e.g. George Eliot, Trollope, Virginia Woolf), in Darwinian biology and in
earth sciences, in cultural and social histories, and in the stalwart
three-decker novel which most broadly disseminated a new kind of narrative for
a revolutionary age. By the 1860s history in England has become the ruling
convention of a particular social order. Dissemination of this idea of time was
the work of the nineteenth century right down to the synchronization of clock
time for the railroads that was a symptom and consequence, not a cause, of the
temporal neutralization produced by history.
The fact that historical
conventions exist primarily to establish neutrality is a thought that can be
dificult to keep in focus, precisely because it goes to the heart of so many
enterprises. Nevertheless, what distinguishes historical time from either mythic
or postmodern constructions of temporality is its neutrality. Not its linearity
– all sequences are linear, even circular or zig-zag ones. Not its chronology –
the Anglo Saxon Chronicle is chronological, sort of, but it is not a modern
history. But its neutrality. In other words history – by virtue of a certain
perspective grammar or consensus apparatus that I analyse as a temporal
instance of realism – claims universality for one kind of time: the neutral,
in.nitely receding, universal medium ‘in’ which everything exists, a kind of
metaphysical ether that justi.es mutually informative measurement between ‘now’
and ‘then’ over a vast range of comparison. ‘History’ is the inscription of
that temporal medium. All details – this battle that marriage – are secondary
carriers of this main feat, just as the pictorial details of the Madonna or
saints were secondary carriers of a similar feat in the Renaissance production
of neutral space.
From
scientific to cultural narrative, and backed up by more than three centuries of
preparation, this unprecedented idea of time took hold after 1800 and remains
for most of us an almost automatic pilot. This kind of time has become the only
conceivable kind: homogeneous, infinite, unproblematic, unconfigured by exotic
influences like furies, or gods or wormholes in space. And the key to this kind
of time is its neutrality as produced by the particular perspective grammar of
history that aligns ‘then’ and ‘now’ into a single system of explanation and
measurement. To establish the optical
illusion of history, narrative must formulate events so that they require
mediation. Hence the fascination with chronological indicators which in
themselves are insignificant carriers of the main discursive event. The
fundamental narrative strategy, familiar across the narrative range from
histories of war and culture to popular romances and detective novels, involves
mediations, crossings from place to place, and from time to time, that
literally establish and maintain the neutral time ‘in’ which alone objectivity
is possible and mobility can be productive.
And productive it has
been. Historical narrative works through the apparently simple gesture that
says ‘once upon a time’ and then makes time produce: produce results,
explanations, knowledge, capital. In fact, production is a necessity, and a way
of reconciling us to present lack for the sake of future completion. The
horizon of history is maintained by ‘the future’; even the remote
‘pre-historic’ past can contribute; nothing escapes. The more we dig back then,
the more we reinforce now the value of ‘the future’ and its enforced deferrals
and deflections, the more we sustain the hope, even the expectation maintained
by historical conventions that such inadequacy is only incompletion. Implicitly
present losses, failures or separations are only temporary stages on the way to
‘the future’ toward which we can proceed in reasonable hope and expectation of
eventual recovery, success, reunion.
The
problem with all this, including my own comparative historical methodology, is
that, along with the entire culture of representation including empiricism and
presumably representational (democratic) political institutions, history is
having to face its own historicity. My early and continuing exploration of the
postmodern challenges to modernity convinced me that the challenges to its
‘objectivity’ are too many simply to dismiss or ignore. The emergent
causalities of history do not allow for the operation of chance or luck, even
though those forces manifestly operate in ordinary affairs. The description of
nature’s laws has modified those established by Newton. It has been nearly a
century since neutrality all but disappeared from time and space in art; and
more recently neutrality has stood by in blue berets helpless to prevent
bloodbaths in Europe and the Middle East. In ‘A Brief History of History’
(1998) I explore ways in which the search for causes, along with other
historical usages, may themselves have become part of the problem in the
difficult effort to understand exactly what it is we are doing culturally, now
that the lights have changed and the possible explanations are multiplying. In
general a multitude of symptoms across the range of cultural practice reveal
that the founding assumptions of history have reached a point of mutation or
reformation – a liminal condition that requires us to recognize the historicity
of history. It, too, is a cultural production, a discursive function. Some recognize these symptoms of cultural change with delight; others
are brought kicking and screaming to the work that reveals incontrovertibly the
symptomatic evidence that history belongs to what (improving on Lyotard) I call
‘the discursive condition’ (Ermarth 2000: 408). Some
seem to find this recognition excessively trying and can be seen running away
in an opposite direction, as, for example, with the tiny souls who write on the
postmodern for the Times
Literary Supplement.
But wishing it away will not make it so, and Mr Podsnap has been gone these 150
years.
When I considered historical conventions as historically .nite, it was
easier to see the full extent to which they appear elusively paradoxical. The
very act of moving attention, of creating gaps to be mediated, actually
constructs the very neutrality that supposedly enables the mediation in the
frst place. The mediation is what causes neutrality to materialize. And that
mediation is implicitly saturated with consciousness which does raise questions
such as ‘whose consciousness?’ But historical narrative makes a point of
masking its mechanisms; that is the irresistible appeal of its ‘objectivity’ –
it masks the fact that it is an ‘objectification’. Perhaps my interest in
unmasking its mechanisms comes from some dim awareness that, as Borges likes to
demonstrate in his stories, inattention to the mechanism can be fatal. In any
case, historical mediation literally produces neutral time; that is above all
what history ‘represents,’ its ‘objects’ functioning only as markers or
carriers for the larger project of objecti.cation, just as the ‘objects’ of
Raphael or Piero were only carriers for the more powerful generalization about
space and the objectifiable world.
In historical narrative,
quantitative distance-markers are especially conspicuous; they are easy to visualize
in terms of pictorial representation, thanks to our deep cultural familiarity
with the perspective grammar that Renaissance architects, painters and
theorists have disseminated. In temporality, the most obvious distance markers
are chronological indicators; these are especially familiar in academic
contexts where ‘periods’ and ‘centuries’ seem almost to constitute the building
blocks of intellectual life. We teach courses and read books with titles such
as ‘Twentieth-Century History’ and The Novels of the 1840s. Scholarly attention respectfully stops at chronological ‘period’
boundaries. Publishers, libraries and universities reinforce these tendencies
and collude in the elision, even suppression of work undertaken in broader
discursive horizons that do not .t the existing categories, the preservation of
which seems to have become a sacred duty.
When
history has to face its own historicity, recognitions are involved that are
potentially threatening, so recoil from the critique is understandable. Still,
it is ironic that history, once an emancipatory and anti-dogmatic device, has
nearly reversed its function when academic institutions and publishers
reinforce history as dogma. Furthermore, its
central value of ‘neutrality’ has become increasingly suspect in an era of
intractable tribal conflict where its consensus mechanism can be seen as a
‘terrorist apparatus’ (Lyotard 1984: 63–5) because it can only suppress what
does not formally agree. There are other problems. The
‘future’ does not appear to live up to its promises, sometimes not even when
that future is only the next quarterly report; rationality does not seem to
govern events; outcomes often do not justify sacrifice. There simply is too
much that cannot be explained historically and that yet has value. And there is
too much repetition of the same old historical stories – the romantic, the
patriotic, the righteous – that too often function only as alibis. My students
have always understood that instantly and implicitly. The worthy dreams of
reason and of the demos, as the Greeks knew,
involve the repression of certain powers that only perpetuate themselves
negatively, haunting and hampering it. History is having to face its
repressions.
My study of modernity and of history as a consensus apparatus
comparable to Renaissance painting was guided from the outset by my awareness
of postmodernity in the margins. My agenda has always been to discover what
modernity was capable of so that I might better understand the competition.
Throughout I have been aware that the postmodern challenge to historical
conventions offers more than mere negatives, but instead, openings for new,
possibly even more enabling definitions of identity and sequence, for new kinds
of relationship with the past, and above all for a new politics, possibly even
a renewed politics. Activating such opportunities, however, requires a
willingness to move beyond the nostalgia evident in so much discussion of the
‘postmodern’. Just as modernity succeeded the medieval, bringing paradigm
shifts with it, so postmodernity has succeeded modernity bringing paradigm
shifts with it. It is merely movement, and not movement that can be denied.
Even if representational conventions are to be defended against the postmodern
challenge, and there are good reasons to attempt it, the defence will be weak
that has no grip on the opposition. Basic codes have changed across the range
of cultural practice, in science, in art, in politics. It is time to stop
flinging epithets and start considering, in as much consensual spirit as we can
muster, the immense practical implications of those changes.
My exploration of this
broadly implicit critique of modernity, present from the beginning of my
research, finally found its way into print as Sequel to History (1992), 17 years after I
starting thinking about the challenges of postmodernity and after I had
published a promised book on one of the most widely and wilfully misunderstood
radicals of the nineteenth century, George Eliot (1985). Sequel approaches the subject of
time in the postmodern condition just as Realism and Consensus took up time in
modernity. Sequel explores what
post-modernity is capable of, especially with regard to the deformation of
modernity in general and its historical and representational values in
particular. What is at stake in this transition is definitely personal, but
what, exactly, is at stake? Once across the threshold of postmodernity – and
most of us already have crossed it here and there whether we like it or not –
history in its traditional sense, along with its founding unitary subject, are
no longer possible simply because the postmodern world is not one system but
many. ‘The discursive condition’ is not congenial to the One World Hypothesis,
nor to the assumed value of neutrality, nor to the project of objecti.cation
with its emphasis on individual viewpoint and emergent form. With this
recognition of postmodern complexities, neutrality and the rest of the values
associated with history do not necessarily become lost, but neither can they
remain universally applicable and, therefore, immune from choice or rejection.
They are properties of some systems and not others, and the choices between
them are
a vexed and difficult
ones.
The threshold of
postmodernity has no simple location any more than the Renaissance did.
Eurocentric societies have been tipping away from modernity for nearly two
centuries. Non-Euclidean geometry was invented before the mid 1800s, and the
linguistic model for knowledge was invoked in England before 1870; Freud and
Marx circumvented the idea of irreducible entities, be they personal or social;
and the entire nineteenth century in France, according to André Breton,
denounced the ‘ridiculous illusion of happiness and understanding’ that the
Enlightenment had bequeathed it. By the end of the first decade of the
twentieth century, phenomenology had sought to override the distinction between
subject and object, painters and writers had abandoned the neutrality in space
and time upon which representation and history rested, Saussure had rede.ned
language as a differential system, and Einstein had published the Special
Theory of Relativity. By 2001 nobody but Mr Podsnap would attempt to disregard
all that. Like the Renaissance or the Reformation, postmodernity belongs to a
cultural event of such magnitude that to insist on assigning it a simple
chronological location is to render it almost entirely invisible. Recognition
or denial, however, are not my business here. I am addressing readers of Rethinking History who certainly will have
recognized already that something has happened to the conventions of historical
writing. The question now is, what becomes of the past? And what becomes of the
founding subject of history, that individual viewpoint and recollection that I
am supposed to be tracing here and that, taken collectively with all others has
sustained the One World Hypothesis and its productions for centuries of
European achievement including its adventures in the new world?
In
order to answer the central question about new relationships with the past, I
turned to narratives that depart from the historical understanding derived from
the Renaissance: from the understanding that the past is past and different
from us and thus, for that very reason, a basis for mediation. That
understanding, now seemingly so simple and obvious, was not obvious before the
Renaissance and was crucial to the Renaissance birth of history. Erwin Panofsky’s formulation of this thought remains one of the best
because it includes both full respect for, and also the grain of critique of
the birth of abstraction that arose from the newly invented historical relation
to the past:
The Middle Ages had left
antiquity unburied and alternately galvanized and exorcised its corpse. The
Renaissance stood weeping at its grave and tried to resurrect its soul. And in
one fatally auspicious moment it succeeded. This is why the medieval concept of
the Antique was so concrete and at the same time so incomplete and distorted;
whereas the modern one, gradually developed during the last three or four
hundred years is comprehensive and consistent but, if I may say so, abstract.
And this is why the medieval renascences were transitory; whereas the
Renaissance was permanent.
(Panofsky 1960: 113)
The distanced abstraction
required by historical conventions of description and explanation always puts
particulars into a systematic and rational horizon, the generalizations of
which are more important than the particulars which are only stepping stones to
them. Take, for example, the generalization that classifies whales as mammals
despite their obvious similarities to fish. Because the culture of
representation does not allow for diversity in identification – something that
prior modes of identification did allow – the creature must be either a mammal
or a fish, and so the poor fish becomes one of us. History and associated
representational conventions all dissolve particulars with abstraction – for
good reasons but with sometimes fatiguing effect. When all particulars exist
mainly as evidence, that is, as instances of developing forms and conditions
that are abstract and accessible only through a sequence of cases, there is
little savour left for the moment, unless it is snatched ahistorically from
this relentless ‘reality.’
Postmodernity
re-introduces diversity, even contradiction, back into the process of
identification; it lets inflection back into sequence. Postmodern identities
consist of multilevel and sequential inflections that produce pattern without
consensus, and sequential linkages liberated from the fatal forward motion of
historical causality. This renewed inflection, formerly suppressed by
scientistic hankerings for mere accuracy, renews emphasis on the slack, the
‘play’ available in the discursive element that allows for more than one kind
of practice. Poets have always understood this. Poetry can be de.ned as
precisely the demonstration of that play in language that interferes with
productive mechanisms, that makes room for imagination, that contains contradiction
without irritable, trivializing insistence on resolution. Postmodernity
encourages recovery of that amplitude in the discursive element. This is partly
why postmodernity brings back to the centre the artistic practices that
modernity marginalized: because, as Bill Paulson has argued, literature is the
‘noise of culture’, its medium of possibility.
The ‘discursive
condition’ contrasts utterly with (I may as well call it) ‘the modern
condition’ because the postmodern medium is never neutral, always ‘semiotic’ in
the sense empowered by Saussure. In order to understand the role of ‘the past’
in postmodernity I rely on Saussure’s most suggestive ideas about language.
First, that languages function reflexively, not referentially (this is obvious
to anyone who knows two languages). Second, that languages generate meaning
negatively through recognition of their differential internal functions (this
is considerably less obvious). And third, that verbal languages represent only
one kind of semiotic system and that we ‘speak’ in many different sign systems
that function as verbal language does, reflexively and differentially, but that
are not verbal – for example, body language, garment language, the sign systems
for traf.c or fashion, the sign systems implicit in tea ceremonies or the world
of wrestling, on the soccer field, in the boardroom, at the club, and so on.
The term for such a system has come to be ‘discourse’ because the term
‘language’ tends to invoke verbal systems. The term ‘discourse’ lies behind my phrase,
‘the discursive condition’. Saussure’s ideas, presented in University lectures
at Geneva c. 1906–11 and after his premature death published from notes as Cours de linguistique
génèrale (1915) and translated into English in 1959, inspired his students at
Geneva and have inspired creative thinking ever since.
Saussure’s ideas have
radical implications for the possibility of ‘doing’ history, personal or
otherwise and also for the definition of individual practice. For example,
instead of thinking of myself as an individual agent picking up signifying
tools in a neutral space, Saussure and his heirs invite me to think of myself
as a moving site of discursive specification, a subject position or, more
accurately, a simultaneous plurality of subject positions because I inhabit
semiotic systems in multiples simultaneously, not one at a time; I am
indistinguishably teacher, thinker, musician, colleague, parent, scholar,
friend, driver, voter and so on. Instead of thinking that language is only
language and the world is ‘real’, I am invited to recognize that everything is
language at every moment: a text, a readability, a writing, an inscription.
Instead of thinking of myself as ‘individual’ (i.e. non divisible entity)
engaged in a consensus apparatus that obliges me to discard much of my
knowledge and sensibility, I am invited instead to recognize the obligation for
constant negotiation among the many semiotic systems or discourses that
constitute my context of meaning and value as a sort of environmental possibility.
In such ideas the semiotic complexity of my day begins to find an intellectual
model adequate to it.
There are costs. I must
sacrifice my idea of romantic individuality and of heroic, world historical
action to which the in.nities of modern space and time invited me, and instead
I must con.ne ‘my’ subjectivity to that moving nexus where I can make this or
that particular specification of whatever semiotic systems are available to me.
‘The past’ is a function of a present discursive opportunity, not a launching
stage well lost. In the ‘discursive condition’ the production of meaning and
value does not ‘originate’ with individual agency, human or divine, but instead
occurs in-between potential and practice: between the not-speakable general
powers of a semiotic system (Saussure’s langue) and the finite
specifications of it (Saussure’s paroles). In the indefinite gap between that potential and its specification
lies the arena of freedom and the opportunity of ‘the past.’ Personal identity
can be construed only in terms of the complex trajectory of such
specifications, what Nabokov calls ‘the unique and unrepeatable poetry of an
individual life.’ The ‘discursive condition’ is this linguistic
in-between. There is no outside to it; we are born into it and into the codes
that have been made available to us, either by effort or by default, and that
were present long before we were and will survive us. Individuality consists of
that trajectory of specifications by which one selects from the range of
available semiotic systems and (necessarily) xcludes the rest of the vast range
of possibility as momentarily useless and hus mere ‘noise’ – although, as
information theorists explain, ‘noise’ is just omeone else’s message. In short,
each of us performs a continuous daily emiotic juggling miracle just so that we
can communicate about the simplest hings, stay on the functional side of the
road, and generally stay out of harm nd earn a living. It is not nothing.
However, the intellectual models of modernity, articularly those of history,
have told us it was nothing.
Postmodernity
reconfigures individuality and agency; it certainly does not do away with them.
But beyond the few indications already given I do not want to repeat here
arguments made elsewhere about individual agency (Ermarth, 2000: 405–13). I
will concentrate instead on the postmodern reconfiguration of time and thus of
temporal sequence and our relationship to the past. Postmodernity does not do
away with the past either, but neither does it use the past to sustain the
universal claims, among them Truth claims, implicitly made by modern historical
writing through its objectifying agendas. Time in the discursive condition is
never the neutral medium produced by historical conventions. Like discursive
subjectivity, discursive time is a function of sequences, all of which are
finite specifications of finite systems of potential. What is realizable are
particular specifications of systemic potential, not the system itself which is
never and can never be specified any more than ‘English’ can. It is thus not
possible in the discursive condition to speak, as history does, of ‘time’.
Discursive times are .nite. They are periodic. They come to an end and know
nothing of the infinite horizons and heroic potentials of modernity and
history’s neutrality.
While
it has always been obvious to most grownups that personal time comes to an end,
modernity makes it easy, perhaps seductively easy, to lose sight of that
determining fact within the infinities and neutralities of historical
conventions. In the discursive
condition time is a dimension of events not a containing medium for them: hence
the impossibility for a neutral time acting as a common denominator for
collective events at the level of history. History
implies a totalized collectivity including all and everyone and it suggests
that whatever does not participate in the collective sums, does not exist. We
see this implication played out daily in the middle east, and on less dramatic
scales nearer to home. Furthermore, modern
history goes on forever, whereas discursive times are only as long as the given
finite sequences of specification of particular potentials by a particular
agent.
What then are the
possibilities for writing histories once the consensus apparatus supporting
modernity has been dismantled? This is the question currently engaging me and,
while I attempt no simple answer, I can say that I find promising opportunities
in the anthematic ambits of experimental narrative sequences that now are
familiar from all kinds of fictions, films, even internet jokes that disrupt
the explanatory machinery of history. This new narrative sequence has nothing
to do with getting rid of so-called ‘facts’; postmodernists are not loonies
unable to kick a stone. In ‘fact’ postmodernity is much more respectful of
detail than was modernity, in something like the same way quantum theory is
more precise just as it becomes less secure in the familiar empiricist terms.
But postmodernity does involve a key move away from objectivity to construct
where the past has new functions. Such new relations for ‘the past’ can be
sought in the experimental sequences ‘written’ in words or steel or sound or
stone: in the narratives of the nouveau roman or Nabokov, in Frank Gehry’s
buildings, in Steve Reich’s music, or in the ribbon of stone in Washington, DC
bearing the names of Vietnam War dead. Such work demonstrates in practical
terms precisely the power to turn convention aside, to reform the act of
attention, to ground and limit the very formulation that is prior to any
discussion at all whether practical or philosophical. Most important of all
such work allows for a plurality of possible even contradictory ‘readings’ and
‘meaning.’ Artistic creations, so often marginalized by the objecti.cations of
modernity, are nevertheless the most highly achieved cases of the kind of
discursive specification that I engage in every day. They provide a range
beyond what is conventionally imaginable. Language that emphasizes its own
associative volatility – for example, poetry from Shakespeare to Stoppard – has
its counterparts in the street and perhaps even, one hopes, in the boardroom
where ‘writing’ takes place just as surely as on the poet’s or novelist’s desk
or in the painter’s studio.
New temporal habitations
have been explored more by artists than by theorists despite the latter’s use
of the term, ‘time’. Early examples can be found in Dada, Kafka or absurd
theatre. A later, British example is Virginia Woolf’s The Waves:
Time lets fall its drop
{says Bernard}. . . . Time tapers to a point; it is not one life that I look
back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who
I am. . . . How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down
beautifully with all their feet on the ground!. . . . I begin to long for some
little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the
shuffling of feet on the pavement. . . . What delights me is the confusion, the
height, the indifference. . . . Of story, of design I do not see a trace. What
is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like
clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them.
(1931: 184, 277, 238–9,
218)
The thread of meaning
breaks, but (scandal!) without catastrophe. Half a world away Julio Cortázar,
another genius of the revisionary sequence, especially admired The Waves for daring to stick its
hand outside of history. Later still, the narrator of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover recapitulates the theme:
The story of my life
doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no
line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but
it’s not true, there was no one.
(1985: 8)
In place of ‘the story’
is ‘writing’ which Duras describes as either the most powerful adventure – it
is either ‘all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void’ – or else it
is nothing more than ‘advertising.’ These few writers testify, from different
parts of the twentieth century and from different cultures and continents, to
the presences of a new kind of sequence in which the past has intense value but
history does not, and where temporality belongs to a digressive and paratactic
order, not an historical one.
Such sequences depend on
digression, or ‘a formality of sustained interruption’ (Ermarth 1992: 145): a
digressive formality foreign to the emergent forms of historical conventions
but completely at home in contemporary films such as Pulp Fiction, The Double Life of
Veronique or The Big Lebowski. Instead of producing history and meaning, they exfoliate, digress,
embedding any meanings in patterns of repetition and variation that mutate in
the course of the sequence and often stop arbitrarily. The volatility of
association takes precedence over the production of historical causality. We
get a sequence defined by its peripheral visions as much as by its forward
motion: a sequence by comparison with which conventional historical sequence,
moving like a good Aristotelian plot toward its increasingly inevitable end,
seems to have blinkers on. Modern history may be plot-like and form-like, but
in 2001 it is not life-like.
The
past is not past in postmodern narrative sequences, but a present reiteration,
a constitutive element of the series. Such a ‘past’ does not resemble the
collective formalities of history. Instead the elements of
memory are part of a continuing, personally marked recognition – ‘anthematic
recognition’ after the ‘anthemion’ or interlaced narrative pattern described
and practiced by Nabokov among many others (Ermarth 1992: 198; 2000: 415).
Whereas history has been weeping at the grave of the past for five centuries
and attempting to resurrect it, postmodernity simply refuses to declare it dead
and thus dispenses with the necessity for burying it. Instead
the past is ever-present in the contested patterns of linguistic and discursive
recognition. And these patterns always belong to finite individual sequences
that replace the grand rationalizations of history. The unique and unrepeatable
poetry of an individual text or life does not serve as a basis for the
commanding consensus that established the conditions of history and of so much
else. What is gained for the sequence is amplitude and inflection, even quality
perhaps. What is lost is the power of generalization that unifies absolutely
everything according to the terms of a single system of measurement. The
objectified universe has lost its (Newtonian) certitude and finality; but then,
as George Eliot long ago remarked, finality is but another name for
bewilderment and defeat.
References
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