Making History ‘Morally Defensible’: Truth, Power and the Siege of Nagykanisza
Castle, Part 1 – edited version
INTH ‘Future of Philosophy of History’ Conference, July 2013
By the late 20th Century, the accumulated critique of past-oriented cultural practices –
historicisation, historical enquiry, historical thinking, historical readings,
historiography… – had brought all forms of ‘doing history’ into disrepute.
Contemporary theorists of historiography (including Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit,
Keith Jenkins, Sande Cohen, Martin Davies) and the philosophers they commonly cited
(including Nietzsche, Lyotard, Deleuze, Guattari) taught us that the conventional
justifications for thinking historically are illusions – no more than rhetorical
supplements to the various failed discursive experiments of modernity. According to the
most radical critique of the category, not only were attempts to defend history-focused
behaviour incoherent (at least on epistemic grounds), they were politically
irresponsible. History in these terms was an impediment to critical and/or
transformational thought and practice. This, one might say, was the paradox of history
that postmodernity had brought to consciousness. On the one hand history (or in Alun
Munslow’s phrase ‘the-past-as-history’) was widely recognized as being fictive,
rhetorical, and lacking a referent and thus an epistemological grounding. But on the
other hand, historicisation – usually mediated in popular forms – had become so
routinised and authoritative in contemporary social formations that it restricted
collective political imaginations from exploring ideas that went beyond the limits of the
already known. History, it seems now, is one more failed and discredited discursive
experiment – incapable of producing secure accounts of the past, and always an
apologist for dominant interests in the status quo. So, why bother with history?
As is widely known – at least among those who are interested in historiography – there
are strong arguments for not bothering with history at all. Or at the very least, it is
argued that we should drop the idea that we need historicized accounts of the past to
orient ourselves in the present. A less radical response to the various problematics of
historical discourse is to see them as a challenge to think more critically about why we
might choose to continue with history. One possible line of thought here is to argue that
historians now have a warrant (even a responsibility) to choose to write self1
consciously politicized and partisan histories, and equally partisan critiques of works
produced by academic historians and other history makers. After all, if the only criteria
we have to evaluate historical narratives are found within the codes of the discourse
itself (questions of form and aesthetics), or belong to the categories of ideology and
ethics (ungrounded), then there can be no epistemological objections to our explicitly
politicized histories – no legitimate complaints that our ways of narrativising the past
depart from the true story of ‘how things were’. This should not be seen as an argument
that allows historians to carry on with business-as-usual, so long as they remember to
supplement their work with a high degree of reflexivity – of a type that would mark an
otherwise conventional historical narration as their ‘own’ authored work. Rather, the
value of the critique of normative thinking about history is that it offers a possible
opening towards creating both a different type of historical discourse, and a different
understanding of people’s individual and collective orientation towards the past. As
Kalle Pihlainen wrote in the most recent edition of Rethinking History, the ‘breakdown
of epistemological history opens the door to ethical considerations’ (2013: 243). His
point of course was that faced with the aporia and conditions of undecidability, we must
accept our responsibilities for choosing both our histories and our ethics. Since
publishing Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity in 1999, Jenkins has argued that we
should choose not to bother with history, because we can use other/better writers to
think about ethics and politics. Although Pihlainen largely accepted the reasoning
behind this position, he chose instead to endorse Jenkins’s earlier advocacy of histories
of a ‘postmodern kind’.
Claire(Norton) and myself agree with him. We accept that our thinking here can be
made to look like a strategy for professional self- survival - finding ways to reconcile the
postmodern critique of history with our continued careers. But we hope nonetheless to
make some limited and specific claims about the possible social value of history as a
congeries of discursive practices. In a book that we’re currently working on – Liberating
Histories: truths, power, ethics – and in a series of related projects, we intend to explore
the potential for orienting historical practices towards ethico-political reflection and
activism. Before explaining some of our thinking about this, I want to summarise our
position in relation to the wider theoretical/philosophical debate about history, so that
our project is not misunderstood. Because this is a short paper, this summary will be
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less elaborate than the one we’ll write for the book. We accept that in general terms
neither ‘history’ nor ‘the past’ places us under a social obligation to know, understand,
empathise or identify with what has gone before. We accept that histories (in whatever
form) are constructed products of discursive practices – and thus are contingent, fictive,
rhetorical, aestheticised, ideological, and lacking epistemic foundations. We do not
believe that histories ‘represent’ or ‘correspond’ to anything ‘back there’ - not even as
‘weak’ correspondence, nor a form of correspondence derived from what Carlo
Ginzburg calls the ‘distorting mirrors’ of sources. Historiography (specifically) is for us a
mode of writing that’s defined by genre rules and scholarly protocols – none of which
give historiography a privileged glimpse of the ‘real’. We regard the rules and protocols
of history writing as being validated and legitimized by intersubjective agreement
rather than some extra-cultural or transcendent authority. We think that the cultural
value of these rules/protocols should be subject to continual critique – not in general
terms, but in relation to their application in specific current social and political contexts
(for example, Palestinian historians of the 1948 Nakba are forced to work outside of
disciplinary conventions, yet their writings are dismissed by political opponents
because they do so). We don’t adhere to conventional understandings of historicism,
either in a philosophical or epistemological sense - we simply see historicism as one
potentially useful reading strategy among others. And we agree with Keith Jenkins that
neither ‘history’ nor ‘the past’ has anything to teach us about ethics – because there is
no way to derive meaning/value from facts/evidence, no way of joining up the ‘is’ and
the ‘ought’.
So the question remains: why bother with history?
We continue to believe that there can be some potential value in ‘doing’ history – of a
postmodern kind. Here we understand ‘history’ to signify no more than a heuristic
fiction – but one nevertheless that might help us to discuss and critique aspects our
current situation, and simultaneously broaden our vocabulary for self-expression. Our
aim is to argue the case for orienting discussion of history’s ontology, methodologies
and epistemology towards the category of ethics – exploring how historical praxis can
usefully contribute to the formation of ethical subjectivities (borrowing from Simon
Critchley) and a wider discourse of contemporary political engagement (hence making
history writing ‘morally defensible’). We take seriously the challenge set out by Walter
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Benjamin, Hayden White, David Harlan and others, who have argued that historians
should recognize and foreground in their working practices their obligations to
contribute to socio-political critiques of the present, and to work towards
transformations. How do we attempt to justify this?
Truths
The kinds of histories that we advocate are legitimized in the first instance by the
redundancy of realist or representationalist conceptions of historical knowledge and
meaning. We believe instead that meaning should be theorized in terms of use (meaning
as always derived from within situated social practices, knowledge as a resource that
helps us cope in the world) and truth in terms of justification (in relation to socially
determined norms, or validation by interpretive communities). We also see potential
here in Alain Badiou’s concept of truth as ‘being true’ or ‘holding true’ to an event that
constitutes a break with the past – in other words, maintaining fidelity to an
emancipatory innovation that involves some unbinding or rupture with the past
(historical examples of this include French rev, Bolshevik rev, 1968 – more recently in
The Rebirth of History [2012] Badiou suggests that there are echoes of the 1848
Revolutions in recent uprisings in the Arab world..) And it’s in the process of
maintaining fidelity to this ‘event’ that a subject constitutes themselves as a subject.
Truth, for Badiou, is something that we sometimes have a chance to make – first and
foremost, it is a matter of conviction rather than revelation or disclosure.
Power
In order to work with the idea that historical practices – as currently constituted –
reinforce the position of dominant interests in the status quo, we intend to examine
how these practices are both produced by and reproductive of discursive and
institutional matrices of power. In particular we want to focus on how the praxis of
academic historical research, and the dissemination of historical knowledge in
educational, political, judicial, heritage and media environments is pre-structured by
implicitly agreed and maintained socio-disciplinary norms. In the UK, as an obvious
example, there are norms set by the REF, funding councils, Department of Culture,
Media & Sport etc... These norms – and the ways in which they’re maintained – have
consequences (some visible, others less so). Historical narratives produced in
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accordance with our current ‘proper’ protocols play a role in identity formation and
confirmation, they can legitimize claims for resources, they can be used to discipline or
control subjects. We don’t object to the politicization of historical practices per se. But
we recognize that historical work always has an ideological dimension to it. And
following from this, we’re interested in the potential for re-imagining historical
practices in what we would regard as socially constructive ways – and not just the
practices of academic historians, but also those of history producers more generally
(artists, curators, archivists, educators, community organizers and so forth).
Ethics
We believe that our work is oriented towards ethics in so far as it’s concerned with
questions of intersubjective solidarity – issues of ‘social ethics’. We’re not principally
interested in personal moral codes, nor in Foucault’s later works on the ‘aesthetics of
existence’ (forged within the spaces left by dominant social power structures – ‘care for
the self as a practice of freedom), nor theological frameworks for ethical discourse (at
least not directly). The model that currently interests us is Critchley’s notion of ‘ethical
subjectivity’ – i.e. something that is formed and performed by the self binding itself to
whatever it chooses as its good. Critchley’s ethical subject is defined by commitment to
an unfulfillable demand that comes from outside and of which it approves – the self
affirms that demand, assents to finding it good, binds itself to that good, and shapes its
subjectivity in relation to that good (2008: 17). The advantage for us of this model is
that it’s a way of conceptualizing ethics that takes us away from talk of ‘ethical systems’,
‘foundations’, ‘categorical imperatives’, or ‘humanism’.
This paper at least gestures towards the directions of thought that we wish to explore in
Liberating Histories. But in what kinds of ways could we write the ‘morally defensible
histories that we advocate’?.....
Mark Donnelly (and Claire Norton)
St Mary’s University College, June 2013
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