Rethinking History 2

Pages 40-84

40-44 ‘On Facts and Interpretation’

…are there historical facts we can know or is history just interpretation?

We know the first world war started in 1914 so in some sense there are facts. However, such facts, though important, are true but trite within the larger issues historians consider. Historians have ambitions, wishing to discover not only what happened, but how, why, and what they meant or mean…

…so it never really is a matter of the facts per se but the weight, position, combination and significance they carry vis-à-vis each other in the construction of explanations that is the issue…this is the inevitable interpretive dimension…

…for although there may be methods of finding out what happened there is no method whatsoever whereby one can say definitely what the facts mean…

…critiques of the limits of textuality apply…

…all facts, to be meaningful, need embedding in interpretive readings that obviously contain them but which simply do not somehow arise from them..

Pages 44-50

The concept of historical (historians’) bias is everywhere; in schools, in the aims and objectives of countless historical texts…

…bias only makes sense when viewed in opposition to unbaised truth…

…typically the historian goes from the original traces, constructs these as evidence, scrupulously footnotes, etc., and on the basis of this gives a fully documented account. Of course empiricists -like Elton- know that definitive accounts are unachievable but they still strive for them. The ambition is to let ‘the facts’ speak for themselves, unmediated by the bulk of the ventriloquist-like (and possibly biased) historian… .

…looking at history this way, as a series of readings, all of which are positioned -then there is clearly no unpositioned criterion by which one can judge the degree of bias…the empiricist claim -that one can detect bias and expunge it by attending scrupulously to ‘what the sources say’ is undercut by the fact that the sources are mute. It is historians who articulate ‘what the sources say’, hence why many historians examine the same accounts and arrive at different conclusions or have their own narrative to tell…

…the basic question is whether empathy -the claim that one has to get into an informed appreciation of the predicaments and viewpoints of people in the past in order to gain real historical understanding (to see the past from its point of view) -is actually possible? If it is not, and that is my view, then why should attempting the impossible be so high on the agenda?

…given then that there is no presuppositionless interpretation of the past, and given that interpretation of the past are constructed in the present, the possibility of the historian being able to, slough off his present to reach somebody else’s past on their terms look s remote…

…here is Eagleton on the problem of reading texts: it is difficult to see criticism (history) as anything but an innocent discipline. It’s origins seem spontaneous, its origins natural: there is literature (the past) and so -because we wish to understand and appreciate it -there is also criticism (history)….But…criticism (history) as a hand-maiden to literature (the past) prevents (such understanding) everywhere….if the task of criticism (history) is to smooth the troubled passage between the text (the past) and reader, to elaborate the text (past) so that it may be more easily consumed, how is it to avoid interposing its own ungainly bulk between product and consumer, over-shadowing its object…it seem that criticism (history) is caught in an insoluble contradiction.

…these are some of the philosophical problems empathy faces…

Pages 51-54

…I do not think empathy , as typically understood, is possible for these philosophical and practical reasons…though a lot of critical reading historians may gain ‘tentative understandings’ but that is a different matter and empathy may only be marginal in such knowledge…

…this, briefly, is Collingwood’s argument. Humans are language animals. Through language things are given meaning. These symbolic codes refer to the world but word and world are categorically different. In different social formations, in different cultures, people speak/spoke differently: the past is a foreign country, people spoke differently there.

To understand people of the past we have to understand the traces left by them. For Collingwood, understanding history is understanding why these people wanted these things and nothing else.: all history is about what they had in mind, all history is about the history of minds.

pgs 57-61

…clearly there is a difference between primary sources (traces of the past) and secondary texts…this difference breaks down at secondary level where it is possible to use a secondary text as a primary source. Thompson’s ‘A history of the working classes’ can be read as an introduction into aspects of the industrial revolution or as a study of what a certain kind of Marxist historian had to say about it in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s: same text, different use. But if this is obvious, what is the problem in play here?

…I have argued that we can never really know the past; that there are no centres; that there are no ‘deeper’ sources (no subtext) to draw upon to get things right: all is on the surface. As we saw in chapter 1, historians don’t go down but across, moving laterally in the construction of their accounts from one set of sources to another, effectively doing comparative work. If this is not seen, if you use the word ‘source’ instead of ‘trace’; if you use the word ‘source’ instead of ‘trace’, if you refer to some of these sources as ‘primary’ and you sometimes replace that with ‘original’, this suggests that if you go to the originals, then because originals seem genuine (as opposed to secondary), genuine (true/deep) knowledge can be gained. This prioritizes the original source, fetishes documents, and distorts the whole working process of making history. At root is that perpetual quest for truth, the quest also apparent in desires for empathetic understanding -to get back into the genuine minds of the original people so that their views are unadulterated by ours…

…if we are freed from the desire for certainty, if we are released form the idea that history rests on the study of primary/documented sources (and that doing history is studying these alone and that from these originals we can adjudicate later historians’ disagreements), then we are free to see history as an amalgam of those epistemological, methodological, ideological, and practical concerns I have outlined…

…Elton uses the term ‘evidence’ to describe the sources that the historian goes to when carrying out research (the ‘evidence is in the record’) whereas he ought to have referred to them as, say, traces of the past. By calling such traces evidence, however, Elton gives the impression -which of course he wants to give- that such pristine pieces of evidence always already organize themselves into latent explanations, so that when enough of them have been found and collected together, then such ‘evidence-based explanations can simply become manifest by themselves…Carr, on the other hand, realizes that it is the active historian who does all the work of organizing the past’s traces, and that the kind of explanations the traces can be found to support depend on the type of organization being practised…

…the way out of this debate is to be consistent and not use the term ‘evidence’ ambiguously. By which I mean we simply remember the salient points (a) the past occurred; (b) traces of it remain; (c) these traces are there whether the historian who goes to them and finds them or not; (d) evidence is the term used when (some or other) of these traces are used ‘in evidence’ on behalf of (some or other) argument (interpretation) and not before. Evidence, therefore, as opposed to traces, is always the product of the historian’s discourse simply because, prior to the discourse being articulated, evidence (history) does not exist: only traces do (only the past did)…

…Barthes, in the Discourse of History, attacks those historians who want to deliver a ‘true’ account of the past guaranteed by the ‘raw evidence’ of the real he argues that such historians perform a sleight of hand whereby the referent (the thing the historian refers to) is projected into a realm supposedly beyond discourse from which position it can then be thought of as preceding and determining the discourse which in fact posited it as a referent in the first place.

Cyberpunk one

Well-written with a coherent academic focus throughout.

First things first…(pages 1-39)

Notetaking begins with a seminal postmodernist text. And without further ado, let us begin.

Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking history;

Chapter 1

Pages 7-8

…the past and history are different things…

…additionally the past and history are not stitched into each other such that only one historical reading of the past is absolutely necessary…

…for the same object of enquiry can be read differently by different discursive practices…

…history is a discourse about, but categorically different from, the past…

…the past has gone and history is what historians make of it when they go to work…

Pages 8-10

…examples of the past-history distinction may seem innocuous but actually it can have enormous effects. For example, although millions of women have lived in the past…few of them appear in history, that is, in history texts. Women, to use a phrase, have been ‘hidden from history’, that is, systematically excluded from most historians’ accounts…

…the past and history are not stitched into each other such that one and only one reading of any phenomenon is entailed: that the same object of enquiry is capable of being differently by different discourses whilst, internal to each, there are different readings over space and time…

pages 11-13

…whilst historians and the rest of them do not invent the view (all of the stuff seems to be there alright) they do invent all its descriptive categories and any meanings it can be said to have. They construct the analytical and methodological tools to make out of this raw-material their ways of reading and talking about it; discoursing in that sense we read the world as a text, and, logically, such readings are infinite. By which I do not mean we just make up stories about the world/the past (that is we know the world/the past then make up stories about them) but rather the claim is a much stronger one; that the world/past comes to us always already as stories and that we cannot get out of these stories (narratives) to check if they correspond to the real world/past because these ‘always already’ narratives constitute reality…which means we cannot fix readings as once and for all…and may interpret and re-interpret…

…different sociologists and historians interpret the same phenomenon differently through discourses that are always on the move, that are always being de-composed and re-composed: are always positioned and positioning, and which thus need constant self-examination as discourses by those who use them…

…how the historian tries to know the past is crucial in determining the possibilities of what history is and can be, not least because it is history’s claim to knowledge (rather than belief or assertion) that makes it the discourse it is (I mean, historian do not usually see themselves as writers of fiction, although inadvertently they may be)…

…epistemology refers to the philosophical area of theories of knowledge. This area is concerned with how we know about anything, in that sense history is part of another discourse, philosophy, taking part in the general question of what it is possible to know with reference to its own area of knowledge -the past…

…we still see historians as trying to raise before us the spectre of the real past, an objective past about which their accounts are accurate and even true…

…if it were possible to know once and for all, now and forever, then there would be no need for any more history to be written…

…epistemological fragility, then, allows for historians’ readings to be multifarious (one past – many histories) so what is it that makes history so epistemologically fragile?..

pages 14-17

…most information about the past has never been recorded and most of the rest was evanescent…no account of the past can recover the past because the past was not an account but events, situations, etc. As the past has gone no account can ever be checked against it but only against other accounts….there is no proper history that, deep down, allows us to check all other accounts against it, there is no fundamentally correct text which other interpretations are just variations; variations are all there are…no matter how verifiable, how widely accepted or checkable, history remains inevitably a personal construct, the manifestation of the historian’s perspective as a narrative…the historians viewpoint and predilections will shape the choice of historical materials…

…look says the poet Klebinikov, in his decrees to the planets ‘The sun obeys my syntax’, look says the historian ‘the past obeys my interpretation’….

…through hindsight we, in a way, know more about the past than those who lived in it. In translating the past into modern terms, and in using knowledge perhaps previously unavailable, the historian discovers both what has been forgotten about the past and pieces together things never pieced together before. People and social formations are thus caught up in processes that can only be seen in retrospect, and documents and other traces are ripped out of their original contexts of purpose and function to illustrate, say, a pattern which might not be remotely meaningful to any of their authors. And all this is, Lowenthal says, inevitable. History always conflates, it changes, it exaggerates aspects of the past. Time is foreshortened, details selected and highlighted, action concentrated, relations simplified, not to [deliberately] alter the events but to…give them more meaning…

….then Lowenthal concludes histories as known to us appear more comprehensible than we have any reason to believe the past was…

…history is a shifting discourse constructed by historians and that from the existence of the past no one reading is entailed: change the gaze, shift the perspective, and new readings appear. Yet although historians know all this, most seem to studiously ignore it and strive for objectivity and truth nevertheless…

pages 18-20

…for while historians would agree that a rigorous method is important, there is a problem as to which rigorous method they are talking about…how would one know which method leads to the truer past…

…the fact that history is per se an ideological construct means that it is constantly being re-worked and re-ordered by all those who are variously affected by power relationships; because the dominant and the dominated also have their own versions of the past to legitimize their practices, versions which have to be excluded as improper from any place on the agenda of the dominant discourse…history is forged in such conflict and clearly these conflicting needs for history impinge upon the debates (struggle for ownership) as to what history is…

…epistemology shows we can never really know the past: that the gap between history and the past (historiography) is an ontological one, that is, in the very nature of things is such that no amount of epistemological effort can bridge it…

Pages 26-31 On Practice

Fourth, in going about their work of finding various materials to work on and work up,historians shuttle between other historians’ published work(s) sotred up labour time embodied in books, articles, etc.) and unpublished materials. This, unpublished, newish material can be called the traces of the past (literally the remaining evidence of the past -documents, records, artifacts, etc), these traces being a mixture of the known (bu tlittle used)trace new, possibly unused and unknown traces, and old traces; that is, materials used before but, because of the newish traces found, now capable of being placed in contexts different to those they occupied before and so began the traces of the transformation of the once concrete into the concrete in thought, that is,into historians’ accounts. Here the historian literally reproduces the traces of the past in to category and this act of transformation the past into history -is his or her basic job…

….quite literally no two readings are the same…

…although the above seems to suggest that all is in interpretive flux, in fact we read in fairly predictable ways. So, in that sense, what pins readings down? Well not detailed agreements on all and everything because the details will always float free -specific things can always be made to mean more or less- but general agreements do occur. They do so because of power; here we return to ideology. For what stops texts being used in totally arbitrary ways is the fact that certain texts are nearer to some texts than others; are more or less locatable in genres, into slots; are more or less congenial to the needs that people (s) have which are expressed in texts. And so apres Orwell they find affinities and fixing posts that are themselves ultimately arbitrary, but which relate to the more permanent needs of groups and classes: we live in a social system -not a social random…

…to deconstruct other people (s) histories is a pre-condition of constructing your own and also a reminder that history is always history for someone…

pages 31-32

Chapter 2

pages 33-35

…I have run arguments from Elton and others where the aim of historical study is to gain real (true) knowledge and suggested this is, strictly speaking, unachievable…

…where does this desire for certainty come from? [it become established in the works of Plato and his theory of absolute knowledge, implying that true/good knowledge out to entail true/good practice…

…christians then claimed the word of god was the word of truth which then gave the criteria to judge things in terms of right and wrong….the emergence of science also conflated the importance of objectivity when facts became stated and on them things actually worked…

pages 36-40

…but in culture nothing is natural. Today we know of no foundation for Platonic absolutes. We have deconstructed and made arbitrary and pragmatic the connections between word and world…

…we still speak of “sunrise” and “sunset”. We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced ineradicably, the Ptolemaic….

…Richard Rorty ‘The truth was always created and never found”. …for the reasons I have mentioned; that our culture has a long, dominant tradition wherein truth and certainty have been held to be found and not created -Platonism, Christianity, reason, science, the habits of everyday…this is how the concept of truth is made to function…

Foucault, Power and Truth pg. 39

‘Truth isn’t outside power…

Truth isn’t outside power…it is produced only by multiple forms of constraint…each society has…its own general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true: the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish between false and true statements, the means by which each is sanctioned, the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth, the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true: the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true…

…by truth I do not mean ‘the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted but rather the ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true, it being understood also that it is not a matter…on behalf of the truth but of a battle about the status of truth and the economic and politic role it plays…

…truth is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. Truth is linked…with systems of power which produce and sustain it…a regime of truth…

All of these arguments are readily applicable to history. History is a discourse, a language game, within it truth and similar expressions are devices to open, regulate, and shut down interpretations…

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This site exists for a number of reasons, all of which are interconnected; firstly I am on the move a lot which means I can’t carry my books around with me, most of which become lost in the process; secondly, given that I am adrift of academia where seminars end notetaking takes precedence; thirdly, I am not constrained by departmental demands and so my interests in all affairs academic is looser, or perhaps broader, in certain respects; fourthly, the safest place to keep material in all its guises is on-line for then they are easily accessed always…