10
Past, Process, and Contest in Contemporary Historiography

Historiographical Openness

In their different ways, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and neopragmatism all seemed to suggest a more central role for empirical historiography. To be sure, historiography still embodied legacies of positivism and nineteenth-century historicism that would have to be jettisoned, but the assault on metaphysics seemed to yield the elements for the necessary recasting. However, other impulses, evident in thinkers from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Derrida and Rorty, seemed to undercut the historical discipline altogether.

In chapter 1, I noted that by the late 1980s practicing historians were becoming attuned to the wider discussion in the humanities. Some suggested that historians, freed at last from the misguided imperative of representation, could do more kinds of things and thereby expand their cultural function. But this confidence betrayed presentist and aestheticist accents that provoked more traditional historians to insist more tenaciously on the old self-understanding. The result was confusion and a debilitating polarization in historiography.

With the eclipse of metaphysics, there seemed deeper reasons for each of the competing foci long at work in historiography—the past moment, apprehended on its own terms, and the process connecting the past moment with the present. Insofar as present conditions have resulted from nothing but history, historical understanding seems all we have to go on. So we feel a deeper urgency to focus on processes leading from the past to our present, not to grasp the goal or shape of history as a whole, but simply to understand where our present has come from. In this mode, we feature in the past moment what fits into and furthers some such process.

Such inquiry may serve action in response to our present situation. As with gender, the now-familiar example, to show that what had seemed natural was contingent and historical is to loosen the present configuration and open the way to new construction—in this case, a new way of making social sense of sexual difference. So historical inquiry that probes contingent constructedness may be re constructive—not in the sense of reconstructing the past as it actually happened, but serving the ongoing reconstruction of the world.

The example of gender shows that we need not take what formerly seemed the dominant processes, especially political-constitutional development, to be most worthy of our attention. The whole historical terrain seems subject to arrangement in one such process or another, connecting the past to us. The arrangement of those processes in some hierarchy of importance is itself historically specific—and at this moment is up to us. In the reflexive mode that follows from the inflation of history, we understand that we are ourselves historical actors as we choose, on the basis of present needs, to ask about this as opposed to that.

Alongside the renewed emphasis on presentist involvement and process, we find a renewed emphasis on the past moment for its own sake, quite apart from, even as opposed to , its place in the process resulting in our present. Indeed, it may be partly because we have new reasons for accenting presentism and process that we feel, at the same time, a deeper need to disembed our predecessors from the processes connecting their experience with our own. To apprehend their experience for its own sake might entail at once suppressing the distance and restoring the real difference between the present and the past moment. In any case, we apparently need to reconceive both terms of the past/process dichotomy and the relationship between them in light of the eclipse of metaphysics.

It was noted in chapter 1 that Simon Schama's semifictionalized history, Dead Certainties , published in 1991, seemed symptomatic of the perplexities that wider theoretical innovations had occasioned for historiography. Most obviously troubling was Schama's apparently willful blending of fact and fiction, but the relationships among past, present, and process were still more fundamentally at issue.

Dead Certainties followed hard upon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989), which eschewed temporal distance in order to convey events from the perspective of the participants. Schama seemed to suggest that even in the maelstrom of "the French Revolution," which had long seemed the founding event of our era, what was most real and worthy of our attention was a world of experience that we can grasp only if we do not worry about where it was all leading, which we know in a way that those involved did not. That world is defined, in fact, by its tension with the process that has led to us.

In Dead Certainties , Schama took a more radical step, teasing into the creases between involvement and detachment, fact and fiction, past and

process, and exploring their interconnections. In his critical review, Gordon Wood understood that in this work, too, Schama assumed "that participants have a privileged access to knowledge of the events they are involved in," whereas, Wood pointed out, most historians assume the opposite. Precisely insofar as they are removed from events, historians are better able to put disparate, confused, often contradictory accounts by participants into a plausible whole.^[1]

But in invoking "objectivity" to characterize what he took to be the alternative to Schama's willful foreshortening, Wood sidestepped important aspects of Schama's challenge. The point is not simply that the accounts of the participants themselves are fragmentary and thus inadequate, as if the participants simply were not as good at doing the same thing historians do. The question concerns the alternative foci of historical inquiry—and the purposes at work in each. In what sense is history about the process leading to the present, and in what sense is it about the past, apart from any such process? Insofar as it is about both, what purpose does each mode of inquiry serve, and what is the relationship between them?

Schama's provocative book usefully dramatized the central issues facing historiography by the early 1990s, when an unprecedented sense of possibility, risk, and danger marked the historical discipline. The historiographical focus continued to expand as never before, yet historians were subject to gnawing doubts as the bases of their earlier self-understanding eroded. Schama had managed to play with the ambiguities in an especially entertaining way, but the challenge was more deeply to clarify the central dichotomies—involvement and detachment, fact and fiction, past and process—and the relationships among them.

Processes to the Present

During the 1980s, historians and theorists coming from very different directions explicitly embraced presentism as the key to a more open and resonant historiography. They included students of historical narrative like Hayden White and Hans Kellner, innovative "new historians" like Joan Wallach Scott, and proponents of "the new historicism" like Brook Thomas. Despite significant differences in accent, each played up the active role of the historian in connecting the present with the past for broadly political purposes.

As noted in chapter 1, Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) launched a narrativist current that examined the construction of historical accounts in language and thereby forced renewed attention to the historian's active role. In

[1] Gordon S. Wood, "Novel History," New York Review of Books , 27 June 1991, 14; Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1992), 319–326.

that work White delineated the cycle of rhetorical strategies that afforded historiography a certain resonance during the nineteenth century but that led to a curiously sterile outcome by the beginning of the twentieth, when historiography settled into the "ironic" mode that henceforth characterized professional historiography. The irony lay in the disjunction between present and past that enabled the historian to assume a stance of superiority. The historian understands what was happening in a way that past participants themselves did not; indeed, the historian can see the inevitable disparity between their self-understanding and what we, from our privileged perspective, know to have been happening really . Thus irony was bound up with the assumption that realistic representation of the past is possible—and is the defining mode of historiography as an autonomous discipline.^[2]

This outcome proved ironic in a double sense, because the assumption of present superiority and the imperative of realistic representation left historiography confined to the temple of art, cut off from the broadly political world of present action.^[3] White sought to contest that outcome by showing that historical accounts are actively constructed in language through particular rhetorical strategies, which stem from political assumptions and have political implications. By undercutting the long-standing assumption that history affords a realistic rendering of a past that is sharply distinguishable from the present, he hoped to point historians toward a more overtly active and reconstructive present role.

White and his narrativist allies added an important dimension to what deconstruction in the loose sense had offered historiography. Any present understanding is simply one contingent narrative construction. And what we deconstruct is never unvarnished reality, the historical "thing-in-itself," but some particular account, constructed in language. To be more precise, what we might find it liberating to deconstruct is some dominant account, central to our present self-understanding and intertwined with our present practice. So deconstructive historical inquiry focuses on the constructedness not of some present actuality but of our historical understanding itself.

Still, even with much clarification in the two decades after Metahistory , White's work proved a problematic bridge between the wider discussion and

[2] Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); see esp. pp. 36-38, for White's understanding of "irony" in this context. For a nice summary of the point, see Lloyd S. Kramer, "Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra," in The New Cultural History , ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1989), 104.

[3] In Metahistory , chap. 10, White portrayed Croce as the embodiment of that ironic culmination. I have disputed White's use of Croce elsewhere, but the issue is secondary here. White does not do justice to Croce, but neither does his larger argument rest on his use of Croce. And his overall point that realist assumptions and imperatives led historiography to settle into a relatively "safe," circumspect cultural role is convincing and important.

practicing historians. In an essay published in 1989, White took particular care to head off the many misrepresentations that had come to surround his argument. He emphasized, most fundamentally, that his understanding of historical discourse, with its accent on the constructedness of history in language, "does not imply that past events, persons, institutions, and processes never really existed," or that we cannot have genuine knowledge about the past. He was not suggesting that everything is language or discourse, or that we cannot refer to and represent extradiscursive entities. Nor was he denying that events occur in chronological sequence. Rather than collapsing the distinction between fact and fiction, he was simply trying to reconceive the relationship between them.^[4]

White recognized that there is an archive of information and a naked chronology; historical inquiry presupposes them. Indeed, the scope for "scientific" research, for access to information about the past, could simply be taken for granted. What required attention was the process through which the historian transforms information and chronology into a specifically the historical, and inherently interpretive, kind of knowledge. Although the transformation at issue can entail very different degrees of complexity, it always involves the production of a historical text in language. More precisely, it is always through the narrative mode of representation that we grasp referents as distinctively historical. In that sense historical discourse constructs its own subject matter.^[5]

So the key, for White, was to understand the function of narrativity in historical writing. From the same historical subject matter, it is always possible to construct a variety of narratives—and thereby to confer different meanings. Whatever the meanings they confer, historians construct plots using the same rhetorical strategies, or modes of linguistic figuration, that imaginative writers use. And those strategies are more tropological than logical in nature.^[6]

When he argued that the rules of discourse formation are not fixed, so that particular instances cannot be predicted in advance, White seemed on his way to a radical historicism. But instead he accented the scope for classifying strategies of emplotment in terms of the four tropes delineated in neoclassical rhetorical theory—metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony. By understanding how historical writing is wound around these tropes, we better understand how historical discourse works like fictional narrative.^[7]

Because White played up this convergence, many failed to recognize that within the wider humanistic discussion he was seeking a middle ground. Though the current developing from structuralism had been crucial in drawing

[4] Hayden V. White, "'Figuring the nature of the times deceased': Literary Theory and Historical Writing," in The Future of Literary Theory , ed. Ralph Cohen (New York: Routledge, 1989), 19–43. See pp. 20, 34–35, for the points here. On pp. 31–36, White summarizes, and responds to, the standard objections to his argument.

[5] Ibid., 20–22.

[6] Ibid., pp. 25–26. See also Hayden V. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 98.

[7] White, "'Figuring the nature of the times deceased,'" 28–29.

our attention to the narrativity of historical writing, White pulled back from the extremes into which the resulting insights had led many of the French post-structuralists. Thus he did not join those who sought to undermine the narrative form as itself ideological and repressive, and he insisted again and again that histories differ from fictions in a culturally significant way.^[8] Although a narrative history does not provide a scientific account of events, it still affords the scope for truth as opposed to ideology.

At the same time, White sought to avoid the other extreme, the quasistructuralist determinism that his way of relying on the rhetorical tropes seemed to suggest. "Far from implying linguistic determinism," his conception "seeks to provide the knowledge necessary for a free choice among different strategies of figuration." The particular culture affords a finite range of possibilities—culturally specific conventions governing the construction of any narrative—but within that culturally specific range, choice of plot structure is relatively free.^[9] As White put it in 1986, "narrative accounts of real historical events . . . admit of as many equally plausible versions in their representations as there are plot structures available in a given culture for endowing stories, whether fictional or real, with meanings."^[10]

But this aspect of White's thinking betrayed a tension that Kellner, one of his ablest allies, astutely analyzed. Because the desired openness entailed the danger of excess, White continued to accent some version of the initial structural tropology that had informed Metahistory . The possibilities for narrative construction, and thus for historical understanding or meaning, were radically open in one sense, but they were limited and structured by a "bedrock of order," the prior, implicitly stable modes of emplotment available in the particular culture.^[11]

Moreover, White's argument grew slippery when he accented the possible truth value of historical texts, and his way of drawing the distinction between historical and literary narratives proved elusive at best. Thus, for example, his insistence that historical narrative tests "the capacity of the culture's fictions to endow real events with the kinds of meaning that literature displays to consciousness through its fashioning of patterns of 'imaginary' events."^[12] Rather than specify the source and nature of the truth value of history, White turned in

[8] Hayden V. White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 26–57 (article originally published 1984); see esp. pp. 34–40, 44–45. Even during the 1970s, as deconstruction gathered force, White questioned the tendency to take its insights to the extreme of "the absurdist moment." See White, Tropics , 261–282; but see also Dominick LaCapra's critique in his Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 72–83.

[9] White, "'Figuring the nature of the times deceased,'" 34; see also p. 27.

[10] Hayden V. White, "Historical Pluralism," Critical Inquiry 12, no. 3 (Spring 1986): 489.

[11] Hans Kellner, "A Bedrock of Order: Hayden White's Linguistic Humanism," History and Theory 19, no. 4 (Beiheft 19: "Metahistory": Six Critiques , 1980): 1–29.

[12] White, Content of the Form , 45. See his use of factual and "factological" in "'Figuring the nature of the times deceased,'" 35, for a comparable example.

the other direction to insist that literature, too, teaches us about reality. After noting that the criteria of realism vary from one culture to another, he asked, "Anyway, does anyone seriously believe that myth and literary fiction do not refer to the real world, tell truths about it, and provide useful knowledge of it?"^[13] Again and again, what he found most worthy of emphasis was the fact that historical and literary texts rely on the same strategies for providing the structure, coherence, and meaning necessary to produce what we accept as an image of "reality."^[14] Historical narratives were realistic and produced the effects of truth.

To be sure, White insisted that it was still proper to assess historical discourse in terms of the truth value of its factual statements, taken individually. Otherwise, history could not justify its claim to represent and explain "specifically real events." This suggested that historians operate within certain constraints; they cannot make up documents, for example. But it is one thing to apprehend some set of events; it is something altogether different to emplot them, to make up a coherent narrative out of them. And for White, truth is no longer at issue once we move from the archive and the chronicle into the narrative telling. So even though the mode of narrative emplotment affects the very content of the historical account, there is no scope for assessing modes of emplotment and narration in terms of the truth/fiction dichotomy. The scope for assessing the truth value of historical accounts is confined to the lower, prenarrative level. And, again, White's own priority was to show not how truth becomes possible but "how historical discourse produces its characteristic knowledge-effects."^[15]

In the last analysis, all stories for White are fictions and can be true only in a metaphorical sense. Thus his insistence that "stories are not true or false, but rather more or less intelligible, coherent, consistent, persuasive, and so on. And this is true of historical, no less than fictional stories."^[16] Conversely, arguments about the meaning of events are as much about the plot structure as the events themselves, so neither can they be true or false. Rather, they constitute second-order fictions.

So even though White, in eschewing the extremes, still posited something distinctive about historical writing, he could seem to be giving away much of the store. Yet the essentials of his argument about emplotment and narrative were unassailable. The question was whether, in light of a postmetaphysical emphasis on construction as opposed to correspondence, White's account of

[13] White, "'Figuring the nature of the times deceased,'" 39. See also White, Content of the Form , 44.

[14] White, Tropics , 121–122; White, "Historical Pluralism," 492.

[15] White, Content of the Form , 45–46; White, "'Figuring the nature of the times deceased,'" 26, 39.

[16] White, "Historical Pluralism," 492. See also White, "'Figuring the nature of the times deceased,'" 27.

what happens when historians emplot in narrative did justice to the scope for recasting the distinction between fiction and truth. As White took care to note, Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative defended the adequacy of narrative by positing "nothing less than a metaphysics of narrativity," showing that the past is actually structured like narrative.^[17] But several earlier thinkers—most notably Croce, Heidegger, and Gadamer—had attempted a more radical recasting of the relationship between human inquiry and the happening of the particular world in history. In their different ways, each concluded that it is only when we reach the level of—in White's terms—narrative emplotment that truth begins to happen.

White almost recalled Croce in asking if "the question of narrative in any discussion of historical theory is always finally about the function of imagination in the production of a specifically historical truth."^[18] In this passage and elsewhere he seemed to suggest as much, but his argument generally severed imagination from the sphere of what can be true or false. It was not clear how, for White, the production of truth relates to imagination, creativity, and the practical concerns that inform the choice of any particular strategy of emplotment.

Like White, Kellner insisted that he emphasized narrativity and emplotment not to undermine historiography but to deepen its cultural impact. Practicing historians, in contrast to their literary colleagues, were quick to avoid confrontation with language, to view rhetoric as merely ornamental, and to take narrative representation as unproblematic. In jettisoning the confining legacy of nineteenth-century realism, they would be free to construct more creative, and resonant, historical accounts.^[19] And understanding why they never get the story straight would make historians more cognizant of the cultural stakes when they choose their particular mode of narration and construction from among those available in the culture. The result, as Kellner saw it, would be a more open and fruitfully pluralistic historical culture.^[20]

Kellner deconstructed historians from Jules Michelet to Fernand Braudel in an effort to promote this crooked self-understanding, but, like White, he also placed some premium on quasi-structuralist classification. We find order and experience some sense of mastery in showing how any historical narrative follows an identifiable rhetorical program, beneath authorial intention. Kellner's celebrated reading of Braudel's The Mediterranean as a Menippean satire is

[17] White, Content of the Form , 49–54. The quoted phrase appears on p. 49. David Carr similarly argues that narrative is appropriate to the structure of historical reality in Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

[18] White, Content of the Form , 57.

[19] Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), x–xi, 7, 24–25, 122–123.

[20] See ibid., 291–292, 315–316, 319, 323, on the role of will. Kellner explicitly follows White in much of this discussion.

the most notable example.^[21] As applied on an ad hoc basis to historical texts, such historiographical criticism tended toward the "weak textualism" that Rorty found one, somewhat ambiguous response to the eclipse of foundationalist philosophy. Like the methodological form of deconstruction that became prominent in American literary criticism, such criticism was at once sophisticated and playful. But it pulled back from the quest for a fully postmetaphysical alternative.

Kellner was one of a number of historians and theorists who, in the wake of White, accented rhetoric and narrative emplotment and deflated the loosely positivist ideal of getting the story straight. Most, like White and Kellner, claimed to foster reflexivity and creativity among historians.^[22] And many did so partly by uncovering the rhetorical strategies that structured historical writing in the past; nineteenth-century French historians drew particular attention.^[23] At the same time, some of these narrativists pulled back from what seemed an unnecessary extravagance in White to seek a more moderate recasting of historiography. But their accents differed considerably.

Linda Orr stressed the irony that results when, with "the revenge of literature," the long-suppressed fear of language comes to the historiographical surface. Taking it for granted that historians seek some Rankean "as it actually happened," she assumed that the inevitable linguistic slippage means failure; we never grasp it, never get it right, never arrive—but precisely thus the history continues.^[24] However, her characterizations betray the shadow of a stable object and finished truth that we have encountered especially among those influenced by the French tradition. As her reference to the continuing history suggests, what she characterizes may not be failure but adequacy in an ever-provisional world.

Lionel Gossman implied that a more radical reconsideration was necessary when, after examining the relationship between fiction and history in

[21] Kellner's "Disorderly Conduct: Braudel's Mediterranean Satire" was first published in 1979, then revised for inclusion in Language and Historical Representation , 153–187. On p. 184, Kellner found Braudel's book to be "a continuous satire on the means available to historical comprehension" and as such, comparable to modernist literature. See also p. 176. In addition, see the essays on Guizot, Michelet, and Goethe and Spengler in the same volume. Kellner argues on pp. 323 and 333 that such deconstructive readings promote a more open historical culture.

[22] For example, Robert Berkhofer found positive implications in the historiographical reflexivity that followed from the new literary theory. By breaking down the distinction between construction and representation, that theory forced historians at last to cease denying the personal element in their offerings and thus opened the way to a richer historical culture. See Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., "The Challenge of Poetics to (Normal) Historical Practice," Poetics Today 9, no. 2 (1988), esp. pp. 444–446, 449–450.

[23] Among the notable examples are Lionel Gossman, Between History and Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

[24] Linda Orr, "The Revenge of Literature: A History of History," New Literary History 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1986): 1–3, 10, 13, 18.

nineteenth-century France, he called for a new pragmatics of historical truth, transcending the opposition between naive realism and absolute relativism.^[25] In a similar way, F. R. Ankersmit suggested that White, though his contribution had been essential, had left much undone. Thanks to White, the philosophy of history had at last plugged into the wider linguistic turn in the culture, but the strong influence of literary theory in White's work kept essential questions about the distinctiveness of historical writing in the background. For Ankersmit, the question was how, in light of White, we are to conceive historical rationality and where we are to find it. Textualism did not exhaust the issue because something that could still be called historical reality continued to have priority over the text, constraining the historian.^[26]

So whereas the narrativists raised essential questions about language and the element of creativity in historical writing, they did not agree on the answers. And though much of their argument offered a healthy challenge to historiographical assumptions seriously in need of reexamination, some of their accents seemed extravagant and provoked confusion or overreaction. While stressing that White's argument was, from the start, considerably more subtle than many of his critics grasped, Peter Novick noted that White had proven a perfect focal point for the restiveness of those reluctant to abandon the "noble dream" of selfless, objective history and finished truth.^[27]

Even as he insisted provocatively on "getting the story crooked," Kellner sought to reassure his readers that

to challenge the ideology of truth is not to champion lies, falsify documents, or suppress information; it is to assert the constructed nature of the human world, to follow Vico in asserting that any meaning that can be gotten from the world is a meaning for some human purpose, and gotten with human tools. Historians do not "find" the truths of past events; they create events from a seamless flow, and invent meanings that produce patterns within that flow.^[28]

Although some of his argument had become common currency by the late 1980s, Kellner's emphases were bound to provoke doubts unless attention was paid to the other side of the coin. Why not lie and falsify documents, especially if all our purposes are ultimately "political" anyway? Kellner wanted us to recognize that any historical representation is an allegorical creation for a human purpose, but why do some of our purposes dictate that we do something other

[25] Gossman, Between History and Literature ; see esp. the concluding essay, "The Rationality of History," 285–324. See also R. B. Kershner, "Dances with Historians," Georgia Review 45, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 589, for a strong endorsement of Gossman's effort.

[26] F. R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), 6–18.

[27] Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 596–603, esp. p. 599.

[28] Kellner, Language and Historical Representation , 24.

than falsify documents to serve some worthy moral or political purpose? Why might a need to learn inform our inquiries into the past, and what happens when it does so? Kellner's accent on crookedness betrayed the image of straightness, taken as an impossible ideal. What scope is there for a postmetaphysical conception of truth that eludes that dichotomy altogether?

Fundamental though it was, the narrativist contribution remained incomplete, so it proved a shaky bridge between the wider cultural discussion and practicing historians. The question was how the narrativists' insights could be embedded in a constructive postmetaphysical framework that made new sense of the defining imperatives of historiography.

White and Kellner had been trained as historians, but to other historians they could seem marginal figures who, having been sucked into the abyss of "theory," found themselves more comfortable in the company of literary intellectuals and Continental philosophers than "working historians."^[29] Scott, in contrast, was already a distinguished practicing historian when, during the 1980s, she began invoking Foucault and Derrida and arguing for a politically conscious presentism in historiography. In addressing historiographical issues, she articulated the aims of historians working in relatively new fields like women's or ethnic history, who tended to embrace political presentism and perspectivism without apology.^[30] Like the narrativists, she claimed to invite a more open and resonant historiography.

By embracing wider humanistic theory, Scott was able to explain with particular force the sense in which history is contemporary, interested, competitive, and "political" in the broadest sense. Even the process through which some subjects come to be studied at the expense of others is politically contested. And Scott argued convincingly that the long-standing assumption of a single master narrative had tended to exclude certain categories of historical subjects—and even certain modes of historical inquiry. Thus she called for a "democratic history [that] would accept the facts that there will always be a plurality of stories, that telling them involves contests about power and knowledge, and that the historian's mastery is necessarily partial."^[31]

More specifically, Scott linked her own line of historical inquiry to a particular present political concern—feminism—and to the deconstructive strand of French poststructuralism.

[29] Gordon Wood spoke for many practicing historians when, in his review essay on Schama's Dead Certainties , he referred to "Hayden White, who carps at the margins of the discipline and preaches skepticism and subversion to the halfway converted but writes no history." See Wood, "Novel History," 12.

[30] See Novick, That Noble Dream , 593–602, esp. p. 598, on the tendency of many "new historians" casually to abandon the objectivity ideal.

[31] Joan Wallach Scott, "History in Crisis? The Others' Side of the Story," American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (June 1989): 691. See also pp. 681, 692, as well as Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 3–5.

A more radical feminist politics . . . seems to me to require a more radical epistemology. Precisely because it addresses questions of epistemology, relativizes the status of all knowledge, links knowledge and power, and theorizes these in terms of the operations of difference, I think post-structuralism (or at least some of the approaches generally associated with Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) can offer feminism a powerful analytic perspective.^[32]

Indeed, Scott's forceful case for the relevance of deconstruction in her introduction to Gender and the Politics of History made the book something of a watershed in the self-understanding of practicing historians. To grasp how much has come to be constructed historically is but a first step. We then recognize that what, most fundamentally, get constructed are meanings. And deconstruction helps us understand how meanings get constructed—and thus how historiography as deconstruction might proceed.^[33]

Scott looked to deconstruction as she developed her influential argument for the import of gender as a historical subject and category of analysis. Rather than reflecting or implementing "fixed and natural differences between men and women," Scott maintained, "gender is the knowledge that establishes meanings for bodily differences. These meanings vary across cultures, social groups, and time since nothing about the body, including women's reproductive organs, determines univocally how social divisions will be shaped." What was necessary, then, was not simply another step in the expansion of social history: "The story is no longer about the things that have happened to women and men and how they have reacted to them; instead it is about how the subjective and collective meanings of women and men as categories of identity have been constructed."^[34]

Deconstruction affords an understanding of the broadly political process—involving differentiation and opposition, negation and exclusion—through which such meanings emerge and change. The view that becomes dominant always entails a positive term defined through its difference from, or opposition to, a term taken as antithetical. Although we come to understand our world through unitary concepts or fixed oppositions, they are always unstable, provisional, because the repressed negative is never fully integrated or mastered but continues in tension with the positive. So the process remains open, despite the tendency of the dominant view to try to close debate by hiding its own historical contingency and constructedness. The binary opposition at issue in gendering has informed not only our way of sorting out the roles of women and men

[32] Scott, Gender , 4. See also p. 3, on her own "avowedly political" motive, and pp. 7–8, on the historian's active role in the production of knowledge.

[33] In addition to Gender , 1–11, Scott's remarkable introduction to the volume, see Joan W. Scott, "Writing History," in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars , ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 21–30, esp. pp. 26, 29–30.

[34] Scott, Gender , 2, 6. See also the unsigned introduction to Behind the Lines , ed. Higonnet et al., esp. pp. 3–4, for a cogent argument for gender as a historical subject.

but also far wider reaches of our cultural practice, as we have come, for example, to understand public and private, or political and social, as we have.^[35]

Thus, for Scott, historical inquiry informed by deconstruction can be especially effective politically, opening the way to change. By analyzing "in context the way any binary opposition operates, reversing and displacing its hierarchical construction, rather than accepting it as real or self-evident," deconstruction enables us to see beyond the array of societal practices that depend on our way of casting the male-female difference.^[36] At the same time, deconstruction entailed the reflexivity and risk necessary for openness. Thus the mode of practice that Scott envisioned developing from deconstruction: "politics that are not only critical of existing social hierarchies but able to point out the premises of their operations; politics that are self-consciously critical of their own justifications and exclusions, and so refuse an absolutizing or totalizing stance."^[37]

Although her way of drawing out the historiographical potential of deconstruction was superb, and though much of her point about politics was unassailable, Scott's emphases seemed to traditionalists to invite excess by reducing history to a mere instrument of political struggles, reflecting a priori political positions. Was a politically inspired historical inquiry into gender to be open to an array of possible answers, so that the inquirers might genuinely learn from their inquiries—and perhaps adjust their present political positions as a result? Or do such inquirers simply find ammunition for their effort to alter present ways of gendering? Do we need a true history of gender, or, as thinkers from Foucault to Kellner seemed to suggest, do appeals to truth and reality simply serve the authoritarian hegemony of the winners, the powerful? The questions are obvious; the answers are not.

Moreover, Scott offered several imperatives at once, and it was not clear how they cohered around the political presentism at issue here. Her emphasis on "the pluralization of the subject of history" sometimes seemed to suggest that we settle for parallel group stories, that any emphasis on the unity of a master narrative was authoritarian and elitist. Yet in playing up the broadly political contest at work in historiography, she was implicitly recognizing that even as the subject of history expands and splinters, there is still a kind of unity, totality, or master narrative; it is simply the endlessly provisional outcome of our debates over what to include. In addition, some of Scott's accents suggested an a priori privilege to "Otherness" that defies both process to the present and open contest. Scott, then, left an array of questions as she offered her stimulating contribution; I return to those questions below.

[35] Scott, Gender , 4–7.

[36] Ibid., 40–41. See also pp. 10–11.

[37] Even as she made her own political and reconstructive aims explicit, Scott recognized that diverse tendencies were at work in deconstruction, which thus did not need to be taken whole: "It may be that some deconstructive critics pursue an endless exposure of contradiction and are thereby unable to endorse or comfortably advocate a political program of their own. But there are also evident examples of a politics empowered by this approach." See ibid., 9. See also pp. 7, 11; and Scott, "History in Crisis?" 691, on provisionality and reflexivity.

Like Scott and the narrativists, Thomas embraced an explicit presentism as he sought to draw out reconstructive possibilities from the new historicism that emerged in literary studies in the United States during the 1980s. The movement's most prominent representative was Stephen Greenblatt, who referred to "the new historicism" almost in passing to characterize a new determination to contextualize literary artifacts after the various loosely structuralist ways of treating them formalistically, as self-contained systems of relations. The point, however, was not simply to return to the old way of explaining works of literature in terms of some prior, stable sociocultural bedrock but to interject them into a field of reciprocal relations with other historically specific cultural practices.^[38]

New historicists like Greenblatt were not presentists, but Thomas thought it possible to adapt their insights for presentist purposes. He took it for granted that in our postmetaphysical era there can be no transcendence or utopian telos to show us the way beyond our historically specific present. But we are not merely stuck, precisely because our present is a hinge between past and future, "a moment of historical translation , not one of mere transition within an inevitable historical process."^[39] By means of exchange with texts from the past, we gain perspective on our own points of view and a sense of possibility that provokes us to grope for alternatives to the present.

What Thomas found in the new historicism was a way of restoring the difference, the strangeness, the uncanniness of the past moment, as disembodied from some apparently inevitable chain leading to us. The new historicists sought access not simply to the past moment for its own sake but to the excluded past moment; they afforded privilege to what did not become actual, to what stood in tension with what had come to seem the dominant processes. But, for Thomas, their insights made possible a deeper, more challenging way of understanding precisely the processes leading to us—as radically contingent and open-ended. Reconnection with what had been excluded or marginalized would enable historical inquiry to serve present action with greater bite. Because the point was to loosen the present configuration, this way of focusing on process to the present would entail anything but some Whiggish justification of the present outcome.

At the same time, Thomas credited the new historicism for working to overcome the separation between literary and historical studies. Although this promised to revitalize both, he envisioned especially a new culture of history taking advantage of literature as a form of historical evidence. Literary evidence could be particularly revealing, especially once deconstruction had

[38] The new historicism was associated especially with the journal Representations , launched in 1982. See Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 146, 162–163, on how "the new historicism" came to be used. Greenblatt admitted that the term was misleading and advocated "cultural poetics" instead.

[39] Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 211; emphasis in original.

taught us to question it in a more unsettling way. As the new historicism showed that texts are not self-contained but bound up with societal practices, we understand that the strains in the text may illuminate societal tensions, contradictions, and suspended possibilities. Thomas noted Greenblatt's interest in theater, which seemed to have special value as historical evidence because of its broad license to present potentially subversive themes that might otherwise have remained hidden. But literature in general embodies what was held back and offers scope for dialogue with our own provisionally lost possibilities. As historical evidence, then, literature no longer needed to be understood in the familiar way, as a mere reflection of society, but could release transformative potential and serve present action.^[40]

Thomas's way of confronting the history-literature-action relationship was moderate and measured. Indeed, he addressed explicitly the reasons for nervousness about the narrativist way of bringing history together with literature and about Scott's more freewheeling political emphasis. In the accents of some of White's followers, he found "the risk of resubordinating history to literature," which would compromise the reconstructive uses he had in mind. So as he proposed a new way of bringing history and literature together, Thomas also found it essential to reaffirm the distinction between them, based on their different cultural functions.^[41]

Thomas's effort to avoid the excesses he found at work in the wider discussion led him to accents that recall Croce and Gadamer. Exactly like Croce, he sought to strike a balance by emphasizing that though our sense of the present as history does not mean we can shape the future at will, historical understanding maximizes our chances to act effectively: "the probability of overcoming particular historical forces that unnecessarily limit us is increased if we are aware of them." Moreover, Thomas linked the presentist desire for effectiveness to a certain mode of inquiry: "So long as our situation in the world has been partially determined by the past, the most empowering studies will be the ones that come as close as possible to telling us how it really was or perhaps more importantly why it was the way it was." Thus, "it is in our interest to maintain disinterested inquiries into the past."^[42] Croce and Gadamer made the same crucial point about openness to learning, though each framed it more radically, without relying on the long-standing imperative of disinterestedness.

Thomas took care to emphasize that a radical sense of the historicity of the

[40] Ibid., 153, 166, 171. Thomas's argument for the particular value of literature as historical evidence recalls a major theme in the work of Dominick LaCapra over the years. See, for example, his chapter on Mikhail Bakhtin in Rethinking Intellectual History , chap. 9, esp. pp. 313–314.

[41] Ibid., 155–156, 206.

[42] Ibid., 18 (emphasis in original), 76, 77. From a Crocean perspective, of course, the notion of "telling us how it really was" comes carelessly close to assuming the historical "thing-in-itself" that Thomas presumably wanted to avoid.

present need not confirm any particular radical or leftist agenda. We may question everything, but we cannot know in advance what we will find. The very conditions of our political judgments are open to such questioning—and are at risk.^[43]

Thomas's way of framing the case for presentism was particularly valuable partly because it was itself historically informed. Although he was interested especially in American pragmatism, he at least considered the impasses of the first historicism in Europe. Thus he could find the potential he did in the new historicism, and thus he was able to place deconstruction in useful historical perspective. Deconstruction was not, as so many assumed, simply an ahistorical formalism or an assault on historical-mindedness; it was rather a response to a historicized world—a world still wrestling with the problems of the first historicism.^[44] And thus Thomas was able to draw out the uses of deconstruction for presentist, reconstructive historical inquiry.

Still, tendencies now familiar to us compromised the force of Thomas's case for presentism. Despite his care to avoid aestheticist blurring, he left uncertainty about the respective cultural contributions of literature and history as his focus shifted from literature as historical evidence to the role of literature at any present moment. Some of his accents suggested a privileged present role for literature vis-à-vis the historical approach that he otherwise seemed to emphasize. And he sometimes blurred the distinction, which elsewhere he understood his argument to require, between literature, with its capacity for inventiveness and play, and history, with its sober concern for truth, understood as preparing the way for effective action. Those trained in literature are especially equipped to use literature as historical evidence in the way Thomas envisioned. But they do so as historians, seeking a true account. They are attentive to play and what it can teach us, but they themselves are not playing, because they understand that what they need is truth, or history, as opposed to fiction, or literature.

Moreover, Thomas was subject to the widespread tendency to view any accent on process or continuity in strong, still-metaphysical terms. Thus he could not do justice to the array of ways of conceiving the past-process relationship. Admirable though it was, his effort to assess contemporary priorities in light of the outcome of the first historicism proved a source of limitation. He associated that earlier historicism with strong justification and the image of "progressive emergence," but though this Whiggish tendency lurked in the nineteenth-century embrace of history, it was not the dominant thrust in Ranke, let alone Dilthey.^[45] Croce and Gadamer explicitly eschewed any such tendency

[43] Ibid., 18. See also p. 162.

[44] Ibid., 16, 31–32, 35.

[45] See, for example, ibid., 95. On p. 33, Thomas cites the point, by now associated especially with Walter Benjamin, that history is always written by the victors.

as each reacted against nineteenth-century historicism to probe more deeply the terms of a merely historical world.

Thomas considered Gadamer, but he did not do justice to Gadamer's way of dealing with the tensions in the first historicism, and thus he misrepresented Gadamerian fusion of horizons. Although what Gadamer envisioned was surely a renewal of tradition, it was not a form of "mimesis," seeking to re-present a lost presence, to reproduce the thing-in-itself. Indeed, Gadamer specified precisely what Thomas found most important about our way of conceiving the world as historical; rather than re-presenting some "lost originary moment," we are endlessly bringing something new into being.^[46]

Although much of Thomas's argument for the reconstructive uses of historical questioning was superb, his dualistic reading of the alternatives ultimately precluded the scope for the moderate postmetaphysical orientation he seemed to envision. He did not grasp the scope for a weak, postmetaphysical kind of continuity or for a weak, provisional "totalization" that does not preclude openness and contingency. Thus he conflated continuity with strong telos and process with inevitability. The resulting accents—the premium on "disrupting the chain of temporal continuity," for example—gave Thomas's argument an element of extravagance that blurred the cultural possibilities and compromised his reconstructive aims.^[47]

Finally, in assessing the impulses at work in the new historicism, Thomas did not quite grasp the scope for the alternative to presentism that we have begun to encounter in other thinkers—as an extreme, nonreconstructive response to the uncanny new experience of nothing but history. To be sure, Thomas was well aware that new historicists like Greenblatt, as they fastened on the excluded past moment, were not interested in the presentist effort to create a new future.^[48] But what were they doing instead? What other reason was there for affording privilege to that excluded moment?

The Uncanny Past

To place the offerings of the presentists in perspective, we must probe the impulse that led some in the opposite direction, to a renewed emphasis on the past "for its own sake," apart from its connection with us through some process. That impulse responded partly to the strong, Whiggish conceptions of process that still lurked in the culture, but it also responded—more interestingly—even to the weak, postmetaphysical emphasis on process to a present utterly lacking in metaphysical justification.

In a world of nothing but history, we seem to have reason to eschew any

[46] See especially ibid., 209–210, for Thomas's treatment of Gadamer.

[47] Ibid., 72, 179, 208-209, 211. On p. 203, Thomas views any notion of temporal continuity as conservative. Even the fact of change confirms a status quo that takes change as normal, inevitable.

[48] Ibid., 5–6, 37.

emphasis on what fits into some dominant process and to focus instead on what did not become actual, what did not fit into what are agreed to be the dominant processes leading to us. As we come to feel that our present is but the resultant of such contingent processes, we find something precious about what lies "outside history" and place a premium on gaining access to it.^[49] So we emphasize what was left along the way, the "other" that any focus on dominant process tended to ignore or exclude.

As noted above, Thomas argued convincingly that attention to that excluded other may be preliminary, serving the wider aim of presentist reconstruction by deepening what we can learn from historical inquiry. The other stands in tension with the dominant process, threatening to disrupt it. But focus on the excluded other may serve purposes that stand opposed to any such concern with presentist reconstruction. In such a nonreconstructive mode, we do not make the past moment more familiar by connecting it with us across historical distance; we do not make those in the past part of our narrative. We do not even seek dialogue with them, for the aim of dialogue is still to overcome difference for our present purposes. Rather, we leave the past moment disembedded, outside, and revel in its difference. We afford privilege to what did not become actual, to the other in all its strangeness. This is to reverse the direction of presentists like White, Kellner, Scott, and even Thomas.

Several ways of handling historical material in this mode have opened up. We may simply display the uncanniness that surrounds the past moment or excluded other when disembedded, left to itself. Or we may take disembedded past artifacts as materials for aesthetic construction, for a good story, so that, yet again, history converges with literature. The combination is evident in the "microhistories" that historians like Carlo Ginzburg, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Natalie Davis began offering in the early 1970s and that came to enjoy a considerable vogue by the 1980s, when they seemed characteristically postmodern. Microhistory overlapped in significant ways with Greenblatt's new historicism. But in a looser form the same impulses could be discerned in much innovative historiography.

Microhistory developed from within the Annales paradigm, but whereas much of the Annales accented quantification and the "longue durée," the microhistorians fastened on the individual case, the concrete, the local, the immediate sequence of life as lived, apart from long-term trends or abstractions, apart from any privilege to what could be quantified.^[50] This was to focus on ordinary

[49] It is striking, for example, that Eavan Boland grouped her poems on the experience of women under the rubric "outside history." Only as history inflates could the world as historical become the foil in this way. See her Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).

[50] For a good introduction, see Edward Muir, "Introduction: Observing Trifles," in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe , ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), vii–xxviii. This is a collection of articles from the Italian journal Quaderni storici , which was a fruitful and influential locus of the new microhistory.

people as shapers of their own lives quite apart from, even in tension with, what had seemed the mainstream development.

Often, in fact, microhistory entailed a close narrative account of apparently isolated, anecdotal, trivial, or bizarre events. Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms , one of the best-known examples of the genre, fastened on a sixteenth-century Italian miller to reconstruct a pantheistic peasant cosmology woven around an earthy material culture. That cosmology turned out to have survived in uncanny difference within official Christian culture—yet it was precluded, and virtually forgotten, by subsequent historians.^[51]

In focusing on what had seemed marginal, the microhistories dramatically brought home difference. Conversely, it was a premium on difference that led the microhistorians to seek out what seemed most opaque and uncanny, most opposed to the dominant processes that had led to us. Some stressed explicitly that in seeking to dis connect the past moment from any process to the present, they were seeking a mode of historical inquiry that does not serve some present concern, which would entail getting caught in contemporary political squabbles. Focusing on Ginzburg's effort within the ideologically charged Italian academic world, Edward Muir made the point nicely: "To [Ginzburg] the proper goal of the historian is not to explore the historical implications of a contemporary theory or problem, but to write about things that are totally forgotten and completely irrelevant to the present, to produce a history that is 'really dead.'"^[52]

But to what end? Raking through the debris of the past sometimes turned up material for a good story, as with Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre , which became the basis for a popular film. Such stories worked like fictions, though the element of distance and uncanniness gave them a particular resonance. But even the best expressions of the microhistorical imperative did not make clear why it had become so important to focus on those hitherto lost to history, why there was something privileged about defying presentism and process.

Justifications for microhistory often betrayed the now-familiar tendency to argue against various straw persons. In one of the best discussions of the genre, Muir recognized that questions about selectivity and concerns about trivilaity intrude as the historical scale goes "micro." But he went on to observe that the ablest microhistorians "have been struggling to eliminate the distortions produced by the giantification of the historical scale, which has crushed all individuals to insignificance under the weight of vast impersonal structures and forces."^[53]

[51] Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller , trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (New York: Penguin, 1982). See also Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method , trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

[52] Muir, "Introduction," xii.

[53] Ibid., xx–xxi.

Although Whiggish tendencies remain part of the mix, we surely need not conceive the historiographical alternatives in such terms as these. As we have noted, historians have sought to get at things in their concreteness and individuality at least since the nineteenth-century reaction against Hegel. To be sure, some strands of the Annales school, when asking certain kinds of questions, played up impersonal structures, but surely no one advocates crushing "all individuals to insignificance under the weight of vast impersonal structures and forces." Who is the target of such charges? Where is such giantification to be found?

This tendency to attack straw persons made it difficult to grasp the post-metaphysical point of the microhistorical impulse. The question concerns the cultural uses of the genre once the earlier ways of playing down individuality, from Hegelianism to cliometric quantification, are no longer at issue. What is the point of disembedding individual lives and episodes and leaving them opaque—in defiance even of weak process to the present, embedded in weak totality? Conversely, what did the success of the microhistorical approach say about the scope for an orientation admitting a weak totality and focusing on weak processes to the present?

The turn to a new historicism in literary studies entailed a comparable emphasis on the disembedded past moment.^[54] In one sense, the new historicism was a predictable reaction against formalism, including not only structuralism but also poststructuralist deconstruction, insofar as it, too, tended to become simply another critical method. As noted briefly above, new historicists argued that the work of art is a historically specific artifact, not a self-contained system of oppositions and relations. But because the legacy of deconstruction remained, it was not possible simply to return to an older contextualism, explaining the literary artifact in terms of some prior, deeper, stable context. The relationship between artifact and context was one of dynamic interplay that eludes our attempt to fix either of them. In accenting the historicity of literary artifacts, moreover, the new historicists were not embracing conventional historiographical approaches but opposing them. However, they sometimes blurred still-metaphysical and postmetaphysical targets as they did so, and thus it was hard to specify their place within the universe of new responses to the merely historical world.

Greenblatt reacted explicitly against what he termed the "relentlessly celebratory character" of much historical narrative.^[55] Such a celebratory mode had been especially prominent in the literary and art historical disciplines, which long had concentrated on the canonical sequence of great masterpieces. But

[54] It was symptomatic that both currents embraced the insights of Bakhtin, who enjoyed a particular vogue during the 1980s. A prominent American advocate of the microhistorical approach, Guido Ruggiero, starts with Bakhtin in his recent Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press), 1993.

[55] Greenblatt, Learning to Curse , 168–170.

new historicist priorities suggested that any historical narrative of dominant processes is inherently justifying and celebratory. In their opposition to celebration, the new historicists were, up to a point, usefully resisting a still-metaphysical tendency. But much like the microhistorians, they tended to tilt with shadows because they did not do justice to the scope for endless Gadamerian dialogue, for knowledge that is taken to be no more than provisional. Still, again as with microhistory, something more novel and interesting was at work in the eruption of the new historicism, even if its practitioners sometimes blurred the point. What happens when there is no longer some metaphysically grounded metanarrative to link us securely to our predecessors, whom we can no longer understand as not-yet-Christian, for example, or as "less developed"? The new historicists sought to explore the sense in which the difference becomes uncanny.

More generally, the new historicists sensed that the categories that had enabled us to posit coherent past moments begin to shatter as the culture places ever more weight on the historical. Reviewing the evolution of his own work, Greenblatt confessed that he had grown "increasingly uneasy with the monolithic unities" that his work on the Renaissance had posited. He had partaken of the conventional approach to the historical world, which had taken for granted a measure of unity, stability, and integration. But it now seemed that the effort to posit such unities "repeatedly fails for one reason: there is no escape from contingency." So in embracing the new historicism, Greenblatt was seeking to overcome the temptation "to conceal cracks, conflict, and disarray" by organizing his work around some power network, hidden structure, or master discourse.^[56] This required pulling back from any totalizing or integrating vision, even of the relatively local sort at issue when we think not in terms of some coherent process but simply of some coherent past moment.

So, for Greenblatt, the objective could not be simply a reversal, condemning what had been celebrated—not even a reversal in the name of the oppressed. Nor was it enough simply to let this deeper sense of the contingency of the past moment serve the more radical and fruitful presentism that Thomas envisioned. Rather, the new historicists sought to disembed the artifact from any process to the present and from any present unifying category. Thus we might experience the naked contingency of things, real difference across time, the uncanniness of the artifact—and of the whole past moment with which it is problematically bound up. In this mode the past elicits not the veneration we once felt for the succession of masterpieces, but "wonder." "By

[56] Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988), 2–3.

wonder," said Greenblatt, "I mean the power of the object displayed to stop the viewer in his tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention."^[57]

Objects displayed in a museum sometimes evoke this sensibility, and pioneering twentieth-century visual artists from Giorgio de Chirico to Joseph Cornell have explored the possibilities surrounding it. The museum, however, houses a special class of objects, and even they, most of the time, can be fitted as stepping-stones in a path leading from the past to us, or at least can be related to each other in a way that some present category enables us to grasp. But with the inflation of history, our relationship to the universe of such objects becomes more problematic because we understand such ways of integrating to be themselves contingent and historical. So those artifacts are not so easily confined, controlled, rendered familiar, fitted into our experience. Yet the past comes to seem a collection of such objects—artifacts that can evoke feelings of uncanniness and wonder.^[58]

Early in the century, Croce had sought an orientation radical enough to dissolve the basis for any such approach to the world as historical. With his way of collapsing the past into the present, there is no tension—and no scope for uncanniness. Because there is no independent past, it is obvious that there is nothing but our present questions and categories to give history coherence, to make the world "history" at all. The artifacts from the past are now present, available to us. But in some of our moods, Croce does not quite convince. Even as we go on making a certain sense of our historically specific world, our sense of the arbitrariness and contingency of the process leaves us glimpsing the shadow of an uncanny remainder. The new historicists fastened on that remainder and sought to bring it to the center of our experience.

Much like the microhistorians, the new historicists often focused on the anecdote, the single disconnected episode, naked in its contingency. The only way to get at what was real, they suggested, was by simply presenting such an episode through narrative, without trying to explain it in terms of some larger structure or process.^[59] And as Joel Fineman has argued, there is no basis for confining the anecdote to some particular level, where it might be assumed to stand in tension with some higher-level process. Indeed, the anecdote may inflate to totality.^[60] To suggest that the whole thing, all "there is," is one big anecdote is a way of characterizing the weak, finite, particular totality of a world of nothing but history. Generally, however, the new historicists fastened on something apparently trivial or everyday, sometimes isolating it, sometimes

[57] Greenblatt, Learning to Curse , 170.

[58] Ibid., 10, 14, 169–170, 180–181.

[59] Ibid., 5; Joel Fineman, "The History of the Anecdote," in The New Historicism , ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 56.

[60] Fineman, "History of the Anecdote," 61.

juxtaposing it with other such bits and pieces, sometimes piling up detail, but always in an effort to produce a certain resonance, a new experience of the uncanniness of the stuff of the historical world.

Greenblatt was fascinated especially with the collectible artifacts—fossils, exotic animals—that were assembled in the early modern "cabinet of curiosities." Like the collectors of centuries past, he seemed to find satisfaction in skillful aesthetic arrangement, and he hoped to convey a comparable experience to his readers. But critics found something arbitrary in his approach. Anne Barton suggested that Greenblatt's collection "is itself a cabinet of this kind, an assemblage of disparate and fragmented things, arbitrarily juxtaposed, their asserted cultural interconnections all too often depending on Greenblatt's skill at arrangement."^[61] R. B. Kershner asked what is to keep the new historicist enterprise "from lapsing into a quirky kind of impressionism"?^[62]

Especially in this premium on arresting assemblage, the new historicism participated in the wider aestheticist tendency to fold history within fiction or literature. But whatever the arbitrariness of his constructions and whatever the pleasure he may have derived from his own creativity, Greenblatt explicitly sought to avoid the aestheticist blurring that threatened as metaphysically grounded philosophy falls away. The poststructuralist way of destabilizing the relevant distinctions remained essential, but it did not exhaust the issue, so we keep coming back to the tensions between fiction and fact, literature and history. There is still a real world distinguishable from fictional ones, and historical texts have different uses than fictional texts.^[63]

For Greenblatt, it clearly mattered that the entertaining anecdotes and resonant curiosities of the new historicism were not invented whole cloth. And despite its interest in fictional artifacts and its suspicion of conventional historiographical modes of ordering, the new historicism was a response—a post-metaphysical response—to the world as historical. For the new historicists, as for all our major figures, it mattered fundamentally that the coming to be of the world has been some particular way, so that there are these artifacts and not some others that we might imagine—or forge. The uncanniness of those artifacts lies in their combination of naked actuality and bizarre contingency. Part of what stops us in our tracks is the sudden awareness that our world, all of it, consists of nothing but such stuff as this. So even the newly privileged experience of the marvelous required truth and thus a distinctively historical text.

Still, Greenblatt's way of framing the alternatives meant that only the form of historical writing that evoked wonder by disembedding the past could be taken as postmetaphysical and culturally valuable. Any reconstructive uses of historical understanding smacked of the conventional historiographical modes of ordering that needed to be disrupted. Greenblatt noted, for example, that

[61] Anne Barton, "Perils of Historicism," New York Review of Books , 28 March 1991, 56.

[62] Kershner, "Dances with Historians," 585.

[63] Greenblatt, Learning to Curse , 13–15.

"while philosophy would seek to supplant wonder with secure knowledge, it is the function of the new historicism continually to renew that marvelous at the heart of the resonant."^[64] "Philosophy" entailed the still-metaphysical quest for closure that Greenblatt and others found lurking in conventional historiography. And the antidote is the relentless effort of the new historicism to keep things in their uncanny individuality.

But though relentless in one sense, that enterprise could be relaxed and pleasurable. Much like Ginzburg on microhistory, Greenblatt stressed that the new historicist approach lacked particular political implications. Precisely as we pull back from any effort to illuminate the present for reconstructive, broadly political purposes, we experience a new admiration and wonder in relationship to the past. For Greenblatt, this experience was a particular achievement of our time, and it afforded "one of the most intense pleasures" our culture has to offer.^[65] In terms of our overall cultural economy, this sort of experience might afford a welcome counterpoint to the ongoing contest that followed from the alternative emphasis on process to the present. Thus Kershner liked the "tentative, playful, and sometimes ironic quality" of the new historicism, especially in comparison with the stridency that results when, in a presentist mode, we approach the past with some present concern in mind.^[66]

From the new historicist perspective, then, evoking the uncanniness of difference, the wonder of arbitrariness and contingency, became the fundamental raison d'être of historical writing. It is crucial for our purposes to understand why this emphasis on the disembedded past crept into the culture when it did and how that impulse relates to the renewed emphasis on presentism and process.

Thomas had difficulty understanding why the new historicists eschewed presentist, reconstructive purposes like his own. He could only assume that Greenblatt and his colleagues were still tied to the mimetic model; thus they were seeking fixed original meaning, even continuity. In the final analysis, he charged, the new historicists had ended up sanitizing the paradoxes of literature by fitting them back into the reigning historical constructions, thereby undercutting their capacity to challenge received opinion.^[67]

But this characterization missed much of what was innovative in the new historicism and did not do justice to the scope for a nonconstructive orientation to the world as history. More specifically, Thomas did not grasp the point of keeping the past moment from reconnecting, even in the subversive way he himself had in mind. To restore strangeness to the past moment or artifact is not simply, as Thomas put it, "to re-present an original presence."^[68] Greenblatt's

[64] Ibid., 181.

[65] Ibid., 180.

[66] Kershner, "Dances with Historians," 586.

[67] Thomas, New Historicism , 214–215. See also pp. 184–185, 199–200, 208–210; compare Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations , 18–19.

[68] Thomas, New Historicism , 209.

aim, after all, was hardly the security we might gain from rendering the past as it actually happened, or the past moment as it actually was. Rather, we experience the strangeness of the disembedded past moment, not to serve the presentist aim of changing the provisional outcome, but as a quasi-religious end in itself. This was to expand the spectrum of experience that opens as we adjust to a world of nothing but history. That experience is akin to, but ultimately distinguishable from, the ritualistic resistance and disruption we found especially in the extreme side of deconstruction. With the new historicism, the element of resentment falls away.

The emphasis on past as opposed to process lurked more generally in historiography by the last decades of the century; it was not limited to the specific genre of microhistory, nor did it require the exotic new historicism. Much of what came to be called simply the new history, as social history expanded, reacted against the long-standing emphasis on some dominant elite strand to focus on formerly neglected groups or dimensions of human experience.

Initially, historians turned from the dominant political or intellectual strand to focus on excluded others like women, out of the sense that women, too, were agents—whether in the larger public sphere or in their own "local" sphere. This was simply to say that power to affect the world was diffused more widely than it had seemed when we relied on a master narrative with a particular, delimited set of foci. Insofar as that was the argument, the focus was still on world-making—even if world-making involved strands that ran parallel, intertwining only problematically. But in some instances the claim to the actual agency of such excluded others weakened, so the focus and rationale of the inquiry changed. From this perspective, history was not about world-making at all.

Sometimes, the aim seemed simply to rescue from condescension those who did not affect the outcome, whose significance lies instead in the dignity, the coherence, of their having lived the lives they did, apart from dominant processes. But some took another step and, at least implicitly, afforded privilege to those who were left outside or marginalized by the dominant processes, processes agreed to be dominant. To focus on their stories was not simply to propose that we study a different process to the present but to disrupt focus on any process. There seemed something inherently illegitimate about the process of particularizing itself, because particularizing necessarily entails winning, leaving a great deal to fall by the wayside. Characterizing the "other" of the dominant processes, those approaching the past in this way almost universally eschewed neutral terminology such as "left outside," "did not result," or even "precluded" as they spoke of the "suppressed" and afforded privilege to the "suppressed other."^[69] They took as most important what was not most important

[69] Even Ankersmit, who has approached this set of issues with balance and discernment, sometimes uses such phrasing; see, for example, History and Tropology , 173–174.

in the older sense of having had a disproportionate influence on some dominant process to the present. Rather than focusing on the coming to be of the actual, this was to resist winning itself by giving privilege to what is excluded as a result of the winning.

In some of its expressions, this approach manifested an overt hostility to the political-constitutional and "high" intellectual-cultural processes that had long seemed especially worthy of attention. Historians found satisfaction in showing that ordinary people—most people—lived their lives little touched by such processes as the Renaissance, the American Revolution, or the Italian Risorgimento. Or they afforded privilege to the experience of those most directly the victims of dominant processes, such as the aboriginal populations in areas taken over by Europeans.

The focus of this approach might even expand beyond long-excluded groups to encompass long-neglected aspects of the experience of all of us. The coming to be of particular world entails particular ways of understanding, experiencing, conferring meaning. And whichever strand we choose to emphasize, this particularizing process can be understood as preclusion or suppression, so that a mode of experience that was nipped in the bud could be conceived as an excluded other.

To afford historiographical privilege to any such other undercuts a focus on world-making, even as expanded to encompass a much larger class of historical agents or dominant processes. So that impulse among practicing historians stood opposed not only to the old exclusionary master narrative but even to the middle ground of weak process and reconstruction. And it participated in the wider tendency toward ritualistic subversion, or reversal, that we found in the extreme side of both Foucault and Derrida, and that reflected a quasi-religious resentment of the particularizing mechanisms through which any world comes to be in history.

Some contended that the narrative form itself is ideologically charged and entails preclusion, so that the alternative to an emphasis on process must entail subverting, or at least eschewing, the narrative form.^[70] Even as he resisted moves in this direction, White pointed out that whereas we have good constructive reasons for emplotting the stuff of history in various kinds of narrative accounts, it is also possible to take an antinarrativist approach, showing how any narrative seeks to cover over its own constructedness—and undermines itself in the process.^[71] So White suggested that whereas we may want to devise historical stories, thereby constructing some particular meaning, the

[70] See White, Content of the Form , 34–40, for a good account of this notion, especially as it informed the effort of Roland Barthes and found its way into French poststructuralism. In Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1986), Sande Cohen seeks to point the way to a recoding of historiography to free it from the allegedly prejudicial—and reactionary—effects of narrative.

[71] White, "Historical Pluralism," 490–491.

constructive impulse that leads us to do so is not privileged. We might instead approach the stuff of history in a more ritualistically deconstructive spirit, constantly undercutting the pretense of coherence itself.

Indeed, our deeper understanding, thanks to White, of what is entailed in narration/construction may well stimulate this countervailing will to antinarrative deconstruction. The postmetaphysical space has room for this impulse as part of the array of new ways of addressing the past apart from process, just as it has room for the variety of the presentist accents discussed in the preceding section. Sometimes, however, these ways of affording privilege to the past moment rested on the conflations and overreactions we have encountered again and again.

In specifying the uses of microhistory, Ankersmit was quick to assume that the alternative boils down to a quest for the key to the workings of history or for some essence or unifying principle tying everything together. He implied that insofar as we seek to understand ourselves as historical resultants by focusing on some process connecting past and present, we repair either to a speculative, quasi-Hegelian metanarrative or to a justifying, celebratory master narrative. By fastening on the scraps, the margins, as opposed to those aspects of the past that led most directly to us, the microhistories afforded a welcome antidote, a kind of defamiliarization that resisted our tendency toward a too-easy essentialism. To concentrate on what was most different, on what most resisted processes that proved dominant, keeps us from assuming that anything we might find back there can be integrated into our present identity, taken as privileged or "given."^[72]

We have good reasons for focusing on the past margins and scraps that stand opposed to all that most readily connects with us. But we cannot understand those reasons if we impute essentialism or Hegelianism to the postmetaphysical way of experiencing ourselves as historical products or resultants. To connect, in a continuous narrative, our present understanding of death, for example, with a very different earlier understanding, and to concentrate on those aspects of the past that fit into that narrative, is not necessarily to make the present privileged and inevitable, or even to make the historical account reassuring. Rather, that historical account may defamiliarize and destabilize the present by showing up as merely historical what was assumed to be given, natural, essential.

Yet we still have reason to emphasize instead the past moment for its own sake—even the margins and scraps of that past moment. We have reason to turn the sense of belonging to a particular history inside out by attending to the preclusion, or by experiencing the uncanniness of the past moment left disconnected, not subjected to the construction that follows from our present need to act. Even insofar as, with Gadamer, we grasp the scope for a dialogical approach that values difference and even surprise, we have reason to depart

[72] Ankersmit, History and Tropology , 174–177.

from Gadamer's way of seeking dialogue and reconnection. These new ways of concentrating on the past for its own sake yield an experience of the historical world that stands in fruitful tension with our renewed emphasis on process to the present.

But though there is room for both sets of impulses, confusion about past-process interaction produced uncertainty about historiographical priorities and fed polarization among historians. And whereas historiography seemed to become more open and inclusive in one sense, some noted a renewed tendency to claim predominance and to exclude. Criticizing Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms , Dominick LaCapra pinpointed the interlocking tensions that lurked in some of the popular microhistories and in much of the new history. As noted previously, Ginzburg revealed a popular peasant culture that had been hidden in our mainstream cultural history, but LaCapra found contradictions both in Ginzburg's conception of agency and in the relationship between that popular culture and the elite culture that had seemed dominant. Ginzburg seemed to view the popular culture as at once autonomous and caught up in a reciprocal relationship with "high" texts. Moreover, LaCapra charged that Ginzburg's approach entailed preclusions of its own; his "empathy with the oppressed" yielded a limited perception of those taken to be their oppressors.^[73]

Paradoxically, the tendency to afford privilege to some excluded other entailed the danger of a new form of vulgar presentism. Reviewing several books on "1492," the moment of Columbian encounter, J. H. Elliott lamented "the absurdities and evasions that arise from efforts to view the past through the lens of such contemporary preoccupations as environmentalism and multiculturalism. . . . This litany of deformations of the past [suggests] . . . the attitudes of an essentially ahistorical civilization, unwilling or unable to recognize the complexity of the processes that have gone to the shaping of the present." Elliott found a sad irony in the tendency of historians to denounce insensitivity to the otherness of the others while refusing to recognize that the earlier Europeans, especially the missionaries, were different from us precisely in seeking not differences but resemblances, a common humanity: "Ironically, it is the otherness of these early European observers and ethnographers which now tends to be overlooked, as their efforts at understanding are . . . found lamentably wanting by the standards of our own more enlightened age."^[74]

Such ahistorical tendencies fed implicit claims to privilege among some "antiprocess" historians. As noted in chapter 1, LaCapra found "a bizarre and

[73] Dominick LaCapra, "The Cheese and the Worms : The Cosmos of a Twentieth-Century Historian," in Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 45-69; see esp. pp. 60, 62. See also Roger Chartier, "Texts, Printing, Readings," in The New Cultural History , ed. Hunt, 169–170, 173–174, for another indication of exasperation with the tendency to dichotomize "high" and "popular" culture, coupled with some helpful suggestions about how we can transcend the dichotomy.

[74] J. H. Elliott, "The Rediscovery of America," New York Review of Books , 24 June 1993, 37–38.

vicious paradox" in the stance of many of those disrupting claims to privilege in the past: "a vicarious relation to the oppressed of the past serves as a pretext for contemporary pretensions to dominance" within contemporary historiography.^[75] So even as calls for openness and pluralism grew more insistent, historians found it ever harder to agree on the criteria as the relationship between past and process became more problematic.

Scott versus Himmelfarb

The whole array of new impulses, some inviting a politically charged presentism, some defying traditional historical narrative, provoked more traditional historians. None responded more forcefully than Gertrude Himmelfarb, a distinguished historian of nineteenth-century England.^[76] Although no single individual or direction manifested all the tendencies Himmelfarb deplored, the opposition between Himmelfarb and Joan Wallach Scott proved especially illuminating. By the late 1980s, Himmelfarb and Scott had emerged as prominent advocates of the opposing "old" and "new" historiographical positions, and each explicitly denounced the other as representing what most threatened the discipline. Each produced a widely discussed book on historiography, and their papers highlighted a notable opening session at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1988.^[77]

Although Himmelfarb and Scott were surely representative, neither side in the debate between old and new historians was monolithic, and certain of the emphases of each of these two exemplars have been controversial even among historians who have no use for the other. Scott was criticized by women's historians both for taking the generally poststructuralist orientation too much to heart and for downplaying the experience of women as she emphasized gender.^[78] And not all those bothered by Scott's overtly political stance were as traditionalist as Himmelfarb in insisting that the political-constitutional sphere must remain privileged as the organizing core for historiography. But the disagreement between these two prominent historians, and the ways they talked past each other, proved highly symptomatic.

Although immediate political differences had their place in the dispute between Scott and Himmelfarb, it would be facile to account for that dispute in

[75] LaCapra, History and Criticism , 69.

[76] Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Telling It as You Like It: Post-modernist History and the Flight from Fact," TLS: The Times Literary Supplement , 16 October 1992, 12–15.

[77] Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Scott, Gender . See also Scott's review of Himmelfarb's book in American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (June 1989): 699–700. The two papers were published in American Historical Review in June 1989 and are discussed below.

[78] For a lucid discussion of Scott's role among historians of women and gender, see the review essay by William H. Sewell, Jr., on Scott's Gender in History and Theory 29, no. 1 (1990): 71–82. See esp. p. 79 on the criticisms that Louise Tilly and Claudia Koonz raised against Scott.

politically reductionist terms. Their disagreement proves more instructive because it cut to the level of the framework for that undoubted political difference. At issue was how the politically charged historiographical terrain might be contested most fruitfully.

As Himmelfarb saw it, Scott had fallen into presentist bias by adopting a feminist stance that those in the past, the subjects of her history, did not share.^[79] As Scott saw it, Himmelfarb would confine the subject of history to the dominant strand of mainstream political development, thereby precluding the stories of the others, stories that might, among other things, subvert the mainstream story and the particular reality it buttresses.

Himmelfarb's conception of history rested on two established pillars: There is a determinate, stable past, and the historian's aim is to understand it as contemporaries did. In her view, the new history was problematic because, picking up on dubious intellectual innovations from outside historiography, it moved away from the former imperative and thus, apparently, from the latter as well: "There is no fixed reality in the past, we are told; the whole of the past is indeterminate." And the consequence: "It is only by making the past indeterminate, making it a tabula rasa , that historians can impose upon the past their own determinacy."^[80] If the object of inquiry is not understood as some stable reality—the past as it actually happened, or actually was experienced—historians feel liberated from the imperative to reconstruct the past as well as possible; they seem to have license to impose anything they like, even to see how creative and inventive they can be.

Whereas for the old history, Himmelfarb went on, contemporaries invented a world that the historian then seeks to reconstruct, for the new, it is the historians who invent, thereby distoring the experience of those they should be seeking to understand.

What is being deprivileged and deconstructed is not only history as traditional historians have understood it but the past as contemporaries knew it. Contemporaries may have thought that their history was shaped by kings and statesmen, politics and diplomacy, constitutions and laws. New historians know better. . . . The new history . . . is in danger of fostering a new kind of condescension, a condescension toward those contemporaries who left few records of their "consciousness" and are at the mercy of the historian who can "invent," "imagine," "create," or "construct" a consciousness that is suspiciously in accord with the historian's own consciousness.^[81]

[79] Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Some Reflections on the New History," American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (June 1989): 668. Himmelfarb includes Scott's Gender , pp. 3, 6, among the examples of the avowed, conscious bias she finds in the new history.

[80] Himmelfarb, "Some Reflections on the New History," 665–668; the quoted passages are on pp. 666 and 668.

[81] Ibid., 667–670. See also Himmelfarb, New History , 15–24.

Himmelfarb emphasized that she welcomed the expansion of focus associated with the new history; of course we should study the historical experience of women and blacks, for example. But she worried that the new historians were placing such emphasis on the disparate subjects of the new history that unity and any hierarchy of importance came to seem inherently illegitimate.^[82] The result was fragmentation and leveling, bound up with a prejudice against "greatness," all of which led Himmelfarb to suggest that, despite everything, political history, especially as focused on the development of constitutions and institutions, remained central. It is the political realm that affords scope for the free and rational shaping of our collective world.^[83]

Scott, in contrast, claimed to want a more democratic history in a double sense. Most obviously, this meant widening the focus to include the stories of the long-excluded others. But it also meant a freer, more open contest over what was important in history, what should be asked, taught, learned. And Scott found traditionalists like Himmelfarb unwilling to countenance either form of democratic expansion. First, they insisted that we continue to focus on elites rather than encompass those excluded others. The pluralization of the subject of history, wrote Scott,

challenges the notion, dear to Himmelfarb and her associates, that "man" can be studied through a focus on elites. Instead, attention to women, blacks, and other Others demonstrates that history consists of many irreconcilable stories. Any master narrative—the single story of the rise of American democracy or Western civilization—is shown to be not only incomplete but impossible of completion in the terms it has been written. For those master narratives are based on the forcible exclusion of Others' stories. They are justifications through teleology of the outcomes of political struggles, stories which in their telling legitimize the actions of those who have shaped laws, constitutions, and governments—"official stories."^[84]

At the same time, Scott found the traditionalists prone to insist on a unified master narrative based on a restrictive conception of what is important. In doing so, they were refusing contest over historiographical priorities, over how that master narrative is to be configured. And their reasons were merely self-serving.

It is finally the plurality of stories and of the subjects of those stories, as well as the lack of any single central narrative that conservatives find intolerable because it undermines the legitimation of their quest for dominance. Their defense of their

[82] Himmelfarb, New History , 5, 9–10, 16, 18, 99.

[83] See Himmelfarb's assault on "History with the politics left out," in ibid., 13–32, esp. pp. 17–21, 31–32. At the very least, she suggested, the determined turning from political subjects that was a hallmark of the new history reflected a change in our self-understanding that called for fuller examination.

[84] Scott, "History in Crisis?" 689–690.

subject—elites in the past, their own hegemony in the present—is a repudiation of the possibility of contest and conflicting interpretation, a refusal of change, and a rejection of the possibility for what I would call democratic history.^[85]

Although reaction against a master narrative that had indeed been prejudicially restrictive was surely justified, these are strong words. Whereas "old" historians like Himmelfarb, in defending "their subject," repudiate "the possibility of contest," we new historians, Scott apparently wanted to say, welcome such contest, as we . . . what? Defend our subject, while they defend theirs? Or do we do something different? Why, from Scott's perspective, did making one choice in the contest entail repudiation of the contest itself—a refusal to play by democratic rules—while to make a different choice did not?

Groups, Processes, and Axes of Contest

In arguing for the continued centrality of political and constitutional history, Himmelfarb was advocating a particular organizing frame, but she was also insisting, more generally, that some hierarchy of importance is essential to provide unity and coherence to the culture's historical self-understanding. Some persons, events, and processes are more important than others, and history must feature those who, from some perspective, seem to have been disproportionately powerful, affecting the course of things. By implication, historians perform one of their roles in determining which such persons, events, and processes are most worthy of our attention, arranging them in a hierarchy of importance. But questions about that process of decision quickly intrude themselves. How open can it be? What range of possible processes does it encompass? Is the outcome always to be conceived as provisional, subject to further contest, or might it be privileged, carrying more than a merely historical sanction?

Insofar as Scott and other new historians emphasized excluded groups, irreconcilable stories, and the scope for disrupting the master narrative, they seemed to suggest that any such emphasis on unity, dominant process, or hierarchy of importance was to afford privilege to the elite and thereby to exclude others. A plurality of parallel stories seemed the only alternative to a master narrative that both privileges the strand leading to the current outcome and justifies that outcome, buttressing the hegemony of the winners. In the passages quoted above, Scott seemed first to envision only these two dichotomous alternatives. And she seemed to suggest that if embracing parallel stories entailed splintering the once-unified historical narrative and leveling the once-hierarchical way of assigning importance, that was an acceptable price.

[85] Ibid., 691.

Because older approaches did tend to confine the past to a single dominant strand, there was good reason for the bravado with which new historians like Scott and Lawrence W. Levine pointed to different histories and accented the conflicts or irreconcilabilities among them.^[86] Still, Scott's argument, too, suggested that there is always a kind of master narrative, some overall historical self-understanding in the culture, though we come to see it as provisional, tension-ridden, open to contest. In one of the passages above, she contended that our way of organizing history around a particular elite strand had precluded stories that might undermine that dominant way of telling and the overall cultural self-understanding it yields. And she charged that her opponents were refusing the contest that she thought desirable. So in her account the various possible histories are at least potentially in interaction and competition.

Thus Scott's irrefutable argument that history in both the making and the telling is inherently political. The process of interaction, competition, and conflict through which the particular world results is political; the decision to tell this and not that, the process whereby the wider culture comes to learn this and not that, is part of that overarching political process.^[87] Historians are historical actors—significant ones—as they compete to shape the culture's self-understanding.

In her influential argument on behalf of gender as a historical subject, Scott was claiming not only that our present way of giving meaning to sexual difference has been constructed historically but also that we need to recast our hierarchy of importance. We long took the political sphere to be especially important; those successful in that sphere, that particular "elite," had a special claim to our attention. But for now, at least, we have more to learn from a history of gendering than we do from the political or constitutional histories that traditionalists like Himmelfarb continued to favor. Although focus on gender may reveal that gendering has affected even our political categories and thus lead us to some fresh questions about our political tradition, we turn from politics to gender not because the politicians we formerly studied were men, marginalizing women, or because, through their power, they marginalized others. Rather, to focus on gender is to take as more important a different aspect of our common historical experience. As part of her effort to help alter our hierarchy of importance, Scott probed historically the process whereby gender was restricted to a particular place in the hierarchy—or kept from becoming a historical subject altogether.^[88] Thanks partly to that historical account, I, for one, am persuaded that gender merits a higher place, even at the expense of politics, in the hierarchy of our historical self-understanding.

[86] Lawrence W. Levine, "The Unpredictable Past: Reflections on Recent American Historiography," American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (June 1989): 671–679.

[87] Scott, "Introduction," in Gender , esp. pp. 2–3, 5–8.

[88] In this connection, see Gender , 83–84, part of Scott's critique of E. P. Thompson's classic The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963).

The larger point, however, is that in accenting contest and in arguing for gender, Scott implicitly agreed that there is a hierarchy of importance and thus something like a master narrative, a common world, a common history. Moreover, in accenting political contest, she implicitly recognized that some prove more powerful than others, exerting a disproportionate influence over the direction of things, as the world comes to be some particular way. Whether what is at issue is an institution or a way of affording meaning to experience, each historical strand encompasses winning, or becoming actual, and exclusion. And the process of winning has a special claim to our attention. Recounting the triumph of whatever has triumphed at present may serve to justify the outcome, as Scott suggested, but celebratory accounts may be contested as well. And as Scott's treatment of gender makes clear, to elevate a particular winning strand in the hierarchy is not necessarily to justify or celebrate but may instead serve deconstruction and change.

In implicitly accepting this larger framework, Scott found herself going beyond her emphasis on irreconcilable stories to a deeper understanding of democratic expansion and pluralism in historiography. Two steps were involved. First, that expansion encompasses not simply formerly excluded groups but a wider array of processes, a wider array of the winning strands that have resulted in our present. Thus gendering and much else compete with conventional political development for our attention. Second, a democratic expansion makes that competition itself freer, broader, more open. There is room for more perspectives, more voices, in the process whereby a particular hierarchy of importance is hammered out. In calling for greater pluralism, Scott seemed to suggest, as the traditionalists did not, that the master narrative is forever tension-ridden and provisional—and thus invites ongoing contest.

In one sense, this broadly political contest has always gone on, but it has not been as open, pluralistic, and democratic as it might have been. The old master narrative was "strong," presenting its particular understanding of the hierarchy—Western, male, political, and so forth—as necessary and inevitable. But as we come to experience our world as nothing but history, we recognize that the master narrative is itself merely historical and thus open to contest. It encompasses whatever historians put into it; historians endlessly compete to get this or that included and to get the hierarchy of importance arranged in this way as opposed to that. As we grasp the cultural import of that competition, our historical self-understanding becomes more tension-ridden than ever before.

Still, both sides of the coin must be remembered. Thick and messy though it is, some particular cultural self-understanding endlessly results from that competition. The point is not to deny unity and totality but to insist on weakness and provisionality. At the same time, it is crucial that though Scott was more concerned than Himmelfarb to accent openness and contest, she did not envision putting everything in, treating everything as equally important. The point

was not that the traditionalists insisted on hierarchy and exclusion, whereas Scott did not. Scott simply wanted an expanded and more open contest in the double sense I have described. Any such choice in this contest will leave something out, and the leaving out, or particularizing, can always be characterized as marginalizing, precluding, or suppressing.

Scott's argument, then, suggested a number of points essential for a moderate, open-ended, yet reconstructive understanding of the place of historiography in a postmetaphysical culture. But though her contribution was invaluable, certain tensions blunted her argument and blurred some of its essential points. In her dispute with the traditionalists, Scott's plausible reaction against the old master narrative tended toward overreaction, precluding even the weak, postmetaphysical understanding of unity and hierarchy that can be derived from the main lines of her argument. So she tended to restrict with one hand even as she invited openness with the other.

Scott's way of using the loaded term "elite" blurred the difference between expansion to encompass excluded groups and expansion to encompass more of the dominant processes that produced our present. Insofar as history in both the making and the telling is political and contested, it is about winning and losing—and the winners, by definition, have had a disproportionate impact on the outcome, the configuration of the present. Whatever their initial status, those winners constitute a sort of elite, but they are not necessarily an elite in the usual sense, a group that is recognizable and advantaged even as it enters the contest, mixing it up with other groups.

Political and cultural leaders command our attention not simply as "the elite," one social group among others, but as dominant agents, as those who turned out to wield disproportionate power in shaping what was, like it or not, the particular totality of our common world. We focus not so much on them , as if their experience as winners was somehow more significant, as on the process itself—the process through which some set of agents proves more powerful and through which our particular world results. A conventional political or intellectual history need not be any more about elites, as an advantaged grouping, than is a history focusing on how we have come to understand gender as we have.

Moreover, once we understand that the outcome of this contest is weak and provisional, to argue for the importance of some particular strand of the overall process is not in itself to seek to justify the outcome—neither the present resultant of that strand nor the overall hierarchical arrangement in which, at present, it has its particular place. In a postmetaphysical mode, we are not tempted to celebrate that master process as the providential march to the present—or to a future that we can discern through reason. We view the privilege that attaches to any present outcome as weakly historical, not strongly metaphysical. But to understand and possibly change some aspect of the present, we must focus on those historical processes that we suspect have been most important in giving our present its particular shape.

Obviously Scott, in focusing on gender, was seeking not to justify our present way of gendering but very nearly the opposite: To show how it emerged historically might enable us to change that provisional outcome. So we afford historiographical privilege to the coming to be of one strand of the actual, even though this particular process of winning entailed the marginalization of women.

Yet Scott tended to preclude any such "moderate," weakly postmetaphysical understanding when she suggested that to focus on a dominant process is necessarily to celebrate its outcome, that historical recounting leads us to associate the winners with some suprahistorical justification. She assumed, moreover, that those who focus on the dominant processes are affording privilege to elites and "forcibly excluding" the rest. And they could wish to do so only because, belonging among the elite winners themselves, they seek to cement their own hegemony. Because of this spurious justification, "their defense of their subject" comes to seem "a repudiation of the possibility of contest."

Thus Scott imputed a claim to strong justification to more traditional historians like Himmelfarb who found the relatively conventional political-constitutional sphere still to be most important. Some of those historians may seek, or lapse into, such strong justification, but unless we are prepared to distinguish strong justification from weak, merely historical justification, we will not be able to judge any particular instance.

Even as Scott invited political contest as opposed to parallel stories, her initial solicitude for excluded groups continued to inform her thinking. An element of posthistoricist extremity, with its accent on the disembedded past, fed her tendency to afford privilege to those marginalized by dominant processes. Thus the vehemence of her reference to "the forcible exclusion of Others' stories."^[89] In this mode, Scott was not saying simply that what had seemed the In this mode, Scott was not saying simply that what had seemed the dominant processes are less important. Nor was it that, disliking their outcomes, she wanted to deconstruct them. This would leave them most important, most worthy of our attention. Because such reconstructive purposes also informed her thinking, Scott did not embrace the more global extremes of Derridean disruption or Heideggerian disengagement. But her way of affording privilege to the excluded other carried her beyond the argument, which she shared with Thomas, that attention to the excluded element can deepen our understanding of any process to the present.

Scott's solicitude for others reflected the resentment of a world of nothing but history that we have encountered in several forms. That world endlessly results in a present that is what it is only because some have been marginalized or left out along the way. In light of this preoccupation, focus on the excluded other, or whatever has been held back, takes on the quasi-religious function we have discussed. The other has a special claim to our attention. Otherness disrupts dominance and so is privileged—is even, quite literally, next

[89] Scott, "History in Crisis?" 689–690.

to godliness. In a world of nothing but history, the others are the meek, and there is only the history for them to inherit. But inherit it they do, thanks to the historian.

As I have emphasized, this new way of focusing on past in opposition to process is a plausible response to a world of nothing but history. But because Scott did not sort out the disparate concerns that nourished her thinking, this element of extremity reinforced her tendency to conflate telling with justifying and compromised her understanding of "democratic expansion." Her solicitude for a certain class of others led her to claim, implicitly, an unwarranted privilege in her contest with the traditionalists over the hierarchy of importance.

Whereas focusing on gender as a long-excluded process genuinely expanded the master narrative, Scott's way of affording privilege to the stories of women as a forcibly excluded other made it seem that to elevate political history over gender history was not simply to judge one process more important than another but to preclude the stories of women as a group. And this could only serve the interests of those whose stories had not been precluded—namely, "the elite." By blurring the two axes, Scott was able to make a choice for a different process look spurious, self-serving. Thus, again, her charge that the traditionalists' "defense of their subject—elites in the past, their own hegemony in the present—is a repudiation of the possibility of contest and conflicting interpretation."^[90] Such purposes may be at work when more traditional historians make their more conventional choices, but to refuse to reduce history to a collection of group stories, and even to marginalize the stories of certain groups, is not in itself to deny the contest or to refuse to expand the focus.

At the same time, Scott's solicitude for excluded groups compromised the reconstructive potential she had in mind in arguing for gender as a historical subject. Insofar as that solicitude intrudes into gender history, it leads the historian to focus on women's experience for its own sake and diminishes the presentist bite. Although our way of gendering left men politically and economically dominant, it diminished the range of possible experiences for both men and women. A history of gender stemming from reconstructive purposes would probe what was precluded, but rather than focus on groups, it would probe experience and meaning, examining the marginalization of possibilities for men as well as for women—precisely as historians have recently begun to do. Scott, however, got caught up in the ambiguity at the intersection between gender and women's history. Thus she did not fully develop the argument for the reconstructive potential of gender as a historical subject, yet neither did she satisfy historians like Claudia Koonz who were more concerned with the parallel history of women as a group.

[90] Ibid., 691. See also pp. 685–686, 689–690, for Scott's tendency to restrict the axis of debate by assuming that groups are necessarily at issue.

Although Scott sometimes disparaged the "elite" winners, her often-reconstructive aims entailed a positive evaluation of some aspects of the process that had resulted in the present—and even of some of those elites who had most powerfully shaped that present. She implicitly valued, for example, the steps in our "high" intellectual history that made Foucault and Derrida possible and that brought them to her attention. That was precisely what we presently take to be the master narrative of our intellectual history in the West, a history that is more obviously "elitist" than most of the strands we presently take to be dominant.

To Scott, at least, it did not seem necessary to study and convey that history, although in principle she might have, as she sought to show other historians how the "more radical epistemology" of Foucault and Derrida could deepen the impact of feminist historiography and, more generally, serve the greater pluralism she sought. But she surely had to applaud the success of intellectual historians like LaCapra whose works extended the master narrative to encompass these figures. Though that narrative was about elites in one obvious sense, that was not why it mattered to Scott. It mattered because it deepened her understanding of the possibilities for present action.

Despite the frustration she professed at the outset of Gender and the Politics of History , Scott made herself heard. So powerful was her voice, in fact, that she herself assumed a place in that elite, not as a woman, participating in a parallel history of women, but as an intellectual leader, affecting the priorities of the culture. She assumed a place in that continuous history of the elite that, in some of her moods, she affected to despise. And in my judgment, obviously, she merits that place; that is why I have read and discussed her, as opposed to some random, typical, ordinary, or marginal historian writing at the same time. But, just as obviously, the master narrative in which Scott had become central was only provisional. Her influence might diminish; others marginalized by her triumph might be resurrected.

Polarization and Revitalization

As translated into historiography, the themes of the wider humanistic discussion tended to produce confusion, restriction, and a debilitating polarization, as opposed to the revitalization that had seemed possible. The Himmelfarb-Scott encounter dramatized that tendency with particular force. Scott pinpointed much that was essential for historiographical renewal, but he r prejudice against elites and even greatness betrayed excesses that Himmelfarb was quick to fasten on. Partly because of those excesses, Himmelfarb managed to sidestep some of what was most challenging—and ultimately essential—in Scott's contribution. In turn, Scott and her followers fell into prejudicial characterizations, including a facile political reductionism, partly because they had to respond to those like Himmelfarb who were quick to repair to unsustainable traditional categories.

Against Scott's presentism, Himmelfarb insisted that historians should reconstruct past experience as contemporaries lived it. But this was to blur the problematic relationship between their experience and our history. Thanks partly to presentists like Scott, Kellner, and Thomas, we better understand that insofar as we seek to deconstruct some present configuration, our purpose is not to write "their" history but our own. We do not willfully falsify past experience, but neither do we simply reconstruct it, because we can know, as our predecessors did not, what was resulting from the processes in which their lives were enmeshed.

In light of the expanded role history was called on to play, Himmelfarb's concern—the past as contemporaries knew it—was indeed being deprivileged, and needed to be. Still, Himmelfarb's complaint that new historians like Scott were forcing their concerns onto the experience of those in the past could not be dismissed as conservative prejudice. But it was not possible to head off the excesses in Scott's thinking by repairing to the old self-understanding as Himmelfarb did.

A more thoroughgoing postmetaphysical recasting of historiography was necessary to overcome the polarization. That recasting required a reconsideration of hierarchy, unity, and totality; of past and process; of commitment and risk; and of the terms of the endless contest to which Scott drew our attention. It required showing why focus on our history and even denial of a stable past do not authorize historians to treat those who came before as mere proxies for present struggles. It was essential to show why, on the contrary, we need to learn—and why truth may result when we seek to learn. On that basis, we might recognize that an invitation to political conflict need not warrant a political-reductionist understanding of the process of interaction. Most basically, that reconsideration had to make sense of the variety of impulses that inform the human encounter with history in a postmetaphysical world, probing the interplay of presentist reconstruction and the plausible extremes.