Seven
Historism and Postmodernism
A Phenomenology of Historical Experience

1. Introduction: Historism and Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a great many things. It originates in the rejection of modernist architecture as exemplified by Bauhaus or by Le Corbusier.^[1] A decade later this most elusive concept was used for referring to deconstructivist theories of literary criticism^[2] and to so-called "antifoundationalist" conceptions in the philosophy of language and meaning.^[3] Over the same period we may witness the development of a postmodernist political philosophy attempting to deconstruct traditional notions of the political center and its periphery;^[4] postmodernist philosophy of culture, in its turn, rejoiced in the elimination of the border between high and low culture

[1] See, for example, C. Jencks, Postmodernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture , London, 1987. Jencks even provides us with data for the final victory of postmodernist over modernist architecture. That date is 1972: the year in which the modernist Pruitt-Igoes building in St. Louis was blown up. "This explosion of 1972, copied countless times throughout the world as a radical dealing with such housing estates, soon came to symbolize the mythical death of Modern architecture." See Jencks, Postmodernism , 27.

[2] For a useful discussion of the relation between postmodernism and contemporary literary theory that goes beyond the all-too-easy equation of deconstructivism and postmodernism, see S. Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary , Oxford, 1990, 103-132.

[3] Apart from Richard Rorty's writings since 1979, particularly useful are J. Rajchman and C. West, eds., Post-Analytic Philosophy , New York, 1985, and K. Baynes, J. Bohman, and T. McCarthy, eds., Philosophy: End or Transformation? Cambridge (MA), 1987.

[4] See especially C. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, Oxford, 1988, and idem., The Political Forms of Modern Society , Oxford, 1986.

and in the aestheticization of contemporary society.^[5] Lastly, postmodernist reflection on art—the domain where postmodernism has been most influential—took the form of a rejection of avant-gardism. Whereas almost every previous new development in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art began by proudly announcing itself to be the "modernist" avant-garde that would pitilessly condemn older styles to obsolescence, postmodernism struck another and quite different note by presenting itself as not being the latest attempt to overcome the history of art.^[6] The modernist avant-garde, by describing itself as the last and ultimate development in art, always firmly and confidently placed itself in a history of art; postmodernism, however, only carried on this tradition of contestation in a curiously paradoxical way by presenting itself as the first form of art that was not interested in locating itself in the history of art.^[7]

But, as this postmodernist circumvention of the historical pretensions of the avant-garde already suggests, postmodernism is also a theory of and about history. It is a theory of history insofar as postmodernism claims to be the first historical period (since the modernist Enlightenment) to avoid periodization successfully.^[8] Next, as a theory about history, postmodernism is a theory rejecting the claims of so-called "metanarratives." The locus classicus of the rejection of metanarrative is, of course, Lyotard's La Condition Postmoderne. As everybody knows, this pamphlet has, for better or for worse (rather for worse than for better, I would say), acquired a central place in the discussion of the pros and cons of postmodernism. Within Lyotard's presentation of metanarrative, its primary function, then, is to legitimate science. "Le savoir scientifique," writes Lyotard, "ne peut savoir et faire savoir qu'il est le vrai savoir sans recourir a l'autre savoir, le récit." (Scientific knowledge cannot justify its pretension to be true knowledge without having recourse to that other form of knowing, the story.)^[9] The legitimacy of science—that is, the answer to the question of why we are justified in placing our hopes and confidence in scientific progress—can only

[5] This elimination is the main thesis of A. Huyssen, After the Great Divide , London, 1988.

[6] P. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde , Minneapolis, 1984; see especially chap. 1.

[7] Hence the eclecticism of postmodernism. Abandoning the notion of the avant-garde implies abandoning periodization. And abandoning periodization results in a tearing down of the barriers against eclecticism.

[8] The paradox of a period presenting itself as the historical period that does not periodize is discussed in G. Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture , Cambridge, 1988, 4; B. Lang, "Postmodernism in Philosophy: Nostalgia for the Future, Waiting for the Present," in A. J. Gascardi, ed., Literature and the Question of Philosophy, Baltimore, 1987; A. Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida , Berkeley, 1985; see, for example, 296ff.

[9] J. F. Lyotard, La Condition Postmoderne , Paris, 1979, 50.

be proven by having recourse to the metanarratives of the Bildungsroman of the history of the human mind.^[10] Examples of Lyotard's metanarratives are: the story that the Enlightenment liked to tell itself about the liberating effects of the progress of scientific knowledge; the story of how such progress can foster the moral and spiritual formation of the nation; and, lastly, Marxism. According to Lyotard, these metanarratives have in recent times dissolved into an infinite number of petits récits, that is, of self-sufficient, "local" language games that are in use in the various scientific subsocieties that populate the contemporary intellectual world.^[11] Henceforward an attempt to organize these social and cultural fragments into a larger and more comprehensive whole or to arrange them into a hierarchy is doomed to fail.^[12] Thus, as a theory about history Lyotard's account is a criticism of customary conceptions of the fundamental unity of the past: the past is broken up by him into a number of disparate fragments and the fragmentation of the contemporary intellectual world is the mirror image of that dissolution of the past.

There are a number of oddities in Lyotard's deplorably sketchy tale of the life and death of metanarratives. First, it may strike one as strange that metanarratives should ever have claimed to "legitimate" science since ordinarily such claims belong to the domains of the epistemologist and the philosopher of science. Worse still, metanarratives were always a source of irritation to philosophers of science since they effected a historicization of science and thus gave rise to the particularly thorny problems of relativism. Metanarratives traditionally served rather to delegitimize science than to legitimize it. However, although Lyotard's own argument does not encourage such an interpretation,^[13] he may have had in mind a historical or social rather than an epistemological legitimation of science. However, Enlightenment modernism always argued the other way round. Modernists always saw scientific progress as the model and condition for social and political progress and to argue the other way round—as Lyotard does—they would condemn as a confusion of cause and effect.

Second, Lyotard is far from being the first to attack metanarrative. It will be obvious to anyone that Lyotard's metanarratives are identical to so-called speculative philosophies of history. Speculative philosophies of history, the kind of systems that were built by Hegel, Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, and many others, were fiercely criticized in the fifties by philosophers

[10] Ibid.

[11] Lyotard, Condition , 98.

[12] Lyotard, Condition , 66.

[13] Storytelling by the Cashinahua is for Lyotard paradigmatic of the social legitimation of knowledge through narrative. He ends his discussion of social legitimation by contrasting it with the kind of social legitimation we know in the West. See Lyotard, Condition , 42-43.

like Popper, Mandelbaum, and Hayek—a critique from which, despite several attempts to answer it, speculative philosophy of history has never recovered.^[14] It is frustrating that Lyotard restricts his clarification of why metanarratives have fallen into disrepute to the casual remark: "Ces recherches des causes sont toujours décevantes." (These searches for causes are always disappointing.)^[15] Yet it would seem that a criticism along the lines of that of Popper and others would have been of little help to Lyotard. For their criticism always had the form of an argument proving that metanarratives fell short of criteria for scientific acceptability. Evidently this type of argument is not open to Lyotard since by making use of it he would entangle himself in the self-defeating strategy of a scientific argument for delegitimizing science. Admittedly, the position is not completely impossible since the legitimacy of science is still a different matter from science itself; nevertheless, the odor of the self-contradiction would remain in the air.

But there has been an older, even more effective and intellectually more interesting critique of metanarrative. I am thinking here of historism, that immensely influential theory of historical thought that was developed at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century and that, despite the quasi-positivist disguise under which it now often hides itself, is still the major source of contemporary historical consciousness. When Lyotard writes that "le recours aux grands récits est exclu. . ., le 'petit récit' reste la forme par excellence comme validation du discours scientifique" (the return to metanarrative is not open to us. . ., the small narrative remains the best option for the justification of scientific discourse),^[16] this shift from the modernist "grand récit" to the postmodernist "petit récit" has its exact analogue in the historist rejection of speculative historical systems like Hegel's, a rejection which has become the hallmark of historist historical thought. In a fragment in which Ranke rejects speculative philosophy (he had the Hegelian system in mind), it is said that the historian has two ways to acquire knowledge of human affairs. Such knowledge can be attained by abstraction (this is the philosopher's method) or by focusing on what Goethe has called the "rebus particularibus."^[17] The latter, the historian's method, Ranke characterized as originating in "a feeling for and a joy in the particular in and by itself." The general is only derivative, for the historian

[14] Although the interest in and respect for speculative philosophy of history is certainly greater than a few decades ago, this has proved to be insufficient encouragement for the construction of new speculative systems.

[15] Lyotard, Condition , 63.

[16] Lyotard, Condition , 98.

[17] Quoted in E Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus , München, 1965, 468.

will not have preconceived ideas as does the philosopher, but rather while he observes the particular, the course which the development of the world in general has taken will be revealed to him. . . . He will try to comprehend all—also the kings under whom the generations have lived, the sequence of events, and the development of major enterprises—without any purpose other than joy in individual life, as one takes joy in flowers without thinking to which of Linné's classes or of Oken's families they belong; briefly put, without thinking how the whole appears in the particular.^[18]

So what Lyotard refers to as our contemporary cultural predicament was already realized a long time ago in the world of historist historical thought. And it is to historism and historists like Ranke that we owe this achievement of fragmenting the whole of history into independence entities or particulars. History gave way, to paraphrase Koselleck, to histories.

But if we can argue from postmodernism to historism, the opposite route is open to us as well. Historism was mainly a theory of so-called "historical forms" or "ideas." These forms or ideas embodied the unalienable individuality of historical epochs or phenomena. And they can only be known in terms of their differences: historical forms demonstrate their contours only insofar as they are distinct from each other and not in what is common to several or all of them. In so far as postmodernist theory can be seen as a set of variations of the Saussurian theme of "difference," we find here a first indication for how to argue from historism to postmodernism. The historist emphasis on difference was strongly reinforced by the historist conviction that everything is what it is as a result of a historical evolution. The essence of a nation, people, or institution could be found in its past.^[19] Needless to say this intuition invited the historist to define the historical form or idea of a people, nation, et cetera, in terms of its differences with what it was at an earlier or later phase. Differences in history result in differences in the essences of historical phenomena. Suppose now that we have one historical work for each historical phenomenon or period. In that case it seems natural to suppose that the differences between these historical works are taken to correspond to or reflect differences in historical forms or ideas insofar as these characterize historical reality itself. So far, so good. But suppose, next, that we have a great

[18] G. G. Iggers and K. von Moltke. eds., Leopold von Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History , Indianapolis, 1973, 31.

[19] Mandelbaum gives the following authoritative definition of histori(ci)sm: "Historism is the belief that an adequate understanding of the nature of any phenomenon and an adequate assessment of its value are to be gained through considering it in terms of the place which it occupied and the role which it played within a process of development." See M. Mandelbaum, History, Man & Reason , Baltimore, 1971, 42. For an exposition of other definitions of histori(ci)sm and their relationship to the one given by Mandelbaum, see my Denken over geschiedenis: Een overzicht van geschiedfilosofische opvattingen , Groningen, 1986, 174-177.

and ever-increasing number of competing historical interpretations for each historical period or phenomenon. It will then become impossible to tell mere differences in interpretation apart from differences in historical forms or ideas, insofar as these are part of historical reality itself. For we could only do this if we knew which interpretation was the "correct" account of a historical form or idea. However, precisely because of the ever-increasing number of interpretations, it becomes more and more difficult to have clear and definite ideas of what is the "correct" historical interpretation or the one that comes closest to that idea. To put it provocatively, the more high-quality interpretations we have, the more the ideal of the "correct" interpretation becomes compromised. To the extent, then, that it becomes ever more difficult to be confident about the "correct" interpretation (in order to prevent an all-too-premature surrender to relativism, I deliberately avoid saying that it has become impossible), we will be unable to distinguish between differences in historical reality (or historical forms or ideas) and mere differences in interpretation. And, since in accordance with historist methodology, differences are what is at stake in our understanding of the past, we may expect that the distinction between the historical text and historical reality (both to be defined in terms of differences) will tend to get blurred. If, therefore, contemporary history has a scholarly production that dwarfs the total sum of all previous historical scholarship, both in quantity and in quality, we may expect a shift from historical reality itself (the natural focus of interest in the happy period of scarce historical scholarship) to the printed page.

But let me be clear about the nature of this shift. This is not a shift within some eternally valid epistemology for the writing of history. Rather, we have to do here with a disruption of epistemological standards themselves. One must conceive of epistemology as the most thorough and the most intelligent articulation of our cognitive prejudices—and as such, epistemology may at times serve an important cultural purpose. It is what one might call a psychoanalysis of science and of scientific practice. As such, epistemology is not so much a foundation as an interpretation of scientific practice and scientific prejudice, so that when practice and prejudices change for whatever reason, epistemology has no other choice than to follow and reflect such a change. Hence, if the dramatic increase in scholarly production one may observe in history over the last few decades suggests the emergence of a new regime in the relation between historical reality and its representation in historical writing, epistemology should not stubbornly resist this evolution as a deviance from what logic or commonsense requires, but should instead provide us with a more up-to-date "psychoanalysis" of the new state of mind of the historical discipline.

If considerations like these justify the expectation that the historist's fascination with difference will result in a gradual dissolution of the notion

of historical reality in times of historical overproduction and in a blurring of the distinction between reality and text, a rapprochement between historism and postmodernism is most likely. For if there is one thing for which postmodernism is notorious in the contemporary intellectual world, it is undoubtedly postmodernism's problematization of the referent and its insistence upon deconstructing the modernist distinction between language and the world. Moreover, postmodernism relies just as much as history upon a logic of difference for its attack on the distinction between words and things. Postmodernist speculations about difference in many cases result in the thesis that "there is nothing outside the text" and in the textual-ism or lingualism which, in Rorty's opinion, is the contemporary equivalent of nineteenth-century idealism.^[20] So if postmodernism, as presented by Lyotard, strongly reminds us of historism, historism in its turn possesses an innate talent for developing into postmodernism.

However, what clearly distinguishes the two is the ease with which they are prepared to problematize our conception of an objective (historical) reality in the manner we have just seen. One cannot, for example, doubt Ranke's robust confidence in the unproblematic existence of a past reality which is the object of historical research: "We merely observe one figure (Gestalt ) arising side by side with another figure; life, side by side with life; effect, side by side with countereffect. Our task is to penetrate them to the bottom of their existence and to portray them with complete objectivity."^[21] What is in historism merely a disquieting and paradoxical tendency—the subsumption of the historical world in language—is almost the postmodernist's point of departure. Obviously, we may expect that this tension between historism and postmodernism will provide us with the best clue for drawing up an inventory of the similarities and the dissimilarities of historism and postmodernism. Consequently, the question of the nature of historical reality and historical experience will be the main themes in the remainder of this essay. These notions are our best yardsticks for measuring the distance between historical reality and historical language.

2. Postmodernism and Historical lRepresentation

Historical writing claims to offer us a representation of historical reality. In view of this claim, representation is the notion in terms of which we can best formulate and analyze the kind of problems I referred to at the end of the last section. Obviously, these problems concern the relation between historical reality and its representation in the historical text. Since Baudril-

[20] R. Rorty, "Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism," in Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, Brighton, 1982.

[21] Iggers, Leopold von Ranke , 42.

lard's theory of the simulacrum is arguably the best developed postmodernist theory of representation, we find here our natural starting point. Baudrillard reminds us of Borges's story of the Emperor who wanted a map of his country so detailed and hence so large that the map in the end covered the whole of the Empire and became, in fact, a facsimile of the Empire itself. Because it is a facsimile, the map urges us to revise our intuitions about the relation between the represented and its representation: the representation is here, or at least tends to become, no less real than the represented itself. Thus reality itself tends to become a mere redundancy because of the presence of its representation(s). "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it," writes Baudrillard, "henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra —it is the map that engenders the territory."^[22] The result is the generation of a real without origin in reality itself: a hyperreal as Baudrillard calls it and we witness therefore in the process "the desert of the real itself" (note the double meaning of the word desert referring both to a movement of desertion and to the result of this movement).^[23] The obvious objection to Baudril-lard's argument is, of course, that in Borges's story, reality or the territory itself can hardly be said to surrender its logical priority to its map-like representation. No territory, no map.

However, later on Baudrillard presents us with a model of the simulacrum that is more effective than the Imperial map in upsetting our commonsensical intuitions about representation. He reminds us of the Iconoclasts, whose "millennial struggle," as he assures us, "is still with us today."^[24] The Iconoclasts were aware of the inclination of the believer to eliminate God himself and to recognize God's presence only in a disseminated form as embodied by the simulacra or images that have been made of Him. The believer worshipping God "through" his images will in the end transfer his devotion for God to the images that were intended only to "channel" her or his devotion. Here, indeed, the precession of simulacra is undeniably a historical and psychological fact and here we are truly justified in speaking of "the death of the divine referential."^[25] The example also justifies the idea of a hyperreality, that is, of a reality that is "more real" than reality itself. For if the believer is apparently inclined to experience the image or simulacrum of God as ontologically prior to God Himself, God's representation has become "more real" than God Himself. Thus simulacra are substituted for reality, an inversion that will inevitably render inapplicable and futile our traditional notions of "truth, reference and ob-

[22] J. Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations," in Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings , edited and with an introduction by Mark Poster, Cambridge, 1988, 166.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Baudrillard, Simulacra , 169.

[25] Ibid.

jective causes";^[26] 'hyperreality' and representation have driven out the represented or reality itself.^[27] The important conclusion we may draw from Baudrillard's argument is that this seemingly so natural, incontestable order of the represented and representation founded on the distinction between the two can no longer be unproblematically upheld for all cases. Insofar as the notion of representation is dependent on this distinction and on the order of the represented and representation, we had better abandon it. Note, furthermore, that this "murder of reality"^[28] is all the more surprising since—in contrast to the example of the Imperial map—the issue of mimesis, of what is a "good likeness" of God, has not even arisen. The spell of hyperreality is apparently so strong that it can afford a sovereign disregard for the issue of mimesis. This fact still further contributes to the primacy hyperreality apparently possesses over "divine" reality itself.

It might now be objected that Baudrillard's theory of the precession of the simulacra does indeed have a certain plausibility for the case of images of the Godhead, but that this is merely a speculation about the psychology of the believer which is a good deal less plausible for other instances of representation. Though I tend to agree with Baudrillard when he argues that the mechanisms that govern and explain the representation of the world in the modern media tend to dominate the represented, I believe that there is much truth in this objection. However, there is a domain in Western culture for which the thesis of the precession of the simulacra, as exemplified by the struggle of the Iconoclasts, possesses an immense plausibility. This is the domain of history and historical writing. For, as has been pointed out by constructivists and narrativist philosophers of history, historical reality itself is just as invisible to the eye as the God of the Iconoclast: we know it only in and by its representations. We have no previously given access to the reality described by Braudel in his Méditerranée, and we can say that, insofar as this reality has any life of its own, it owes this life to the simulacrum which Braudel has constructed of it. Certainly in this case the simulacrum precedes reality itself. Of that reality we can therefore say that it is as much "made" as "found," and the impossibility of distinguishing clearly and precisely between these two is not so much a thesis about the vagueness of the borderline between fiction and history (the fashionable interpretation of this state of affairs) as a questioning of the meaning of these words themselves if applied to historical writing. Thus the death or even "murder" of God has its exact analogue in the replacement of histori-

[26] Baudrillard, Simulacra , 168.

[27] Baudrillard, Simulacra , 170. For a roughly similar account of historical representation based on suggestions by Gombrich and Danto, see chap. 4 of this volume.

[28] Baudrillard, Simulacra , 170.

cal reality by historiographical hyperreality as soon as we accept the con-structivist's or the narrativist's ontological agnosticism. I am well-aware that we all feel a strong intuitive resistance to this demystification of historical reality: for what we are only too ready to do in the realm of theology, we are most reluctant to undertake for a domain of "scientific research," like the writing of history. We may therefore derive some comfort from the fact that for a domain of scientific research like psychology, a closely similar conception of reality has been proposed by no less an authority than Freud. In psychology, Freud wrote in his Interpretation of Dreams, psychic reality can be compared to the "virtual images" created by a microscope or binoculars: "Everything that can be an object of our internal perception is virtual, like the image produced in a telescope by the passage of light rays."^[29] If we investigate psychic reality, we investigate a "virtual" reality, a reality of images or of simulacra and not a reality that is the supposed origin of these images or simulacra.

Under the present circumstances we can do either of two things. We may conclude from the mechanism of the simulacra and from the operation of that mechanism in the writing of history that we cannot properly speak of historical representation at all. For, the term representation requires the presence of an independently given (historical) reality which is, next, represented in and by historical writing. Consequently, as postmodernists often argue, the postmodernist notion of the simulacrum is essentially a going "beyond" or against representation.^[30] And, in accordance with the postmodernist fascination with performance,^[31] one could at most say that historical writing offers us a presentation (instead of a representation ) of the past. In opposition to this strategy, I prefer to see the theory of the historical simulacrum as a theory of rather than against representation. My main reason for this alternative strategy is that meaningful debate takes place in disciplines like historical writing and psychology. So, despite the death or "murder" of the epistemological God, and despite the replacement of historical reality by the postmodernist notion of historiographical hyperreality, we cannot reduce historical accounts to the arbitrariness of mere presentations of the past. To put it differently, in view of the possibility of historical debate, we ought to see the postmodernist notion of the his-

[29] S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams , part 2, in Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , volume 5, London, 1953, 611.

[30] Connor, Postmodernist Culture , 212.

[31] Connor, Postmodernist Culture , 132-157; whether there really is a material difference between the modernist and the postmodernist views of representation can be doubted insofar as postmodernism could, perhaps, best be seen as modernism's self-awareness. This has been argued, for example, by Huyssen, After Divide , 209. The postmodernist's attack on representation could then beat be interpreted as a new theory of representation. This, in fact, is my position.

torical simulacrum as a challenge to clarify the nature of historical representation rather than as too facile an injunction to abandon the concept of representation for the writing of history altogether. The example of historical writing urges us to penetrate deeper into the secrets of the phenomenon of representation, instead of surrendering it as soon as the notion no longer immediately satisfies our commonsensical conceptions of representation. Since postmodernism is so strongly affiliated with art and aesthetics—where the issue of the adequacy of representation is indeed less urgent than in historical writing—postmodernists have too easily abandoned the notion of representation.

Maintaining and adopting, then, the notion of representation, we may ask what features we should attribute to it in conformity with postmodernist patterns of argument. First, it has been pointed out, for example by Jameson, that depthlessness results if the distinction between reality and representation becomes blurred.^[32] The explanation is as follows: The traditional opposition of language and reality effects a duplication in both language and reality. This duplication is the result of the fact that: l) this opposition is suggestive of a mimetic model of representation; and 2) mimetic representation always permits us to ask for the adequacy of representation (thus we saw in the previous paragraph that the possibility of meaningful historical debate seems to require the distinction between representation and the represented). If, then, representations can be rated according to their adequacy, the hierarchy of representations will have its counterpart in a corresponding hierarchization of represented reality itself. That is to say, what is "essential" in reality is accounted for in the more adequate representations, and what is merely contingent or "appearance" is accounted for in the less adequate ones. Hence, if we distinguish between language and reality, reality almost automatically will be structured into a foreground (what is essential) and a background (what is mere appearance) and an illusion of "depth" is thus created. This illusion of "depth" gives way to "depthlessness" and to the inapplicability of the distinction between the essence of reality and mere appearance as soon as the postmodernist simulacrum questions the traditional opposition between language and reality.

Furthermore, this argument has a peculiar implication for postmodernist art and aesthetics. Modernist art always distrusted (or even ridiculed) realist or naturalist art as a naive attempt to bridge the gap between the represented and its representation. For the modernist, the essence of reality was not where the realist painter believed to have found it. Because the postmodernist is no longer interested in this gap between

[32] F. Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984): 58.

representation and the represented, it can afford to be indifferent with regard to the question of realism. Duchamp's object trouvés and Warhol's Brillo boxes have situated themselves precisely in this gap and, by doing so, have rendered the problem of realist representation meaningless and beside the point. Similarly, the realist or even classicist tendencies of postmodern art^[33] should not be interpreted as a return to premodernist forms of representation but rather as a rhetorical ploy to heap ridicule on the pathos of the modernist struggles with the problem of the representation of reality.

Second, and more important, postmodernist depthlessness undoes the unity that the past possessed under the regime of modernism. Modernist philosophers of history will agree that, at first sight, the past is a chaotic manifold. Yet, if we penetrate below that chaotic surface, we are able to discover the deep structures that give to the past its unity and coherence. Postmodernist depthlessness, however, shaves off those deep-lying layers of the past that give to it its unity—and past reality disintegrates into a myriad of self-sufficient fragments. Postmodernism functions within the matrix of the detail and its leading concepts therefore are, in Alan Liu's dithyrambic enumeration: "particularism, localism, regionalism, relative autonomism, incommensurabilism, accidentalism (or contingency), anecdotalism, historicism—and to draw attention to a set of curiously prominent Greek prefixes in the method—'micro-,' 'hereto-' and 'poly-'ism."^[34] The postmodernist historiography of the microstorie, of Alltagsgeschichte, and of large part of the history of mentalities is paradigmatic of this fascination of the postmodernist historian with the detail and the contingent.

As a conclusion to this section, we may note that there are indeed two significant resemblances between the historist and the postmodernist theories of the representation of historical reality. First, to the historist rejection of speculative philosophies of history embodying the unity of the past corresponds the postmodernist's depthlessness and the postmodernist's conviction that no principle of unity lies below the surface of reality. Second, in both cases the irresistible gravitational pull of the detail is felt, though this pull is undoubtedly stronger in the case of postmodernism than in that of historism. For if historism is not essentialist with regard to the past as a whole, it remains, unlike postmodernism, essentialist with regard to the details of the past that are investigated by the historian. But even at that level, the postmodernist will resist a hierarchization of past re-

[33] One could think here of a number of painters discussed by Jencks, like James Valerio, Hockney, Erlebacher, or Roberts. See Jencks, Postmodernism , chaps. 3-6.

[34] A. Liu, "Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail" Representations 32 (Fall 1990): 78.

ality into what is essential and circumstantial. Historism is, from this point of view, a kind of halfway house between the essentialism of speculative philosophies on the one hand and postmodernism on the other—a state of affairs we might characterize by saying that postmodernism is a consistent and radical historism that is no longer content to stop halfway.

But to see these resemblances is, at the same time, to see where the historist and postmodernist theories of historical reality and of historical representation differ. It is true that neither historism nor even postmodernism will or can deny that history is an empirical discipline in which historical reality, however conceived, is described or represented on the basis of empirical data. However, the historist notion of historical reality will present us with relatively few problems if we wish to explain how historical reality provides the historian with the relevant historical data. I emphatically do not want to say that an account of the origin of historical data and of historical experience will be easy to give for the historist case; I only say that it will came less brain-racking problems for the historist than for the postmodernist. For, the postmodernist notion of the simulacrum and of historiographical hyperreality seems to leave no room whatsoever for the autonomy of historical reality and for an authentic historical experience of that reality. Here everything becomes construction. And it is here, therefore, that we encounter the truly profound difference between his-torism and postmodernism.

So the crucial difference between historism and postmodernism is to be sought in the role which both attribute to historical data and to historical experience. One should be clear, however, about the nature of the dispute. The historist and the postmodernist will agree that the historian studies his documents, reads his sources and his texts, and that these provide him with his data. At this, what one might call "phenomenological," level any dispute about how the historian collects his data or about how he experiences the past would surely be quixotic. The dispute, however, concerns the philosophical interpretation of this state of affairs. Historists will interpret the historian's procedure as an experience of an independently given historical reality; the postmodernist theorist of the simulacrum will have his doubts about the autonomy the historist attributes to past reality. Thus, the real dispute between the historist and the postmodernist concerns the nature of historical experience and the place of historical reality in the historian's experience of the past. To put it succinctly, we may wonder whether the postmodernist theory of historical writing, unlike that of historism, still leaves room for the authenticity of historical experience. That is, for an authentic experience of the past in which the past can still assert its independence from historical writing. To that question, the question of the postmodernist theory of historical experience, we shall now turn.

3. The Postmodernist Theory of Historical Experience

Discussing historical experience, Gadamer writes in his opus famosum : "However paradoxical it may seem, the concept of historical experience seems to me one of the most obscure we have."^[35] Indeed, historical experience has only seldom been investigated as such in philosophy of history. The explanation lies partly, it seems to me, in historical objectivism and in the peculiar form that this objectivism often took in historical thought. Objectivism required of the historian that he, in the famous words of Ranke, "efface himself," that he offer a "reenactment of the past" in his writing, from which the historian himself is as absent as possible. This objectivism made it difficult for the notion of historical experience to enter the scene of historical thought: these objectivist requirements seemed to leave no room at all for the very notion of the historian's experience of the past. For, the notion of historical experience inevitably requires the presence of a level (however defined) between the past itself and its adequate representation by the historian—and whatever happened at that leve could only compromise the reliability of the latter. It might be added that, paradoxically, historical thought has always been even more "objectivist" than the philosophical reflection on science. For, despite the efforts of historists and of a hermeneuticist like Dilthey (who attempted to do for history what Kant had achieved for the sciences), historical thought has always remained curiously satisfied with its pre-Kantian and preempiricist position. The "critique of experience," as we find it in eighteenth-century philosophy all the way down from Locke via Hume to Kant, has, in fact, simply no analogue in the history of historical thought. This absence of a critique of historical experience may explain why historical thought has always found itself without much defense against the textualist or idealist seductions as we find them (I would be the first to concede this point) in so much of contemporary postmodernist theory. Objectivism and textualism (or idealism) have been the two opposite extremes toward which historist thought always naturally gravitated without ever being able to find a reasonable synthesis or golden mean between the two.

If historical experience is so much a neglected theme in traditional historical thought, this is, indeed, even truer of postmodernism. One of the criticisms we may justifiably make of postmodernism is that it focuses so much on textual presentation and feels so little inclined to consider closely modernist accounts of the experiential basis for what is expressed and presented by the (historical) text. Postmodernism is often accused of

[35] H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method , trans. G. Barden and J. Gumming, New York, 1986, 310.

dismissing such an experiential basis as irrelevant; but instead of saying that postmodernism has a mistaken or cavalier notion of historical experience, it is better to say that it has, in fact, no theory of historical experience at all. Our present task of investigating the postmodernist theory of historical experience, therefore, puts us in the awkward position of first having to develop such a theory ourselves. Yet, such a theory must inevitably be outlined, however sketchily, for without it we shall be unable to map the differences and similarities of historism and postmodernism. As the reader will recall, such was the conclusion of the previous section.

In answering the question of the postmodernist theory of historical experience, I shall boldly take my point of departure in our experience of our personal past as given in the nostalgic recollection of that past. Who does not know that intense nostalgic yearning we may sometimes feel for a certain atmosphere or for a specific remote part of our personal past? Surely, if we do effectively possess the capacity to experience the past in the truest sense of the word, it is the feeling of nostalgia that bears the clearest sign of such experience and is likely to be the most suitable point of departure for discovering the nature of that experience. It is interesting that we feel an immediate resistance to such a strategy with regard to historical experience. For we tend to believe that our collective past, the obvious object of historical experience, is generically different from our personal past, so that the latter could never provide us with clues for an understanding of the former. But especially in the kind of empiricist investigation in which we are presently engaged, that is, in fact, a strange and even unprecedented resistance. Think of the empiricist account of science. As is well-known, the empirical foundation of science was often identified with sensory perception, hence, with how we as individuals experience the objects given to sensory perception. Empiricism is individualist. It has no use for the notion of a supraindividual subject of experience, and if such a notion were ever to be appealed to, the empiricist would rather see it as a kind of shorthand for how a number of individual scientists, as individuals, experience empirical reality. If, then, sensory perception as it ought to be attributed to the individual's experience of (a personal) reality is wholly acceptable within an empiricist account of the sciences, why should we wish to be more ascetic in the case of historical experience? Why should history be the kind of subject matter that can only be experienced by a quasi-Hegelian transindividual subject? Arguments to that effect will inevitably presuppose what they attempt to prove: for, what "neutral" vantage point is there outside subject and subject matter, from which such arrogant claims could be made as to how, in historical writing, subject and subject matter ought to be constituted? Moreover, turning the argument around, we will not find it difficult to model different forms of historical consciousness or of historical practice after the experience of our

personal past: "Die geschichtliche Wissenschaften," as Gadamer aptly remarks, "denken nut welter was in der Lebenserfahrung schon gedacht wird."^[36] Here one may think of the quasi-psychoanalytical tendencies attributed by such widely different authors as Goethe and Habermas to the historist conception of the past;^[37] we can think of the "neurosis" of the scienfistic approaches of the past advocated in the fifties and the sixties, or of the teleological aspirations aiming at Bildung and self-realization that are so conspicuously present in Hegelian, Marxist, or nationalist conceptions of the past. I certainly do not wish to imply that all writing of history can be fitted within the matrix of our (nostalgic) experience of our personal past; the foregoing only intends to call for a momentary "willing suspension of disbelief" in the feasibility of the strategy which is advocated here.

It will be my thesis, then, that nostalgia and the nostalgic remembrance of the past give us the most intense and the most authentic experience of the past, and that, consequently, nostalgia is our most suitable matrix if we wish to map the similarities and the dissimilarities of the historist and the postmodernist experience of the past. Taking nostalgia as our matrix for exploring historical experience, it will become clear in the course of this chapter that as far as historical experience is concerned, postmodernism can best be seen as a more sophisticated, and in any case, more consistent form of historism. Against the background of nostalgia, historism can be explained in terms of postmodernism, while the reverse does not hold. Besides, there is a more circumstantial reason for focusing on nostalgia. Contemporary discussions of nostalgia already suggest an elective affinity between nostalgia and the postmodernist attitude toward the past. Thus Shaw and Chase even go as far as saying that "some cultural critics have identified the whole experience of postmodernity as a kind of macronostalgia."^[38] I hasten to add, though, that I certainly do not intend to sub-

[36] Gadamer, Truth , 'The historical sciences only elaborate what is already thought in the experience of life' (my translation), 208.

[37] I refer to Goethe's statement: "Geschichte schreiben ist eine Art, sich das Vergangene yom Halse zu schaffen." (Writing history is a way to get rid of the past.) Quoted in F. Wagner, Geschichtswissenschaft , München, 1966, 248. For Habermas, see J. Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse , Frankfurt am Main, 1973, 262-300. Habermas explicitly makes the comparison in this volume of the psychoanalyst and the historian in the following passage: "Die Arbeit des Anaoytikers scheint sich zunächst mit der des Historikers zu decken; genauer, mit der des Archüologen, denn die Aufgabe besteht ja in der Rekonstruktion der Frühgeschichte des Patienten" (The task of the psychoanalyst seems to be the same as the historian's, or rather, the archaeologist's task, for the goal is a reconstruction of the early history of the patient) (282). Similar suggestions were made by Herbert Marcuse and Norman Brown.

[38] M. Chase and C. Shaw, "The Dimensions of Nostalgia," in Chase and Shaw, eds., The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia , Manchester, 1989, 15. See also the paragraph titled "The Nostalgia Mode" in Jameson, Postmodernism , 66-68. In his magnificent study of four testators of postmodernism, Megill devotes much attention to the role played by nostalgia in the work of the authors investigated by him. According to Megill, Heidegger is the most explicit of thefour "prophets of extremity" about what nostalgia should mean to the philosopher. However, if for Heidegger the nostalgic return to our origins requires an "undoing" or Destruktion of the history of ontology, his conception of nostalgia differs from the one advocated here. In the present essay it is essential that in nostalgic experience both the past and the present are accepted as such; indeed, the present is the dominant partner in the relationship between the two. For Heidegger's conception of nostalgia, see A. Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Berkeley, 1985; especially 120-125.

scribe to all the claims recently made by postmodernists concerning nostalgia and the way it manifests itself in contemporary culture.

The following stanzas from the poem "Einst und Jetzt," written by the Austrian romantic poet Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850), will give us the matrix of nostalgic experience we are looking for:

Möchte wieder in die Gegend,
Wo ich einst selig war,
Wo ich lebte, wo ich träumte,
Meiner Jugend schönstes Jahr!

Also sehnt' ich in der Ferne
Nach der Heimath mir zurück,
Wähnend, in der alten Gegend
Finde sich das alte Glück.

Endlich ward mir nun beschieden
Wiederkehr in's traute Thai;
Doch es ist dem Heimgekehrten
Nicht zu Muth wie dazurnal.

Wie man grüsset are Freunde
Grüss ich manchen lieben Ort;
Doch im Herzen wird so schwer mir
Denn mein Liebstes istja fort.^[39]

Lenau's poem presents us with what undoubtedly is the prototypical form of nostalgia: the nostalgic yearning for the lost days of one's childhood. Probably because childhood is both so clearly distinct from adult life and often endowed with the features of stability and fixity (I shall return to this in a moment), it functions as the favorite object of nostalgic experience. When considering the characteristics of nostalgia as expressed

[39] I wished I were again in the country, / Where I once was happy, / Where I lived and where I dreamt, / That most wonderful year of youth!

Thus I was longing from afar, / For childhood's native soil, / Expecting, that in the familiar setting / Childhood's bliss could be found again.

Finally it was given to me / To return tn the valley of my youth; / But to him who comes back home / It is not as in the days of old.

As one greets old friends / So I greet many a dear place; / But my heart becomes so heavy / For what was dearest is lost forever. (my translation)

N. Lenau, Sämtliche Werke in einem Banke: Herausgegeben von G. E. Barthel , Leipzig, n.d., 21.

by Lenau's poem, we will first observe that nostalgia is intimately related to an awareness of displacement or of being displaced. The subject of nostalgic experience is painfully aware of being where and when she does not want to be. What naturally is the center of our experience and our existence—the present and the here and now—is suddenly relegated to the periphery. It should be added that nostalgic "displacement" can be both temporal and spatial in nature (in Lenau's poem we encounter a combination and mutual reinforcement of both these forms of nostalgic displacement). If, however, we trace back the history of nostalgic displacement to its origins, spatial displacement appears to be the older of the two. For, the neologism nostalgia (a composition of the Greek words nosteoo —"to return home safely"—and algos —"pain") was coined in 1688 in a learned dissertation by the German physician Johannes Hofer to describe the mental afflictions of Swiss mercenaries fighting far from their native country—afflictions that might even result in attempts at suicide.^[40] It is tempting, though admittedly dangerous, to speculate on the causal relation existing between nostalgia and space and time, these two most fundamental categories of physical reality. Would it not follow that nostalgia provides us with a bridge between physical reality and the realm of emotion and feeling? Surely, many other feelings are causally related to aspects of physical reality. But the link between these other feelings and the objects that cause them ordinarily belong to the more contingent aspects of physical reality (e.g., pain, hunger, sexual arousal). Since nostalgia, on the contrary, is dependent upon these most fundamental categories of physical reality, we may perhaps believe that nostalgia must be a most "fundamental" feeling about our location in space and time, one which could possibly help us explain and hierarchize other more contingent feelings.

What most requires our attention in the present discussion is, however, the following. The main point Lenau wishes to make in the stanzas I quoted is that nostalgia always urges us to undo 'displacement' but without ever actually succeeding in achieving this goal (Sehnsucht, that untranslatable term of German romanticism, aptly sums up this combination of desire and frustration in which desire and the frustration of desire both presuppose and reinforce each other). For, contrary to the hopes and expectations of the poet, returning to the valleys where he spent his youth did not result in a satisfaction of nostalgic yearning. It did not realize for the poet the goal or motive of this return: an identification with the boy he had been so many years ago. If we consider the goal-means relationship of practical reasoning, nostalgia presents us with a goal that selects the means that can never realize the goal while, paradoxically, this seems to be precisely the goal of nostalgic Sehnsucht. This may remind one of Kant's

[40] F. Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, New York, 1979, 1ff.

definition of aesthetic beauty as "Zweckmäsigkeit ohne Zweck" (purposefulness without purpose), and that would justify us in attributing an aesthetic quality to the object of nostalgic desire.

At the same time we find here the crucial difference between the historist and the postmodernist; nostalgic experience of the past. The historist experience of the past aims at an identifying Verstehen, at a reliving of the past, an immersion in the past; for, the historist historical experience is to have, once again, the same experiences that do belong to the past itself (which, in fact, results in an elimination of historical experience since past experience can not be equated with an experience of the past). His-torism and nineteenth-century hermeneutics, when striving for a revelation of "wie es eigentlich gewesen," for a Rankean "self-effacement" of the historian, aimed, therefore, at an elimination of historical experience in the proper sense of the word. The nostalgic experience of the past, on the contrary, by consistently upholding the unattainability of the past, respects the distance or difference that is necessary for the possibility of historical experience.

This distinction between the historist and the postmodernist experience of the past can be further detailed if we take into account the spectrum of emotions involved in nostalgia. Nostalgia, as is demonstrated by the stanzas quoted from Lenau's poem, is a strange mixture of happiness and disappointment. One speaks of nostalgia as "joy clouded with sadness" or of the "bitter-sweetness" of nostalgic yearning.^[41] Evidently, the feeling of joy or of sweetness is provoked by the magic of a past that we know we have irretrievably lost. Yet—and this is important—the feeling should not be related to an identification with, or a recapturing of, the object of nostalgic longing. Nostalgia is not a reliving of the past. This is already clear from the curious but often-cited fact that one may feel nostalgia for periods one objectively knows to have been periods of unhappiness; and why should we wish to relive an unhappy period in our personal past?^[42] Even more significant here is the feeling of bitterness that always accompanies the nostalgic experience of the past. For, what the latter feeling reflects is the unattainability of the object of nostalgic yearning; it originates in an

[41] Davis, Yearning , 14, 27.

[42] D. Lowenthal, "Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn't," in M. Chase and C. Shaw, eds., The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia , Manchester, 1989, 19. The presentist bias Lowenthal attributes to nostalgia is in agreement with the view of nostalgia advocated here. See also D. Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country , Cambridge, 1985, 4-13. Davis gives a similar account: "Some will, to be sure, allow that their nostalgia is tinged frequently with a certain sadness or even melancholy but are then inclined to describe it as 'a nice sort of sadness'—'bittersweet' is an apt word occasionally used." See Davis, Yearning , 14. Davis, for that matter, is no less insistent than Lowenthal about the presentism of the nostalgic past: the nostalgic past "is a past imbued with special qualities, which, moreover, acquires its significance from the particular way we juxtapose it to certain features of our present life" (Davis, Yearning , 13).

impotent awareness that we can never actually recapture or reabsorb the faraway object of nostalgic desire. The result is that nostalgia robs the object of nostalgic desire of the concrete existence that it did still possess in the historist account of historical experience. The truth therefore is that what we experience historically in nostalgia is not "the past itself" (as conceived by the historist), but the difference or the distance between the present and the past. The topic of Lenau's poem is not the childhood of the poet itself (as the historist would read the poem) but the difference between "Einst und Jetzt," between the childhood and the present of the poet. Put differently—and from an opposite point of view—one might say that nostalgia gives us the unity of the past and the present: for, the experience of difference requires the simultaneous presence of what lies on both ends of the difference, that is, of both the past and the present. In the experience of difference, the past and the present are united. However, they are both present only in their difference —and it is this qualification that permits us to express the paradox of the unity of past and present. But in both cases, whether we prefer to see nostalgia as the experience of difference or as the unity of past and present, difference becomes central while the past and the present themselves are reduced to mere derivative phenomena. The past no longer is the "real" object it was for historism. The "reality" experienced in nostalgia is difference itself and not what lies at the other side of the difference—that is, "the past" as such. The nostalgic experience of the past in not a kind of bridge permitting us to go back to a reified past itself. This fact about nostalgia has been well expressed by Lowenthal with the observation that "what we are nostalgic for is not the past as it was or even as we wish it were, but for the condition of having been."^[43] This "having been" is the pure category of difference embodying the distinction between the historist and the postmodernist experience of the past.

Further confirmation of this claim about nostalgic difference can be found in the topoi of et in arcadia ego and of the pastoral that for a long time in Western history have been the expression for social or collective nostalgia. What must strike us about these topoi is that they are completely—and deliberately—without historical content; they were, as such, the pure manifestations of difference and therefore ideally suited for expressing nostalgia. It is not surprising, then, that these old topoi of nostalgia silently but suddenly disappeared from the Western cultural repertoire with the advent of historism.^[44] For, historism gave Western man an objectified, reified past. And by doing so, it absorbed the dimension of difference as embodied in the traditional topoi of nostalgia, in the by now rei-

[43] Lowenthal, "Nostalgia," 29.

[44] I owe this information to Dr. W. E. Krul.

fled past itself. Nostalgia, as an attitude toward the past, became suspect since its resistance to the reification of the past seemed to question and even to endanger historical truth. For what historical truth can there be if there is not a past "historical" object that historical truth is truth about? Hence, for example, Lasch's fierce condemnation of nostalgia: for Lasch, the nostalgic person merely is "an incurable sentimentalist afraid of the future" and no less "afraid to face the truth about the past."^[45] This clearly is the historist's verdict for nostalgia.

Its propensity to objectify the past inspired in historism a love for a past which has the fixed and clearly articulated contours that physical objects typically possess. The historist past is a "clear and distinct" past and the historist is therefore above all interested in those features of the past that express or define this clarity and distinctness. Historist historical writing is a science of demarcations and of the distinction between foreground (the important) and background (the unimportant). Distinction and difference are for the historist, above all, distinction and difference within the past itself. Nostalgic difference, however, is paramountly a difference between past and present, and this effects a melting together of the clear lines and contours projected onto the past by historism: differences within the past itself yield to the differences between past and present. At the level of the experience of our personal past, this phenomenon has been described by Davis in the following way:

During the developmental transition from adolescence to adulthood it is, on the mundane plane of daily life, the anxieties, uncertainties, and feelings of strangeness about the present and future that constitute figure for the youth while ground is composed of familiar and likable persons, places, and identifies from the past. "Without really changing a thing" (and thus sparing one's being self-accusations of distortion or falsification), the nostalgic reaction inverts the perspective: the warmly textured past of memory that was merely backdrop suddenly emerges as figure while the harshly etched silhouette of current concerns fades into ground .^[46]

This may explain the associations with a kind of Stoic, stable order that are often mobilized by nostalgia and where the nostalgically desired past seems to differ so conspicuously from the unpredictable vicissitudes of the present. The nostalgic past is largely a silent and static past inhospitable to the clear and forceful patterns of historical evolution that the historist always likes to discover in the past. The nostalgic past privileges background, stability, and the structures of stability at the expense of change and of what permits narrativization. Hence the interest in postmodernist historical writing for the insignificant and the contingent—or, rather for

[45] Quoted in Lowenthal, "Nostalgia," 20.

[46] Davis, Yearning , 58.

what is condemned by the historist as insignificant and contingent. Hence also the—at first sight—amazing coalescence in postmodernist historical writing of structutalism and a preoccupation with the apparently meaningless and redundant: both have their common origin in the emancipation of the background at the expense of the foreground.

In the foregoing I repeatedly moved from the nostalgic experience of our personal past to the domain of historical writing about times and places outside our personal experience. It has been my thesis that a historical experience of the past outside or before our personal past is possible. Two closely related objections can be formulated against this enlargement of the range of (nostalgic) historical experience. First, it may be argued that "the past which is the object of nostalgia must in some fashion be a personally experienced past":^[47] one does not feel a nostalgic desire for the childhood of somebody else. Second, one might object that nostalgia can never be a model for historical experience since no experience of the past, either nostalgic or otherwise, is ever possible. Experience, so the objection runs, is inevitably a matter of the present, so that an experience of the past is ruled out by the very meaning of the word experience. But this objection confuses experience of with experience in: surely all experience takes place in the present but it does not necessarily follow (unless some additional semantic provisions are made) that the possibility of an experience of the past is unthinkable because of that undeniable fact. Conceding this, our imaginary objector might now point out that the object of historical experience is, at most, the evidence the past has left us but not the past itself. Hence, the notion of a (nostalgic) experience of the past confuses the experience of evidence with the experience of what the evidence is evidence for. Yet, as everybody who has some personal acquaintance with the phenomenon of nostalgia will recognize, this distinction between evidence and what the evidence is evidence for is inappropriate in the case of nostalgia. For, nostalgia clearly has nothing to do with inferences on the basis of evidence; it really is an experience of the past—no more and no less. In view of this argument about the nature of nostalgia, the imaginary objector might now be willing to grant that we can, albeit in a slightly contaminated sense of the word, nostalgically experience the past in the sense of our experiencing again the same feelings we know to have had in a remote part of our personal past. To the extent that nostalgia is indeed successful in "copying" (or in "reliving") these ancient feelings one might speak of an experience of the past.

Both objections have in common that they restrict the range of potential nostalgic experience to a past that we did actually experience before (at the time that it was present). This position can be further clarified by

[47] Davis, Yearning ; 8.

taking into account the obvious parallelism of nostalgia and memory. For is not nostalgia memory invested with a specific emotion? And, indeed, memory presents us with a picture roughly similar to the one we encountered in the previous paragraph. Nobody would object to the assertion that we remember something of our childhood. On the other hand, we cannot properly say that we remember the taking of the Bastille. We may say that we know that the Bastille was taken on July 14th, 1789, or that we "remember" this fact in the sense that a statement asserting that fact is stored in our memory, but since we were not present at the occasion itself, we could not say in the proper sense of the word that we remember the taking of the Bastille. It would be worthwhile therefore, in this context, to strictly distinguish between remembering and remembering that. The latter phrase is merely synonymous with knowing that, while what is known is either an event in the past or a fact we have learned about the past. But in both these cases remembering that lacks the associations with experience and feeling that are undoubtedly part of remembering in the former sense. Since nostalgia was defined a moment ago as memory invested with feeling, nostalgia is semantically related to remembering and not to remembering that. If, then, together with remembering, nostalgia remains firmly locked within the narrow limits of the experience of our personal past, the conclusion follows that nostalgia is an unsuitable model for the historian's experience of the past,

Against these two objections it can be pointed out, first, that it would be quixotic to deny the all-too-evident nostalgia in, for example, Petrarch's or Hölderlin's fascination with classical antiquity, in Ruskin's or Viollet-le-Duc's idealization of the Middle Ages, or in Michelet's exaltation of the great Revolution (to which I shall shortly return).^[48] Feeling a nostalgic yearning for a historical period antedating our birth by many centuries is a fairly common phenomenon both for historians and nonhistorians. And one must not forget that Braudel's Méditerranée, which is often regarded as the highest achievement of twentieth-century historical writing begins with the openly nostalgic declaration: "J'ai passionément aimé la Médi-

[48] Exemplary for nostalgic longing for a remote past is the last stanza from Hölderlin's "Griechenland":

Mich verlangt ins bessre Land hinüber,
Nach Alcäus and Anakreon,
Und ich schlief' im engen Hause lieber
Bei den Heiligen in Marathon;
Ach! es sei die letzte meiner Tränen,
Del dem heil'gen Griechenlande rann;
Lasst, o Parzen, lasst die Schere tönen,
Denn mein Herz gehört den Toten an!
(F. Hölderlin, Ausgewählte Werke , Köln, n.d., 251.)

terranée." Next, it will be noted that if the objections formulated above against the nostalgic experience of the past are accepted, the corollary is hard to avoid that no experience of the past (nostalgic or otherwise) is possible at all. And that would certainly imply a most counterintuitive characteristic of a self-professed empirical discipline like the writing of history.

Yet, it may still be argued that an unprejudiced view of nostalgia relentlessly requires us to reject as mere delusion the conviction of authenticity that ordinarily accompanies the nostalgic experience of a faraway past. And, indeed, this resistance to the nostalgic experience of a remote past certainly is appropriate if we accept the historist (or positivist) objectification of the past. If the past is seen as an object (or totality of objects), albeit immensely complex, then these object(s) inevitably belong to the past and then historical evidence truly is the sole, but disappointing, candidate for the role of the object of historical experience. When Gadamer observes, as we saw at the beginning of this section, that historical experience is a much neglected topic in historical theory, this undoubtedly has its explanation in the fact that, from a historist or positivist (or even from a con-structivist or narrativist) point of view, the notion of historical experience is hard, if not impossible, to make sense of. However, if the nostalgic experience of the past is understood as an experience of difference —and not of a past object lying at the other side of the difference between the past and the present—we get a different picture. For historical experience, as the experience of difference, dispenses with the (historist or positivist) postulate of the past as a kind of fixed object that is paradoxically forever outside the range of our potential experience and of which experiential knowledge is therefore sui generis impossible. This is precisely the lesson that is taught to us by Lenau's poem: nostalgic remembrance is in Lenau's poem an authentic encounter with the past permitting us to have an authentic experience of our (personal) past, and yet this does not presuppose that the past is made present again in some way or another (so that it can be experienced as a contemporary facsimile of the past).

On the contrary, all the interest of the nostalgic experience of the past lies in the fact that nostalgia is not a "re-enactment of the past." And if this is true, our personal, nostalgically remembered past is not categorically different from a past that is either a collective past or a past of several centuries ago—or even both at the same time. Nostalgia is not suggestive of the historist or positivist notion of a past "as such" and of the reification of the past into a strange kind of object that is part of the inventory of a world antedating ours. Indeed, for the historist or the positivist, the nostalgic experience of the past is an inexplicable mystery, so the kind of experience that it gives will necessarily be seen as a delusion by them. But the nostalgic experience of the past is not a problem that we should try to explain with the help of historist or positivist assumptions with regard to the

relationship between past and present: it is a datum that we should exploit as much as possible in order to deepen our insight into our relationship to the past. To put it differently, we must avoid trying to fit the nostalgic experience of the past within the historist or positivist conception of the past—for in that case the phenomenon of the nostalgic remembrance of the past is only confusing. The value of nostalgia lies precisely in the fact that it effectively questions historist and positivist assumptions and, by doing so, extends the range of (potential) historical experience in a way that was hitherto inconceivable. In short, as soon as we have abandoned historism and positivism and see historical experience in terms of the nostalgic experience of difference, there are no insurmountable obstacles to the notion of the historical experience of a remote and collective past. It is here, then, that we encounter the contribution of the notion of nostalgia to historical thought. If the notion of nostalgia is consistently purged of its associations with sentimentalism and with a spurious idealization (i.e., reification!) of the past it will be a most useful and welcome instrument for clarifying our understanding of the past and of how we experience it.

Within the matrix of the nostalgic experience of the past, we can further develop the similarities and the differences between historism and postmodernism. It is true that when historism rejected the ahistorical world view of the seventeenth century, of rationalist natural law theory, this rejection was mainly motivated by an acute awareness of the difference between historical periods. In his so-called Ideenlehre, Humboldt had argued that each historical period possesses its own historical idea which embodies its differences from other periods. However, if we bear in mind the matrix of the nostalgic experience of the past, historism sought to reify each of these historical periods and, by doing so, to present them as objects of historical experience.^[49] One may think here of Ranke's well-known statement: "But I assert, every epoch is immediate to God, and its worth is not at all in what derives from it but rests in its own existence (my emphasis), in its own self."^[50] Thanks to this tendency to reify the past, historist historical practice at times suggested an intellectual mentality coming quite close to that of positivism.^[51] The paradox of a philosophy of history that is so com-

[49] W. von Humboldt, "On the Historian's Task," in G. G. Iggers and K. von Moltke, eds., Leopold von Ranke: The Theory and Practice of History , New York, 1973, 22.

[50] L. von Ranke, "On Progress in History," in G. G. Iggers and K. von Moltke, eds., Leopold von Ranke: The Theory and Practice of History , New York, 1973, 53.

[51] In the practice of nineteenth-century historical writing, historism gradually degenerated into a quasi-positivist theory emphasizing a respect for very detailed historical studies which kept as close as possible to historical evidence. The evolution from historism to positivism is exemplified in the scholarly career of the Dutch historian Robert Fruin (1823-1899). See J. Tollebeek, De toga van Fruin: Denhen over geschiedenis in Nederland sinds 1860 , Amsterdam, 1990, 16-56.

pletely dependent upon the hypothesis of difference but that is nevertheless reluctant to grant difference the role it ought to play, can, at least partially, be explained by the historist ideal of Universalgeschichte ("Universal history") that lingered on in historist historical thought for most of the nineteenth century. Universalgeschichte was seen as the context of contexts within which all the elements of the past could be integrated and given their logical or historical place. As such, Universalgeschichte had a double function. First, it was suggestive of that fixed logical or historical place of all historical elements and so functioned as a standing invitation to reify the past. Second, Universalgeschichte indeed epitomized all the relevant differences between historical periods—and between the present and the past—but it gave to the recognition of difference the status of a pious afterthought that had no significance for historical practice whatsoever. Universalgeschichte thus became a storehouse in which the paradoxes and inconsistencies of historism could be conveniently put out of sight so that they could no longer hinder historist historical theory and practice.

From the point of view of the historist reification of the past, the postmodernist experience of (nostalgic) difference will be labeled as either the experience of the reality of unreality or the experience of the unreality of reality. For the historist the (nostalgic) experience of the past must therefore have an air of mystique and almost religious revelation. Such indeed appears to be the case if we consider how a historist such as Friedrich Meinecke discusses the nostalgic experience of the past. Meinecke quotes a passage from Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit in which Goethe describes an experience of the past that is completely in agreement with what has been said up till now about the nostalgic experience of the past. Referring to a most intense experience of the past he had had when visiting Strasbourg Cathedral and, in the same year, 1774, the venerable home of an old patrician family, Goethe writes:

A feeling that overwhelmed me more and more, and that I hardly succeeded in expressing, was the experience of the past and the present as one: an experience that brought something spectral into the present. The feeling is expressed in many of my larger and smaller works and always worked out satisfactorily in poetry, though the feeling had to appear as inexplicable and perhaps even as disagreeable each time as it presented itself in life itself. (my translation)^[52]

[52] "Ein Gefühl aber das bei mir gewaltig äberhand nahm und sich nicht wundersam genug äussern könnte, war die Empfindung der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart in Eins: eine Anschauung, die etwas Gespenstermässiges in die Gegenwart brachte. Sic ist in vielen meiner grösseren und kleineren Arbeiten ausgedrückt, und wirkt im Gedicht immer wohltätig, ob ale gleich im Augenblick, wo sie sich unmittelbar am Leben und im Leben selbst ausdrückte, jederman seltsam, unerklärlich, vielleicht unerfreulich scheinen musste" (quoted in F. Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus , München, 1965, 463).

Obviously, the experience of the unity of past and present recorded by Goethe is an experience of the difference between the two that can only be experienced in this momentary union (we noted this relationship a moment ago). The historist Meinecke is profoundly struck by Goethe's historical experience: "one's heart misses a beat upon reading these really most remarkable words." And he goes on to emphasize that Goethe's remark does indeed bring us to "the deepest problems of historism."^[53] Nevertheless, Meinecke's own clarification of Goethe's historical experience is paradigmatic of historism—and of historism's shortcomings. For, in Meinecke's view, the unity of past and present as experienced by Goethe "tore the poet away to a higher atmosphere in which, now held, he floated above all historical epochs" (my translation).^[54] We can observe here in Meinecke's analysis the time-honored historist reflex to project the differences between past and present on the scale of Universalgeschichte. The unity of past and present, in which their difference from one another is experienced, is now seen from a transhistorical perspective and its concreteness is neutralized into a timeless insight. What distinguished Goethe's experience of the past from that of the historist—the prominence in it of the present—is relegated to the background again by Meinecke's appeal to the transhistorical dimension of Universalgeschichte.

It will be helpful to compare Meinecke's analysis to the account given by Huizinga—another self-professed historist—of what he referred to as historical sensation. We shall see that Huizinga comes closer to a postmodernist account of historical experience than Meinecke. For, Huizinga explicitly underlines the role of the present in historical sensation when he contrasts historical sensation with that loss of the historical subject in the past that is traditionally associated with the doctrine of Nacherleben.^[55] Instead, Huizinga argues, historical sensation ought to be compared to our understanding of music. A most appropriate comparison if we recall Lévi-Strauss's characterization of music as "instrumental for the obliteration of

[53] Ibid.: "es kann einem bei diesen indertat seltsamen Worten einen Augenblick das Herz stille stehen. . . Dieses 'Eins' aber führt nun überhaupt in die tiefsten Problemen des Historismus" (my translation).

[54] "Entrückte den Dichter in eine höhere Sphäre, in der er nun ergriffen, über den Zeiten schwebend, weilte" (Meinecke, Entstehung , 465).

[55] J. Huizinga, Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance: Essays by Johan Huizinga , trans. J. S. Holmes and H. van Marle, Princeton, 1984, 54. For a discussion of Huizinga's conception of historical sensation, see the excellent dissertation on Huizinga by W. E. Krul, Historicus tegen de tijd: Opstellen over leven en werk van J. Huizinga , Groningen, 1990, 230ff.; and F. W. N. Hugenholtz, "Huizinga's historische sensatie als onderdeel van her inter-pretatieproces," Forum der Letteren XX (1979): 398-404. The latter discussion is disappointing.

I want to thank Dr Krul for his help in this part of my argument. See also my, De Historische Ervaring , Groningen, 1993.

time."^[56] A melody is only heard or understood if the differences in sound and pitch are heard together in a movement, which is analogous to what happens in the nostalgic experience of the past.

Historical sensation, Huizinga continues, is not "an aesthetic enjoyment, a religious emotion, an awe of nature, a metaphysical recognition—and yet it is a figure in this series." It may be evoked "by a line from a document or chronicle, by a print, by a few notes from an old song."^[57] It is the momentary dizzying experience of sudden obliteration of the rift between present and past, an experience in which the past for a fractional moment reveals itself "as it is, or was." But this as it is is not the historist's wie es eigentlich gewesen, but the past invested with difference. The latter, crucial assertion is clarified by Huizinga when he writes that the object of historical sensation is not something the author of a book has himself placed in a remote past in that book. On the contrary, as Huizinga recognizes, the present-day historian "brings it to the author; it is his response to the writer's [that is, the author's] call" (my emphasis).^[58] Once again, the feeling of complete authenticity that accompanies historical experience and historical sensation is not the experience of an event or object in the past, similar to how we may experience the objects that are given to us in daily life, but an experience in which both the past and the present have their role to play. Huizinga proposes here, in fact, what we have learned to see as the postmodernist view of historical experience.^[59]

[56] C. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to the Science of Mythology , New York, 1969, 16.

[57] Huizinga, Men and Ideas , 54.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Since my argument here is strongly dependent upon the views expounded by Gadamer in Truth and Method , it may be worthwhile—or even my duty—to define my own position with regard to Gadamer's conception of historical experience.

As far as essentials are concerned—the thesis of the historicity of historical experience—Gadamer's position and the one advocated here are identical. I heartily agree with Gadamer when he observes: "It is, in fact, the main lack in the theory of experience hitherto—and this includes Dilthey himself—that it has been entirely orientated towards science and hence takes no account of the inner historicality of experience" (Gadamer, Truth , 310-311). Historical experience is historical, not simply because the past is the object of historical experience but also because historical experience is itself part of a history. For as Gadamer demonstrates—having in mind nineteenth-century historists and hermeneuticists, with the possible exception of Droysen—it is very well possible and even tempting to sustain ahistorical, transcendentalist accounts of how we must conceive of historical experience in the historical discipline. To historicize historical experience requires a historicization of the transcendental "distance" between the historian and the object of historical experience. Gadamer achieved this historicization predominantly with the help of his concept of Wirkungsgeschichte that will be discussed in the next paragraph of this chapter.

Yet, from this point Gadamer's path and mine diverge, mainly because the domain of historical writing that is at stake in this discussion—the history of mentalities—differs from the one Gadamer has in mind. I have no wish to disagree with what Gadamer writes about the place and function of hermeneutics in, for example, intellectual history and the history of philosophy.

However, with regard to the domain of the history of mentalities, my argument differs from Gadamer's in the matter of the relationship between the historian, the object of historical experience, and how the "distance" between the two ought to be historicized. Gadamer discusses at some length Hegel's account of experience, and though he feigns a certain aloofness from Hegel's account—"Hegel's dialectical description of experience has some [my emphasis] truth" (Gadamer, Truth , 318)—it seems to me that there is no real, or at least no fundamental disagreement between Hegel and Gadamer from our present perspective. For Hegel, experience is our means for "appropriating" the world and for making it part of ourselves and our identity: Erfahrung is the crucial factor in the process of Bildung , the process by which we articulate our personality and our identity. Thus, Gadamer approvingly quotes Hegel as follows: "The principle of experience contains the infinitely important element that in order to accept a content as true, the man himself must be present or, more precisely, he must find the content in unity and combined with the certainty of himself," and he adds the following comment: "The concept of experience means precisely this, that this kind of unity is first established. This is the reversal of the direction that consciousness undergoes when it recognizes itself in what is alien and different" (Gadamer, Truth , 318). And in the remainder of his exposition, Gadamer makes no attempts to question this aspect of Hegel's account of experience.

As will become clear at the end of this essay, my view of historical experience and of the object of historical experience is, in fact, the exact opposite of Gadamer's (and Hegel's). The object of historical experience, for me, is the experience of what used to be part of ourselves but has become strange, alien, or defamiliarized. Historical experience, in this essay, is not (as is the case with Gadamer) an attempt to "appropriate" the world, to demonstrate the world so that we can feel at home in it. For me, the past and the object of historical experience, at least in the history of mentalities, only comes into being when a part of ourselves or of our cultural identity takes on an independence of its own and, thus, can be objectified historically. The movement is not a movement toward the Hegelian absolute spirit, but precisely a dissolution of the absolute spirit.

And there is a second difference. Later on in his book Gadamer writes: "The hermeneutical experience is concerned with what has been transmitted in tradition. This is what is to be experienced. But tradition is not simply a process that we learn to know and be in command of through experience; it is language, ie it expresses itself like a 'Thou'" (Gadamer, Truth , 320); the textualism of this statement is further reinforced by the observation: "everything written is, in fact, in a special way the object of hermeneutics" (Gadamer, Truth , 356). For Gadamer, language and text are the natural objects of historical experience. The explanation provided by Gadamer himself is that the historian encounters the past most often in the form of written texts (books, inscriptions, documents) (Gadamer, Truth , 352). Naturally, all this results in a textualization of the past. But the argument need not be convincing in all cases. Surely, in the fields of intellectual history and the history of philosophy Gadamer's textualization of the past seems defensible. However, if we think of Goethe's and Huizinga's historical experience (and of what must have occasioned these experiences), it will be obvious that we go beyond the domain of the written word here. Moreover, in this paragraph, historical experience was related to nostalgia as the prototype of an authentic experience of the past. And the nostalgic experience of the past is only contingently related to language and writing. See also my "Enkele inleidende opmerkingen over tekst en context in de geschiedbeoefening," Groniek 115 (1992): 7-23.

Most notable in Goethe's and Huizinga's accounts is the distinctly episodic character of historical experience. Both Goethe's and Huizinga's recollections of their historical sensations suggest a sense of being suddenly overwhelmed by the past's self-revelation. Nostalgia can once more be of help if we wish to develop the consequences of this episodic character of historical experience. We must observe that the events in our personal history that may trigger a nostalgic yearning are only rarely, and certainly not necessarily, the kind of events we hold to be of great significance in the story of our life. Thus we may nostalgically recall a certain atmosphere at a quite specific moment in our parental home or a holiday with our family; but we will seldom have nostalgic memories of having passed a particular examination or of having been promoted to a more responsible position. And yet, it is events of the latter kind that make up the narrative story of our life and constitute the items for our curriculum vitae or of the memoirs of an elderly statesman. Narrative coherence may guarantee the easiest access to the past but it obscures the authenticity of our experience of it. What has been appropriated and mastered narratively is no longer accessible to historical experience.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this thesis of the episodic character of historical experience. First, insofar as historical writing wishes to remain as true as possible to the episodic character of historical experience, it will necessarily repeat at the level of historical representation the features of the fragmented, the contingent, and the isolated. No doubt the microstorie, the history of mentalities, and Alltagsgeschichte, with its interest in the insignificant details of daily life, best satisfy these requirements within the compass of postmodernist historiography. And this is no mere antiquarianism. For the "fetishistic appropriation of objects" that Bann sees as characteristic of antiquarianism presupposes that the past is given to us in the form of autonomous objects and this reflects the historist's tendency to reify the past rather than the postmodernist's preference for the elusive difference between past and present.^[60] Second, the matrix of nostalgia may make us aware of what is misleading in Paul Ricoeur's and David Carr's account of historical narrative. According to Ricoeur and Cart, all of our life and all of history is permeated by narrative.^[61] Their argument is that all our actions and all our deliberations preceding action take place in a thoroughly narrativized world. However, the opposition we observed a mo-

[60] S. Bann, "Clio in Part: On Antiquarianism and the Historical Fragment," in Bann, The Inventions of History , Manchester, 1990, 120. I commented on the fetishism of historism in F. R. Ankersmit, "Historische representativiteit," in Ankersmit, De navel van de geschiedenis , Groningen, 1990, 220ff.

[61] P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative , Chicago, 1983; D. Carr, Time, Narrative, and History, Bloomington, 1986.

ment ago between the isolated event, that is the object of historical experience, and the coherence of narrative indicates that the rule of narrative is not universal. There is an attitude toward the past that is not only free from, but even inimical toward narrative.

The latter claim can be clarified when we take a look at Michelet. For, Michelet is at the same time the greatest narrator and the most nostalgic of nineteenth-century historians—and perhaps even of all modern historians. Michelet "'revit,' 'refait' et 'souffre' la Révolution"^[62] in narrating its history and therefore invested more in narrative than any other historian since it was his sole means for "reliving" and "remaking" that most glorious part of French history. And for Michelet's nostalgic yearning for the French Revolution we only have to read the 1847 preface where Michelet depicts himself sitting on the windy plane of the Champ de Mars and musing about the enthusiasm and almost religious fervor of the revolutionary feasts that took place there fifty-seven years before:

You are alive!. . . I feel it, each time when in this part of the year my teaching leaves me to myself, when work weighs heavily upon me, when the summer heat becomes oppressive. . . . Then I go to the Champ de Mars, it is the only monument that the Revolution has left. . . . The Empire has its column and has almost appropriated to itself alone the Arc de Trimophe; the Kingdom has its Louvre, its Invalides; the feudal cathedral of 1200 still has its throne at Notre Dame; it is only the Romans, who only have the thermae of Caesar. And the Revolution has as its monument. . . emptiness. . . (my translation)^[63]

All the bitterness and sweetness of the nostalgic longing for a forever-unattainable past are present here. And almost every page of the Histoire de la Révolution Française testifies to Michelet's continuous awareness of the "difference" between a decrepit present and those glorious days of the great Revolution he so much wanted to experience and to relive as a part of his own life. But it is an impossible striving, as he himself realizes at those very moments when he comes closest to it:

I lost my father with whom I had lived all my life, for forty-eight years. When that happened to me, I looked around myself, I was elsewhere, I hastily finished this work that I had dreamt of for such a long time. I was standing

[62] J. Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution Française , vol. 1, Paris, 1952, xxi.

[63] Tu vis!. . . Je le sens, chaque fois qu'à cette époque de l'année mon enseignement me laisse, et le travail pèse, et la saison s'alourdit Alors je vais au Champ de Mars, voilà le seul monument qu'a laissé la Révolution L'Empire a sa colonne, et il a pris presque à lui seul l'Arc de Triomphe; la royauté a son Louvre, ses Invalides; la féodale église de 1200 trône encore à Notre-Dame; il n'est pas jusqu'aux Romains, qui n'aient les Thermes de César. Et la Révolution a pour monument. . . le vide. . . (J. Michelet, Histoire , 1.)

below the Bastille, I took the fortress, I placed on its towers the immortal flag. . . . This blow came to me, unforeseen, like a bullet from the Bastille. (my translation)^[64]

Precisely at the moment when the past became almost as real as a "balle de la Bastille," the past sent him back to the present; having come closer to a "resurrection" of the past than ever before, he is thrown back again into the desolation of the present.

In accordance with what was just said about the episodic character of the nostalgic experience of the past, we may expect that Michelet will feel tempted to yield to the urge to exclude the Revolution from the majestic flow of his narrative of French history. In a brilliant analysis of Michelet's historical writing, Gossman has recently shown this expectation to be correct. For Michelet, according to Gossman, the narratable past essentially consists of the many obstacles that had to be overcome (all through the centuries) before the Revolution could actually materialize. As a result, the Revolution—during which these obstacles had eo ipso been temporarily vanquished—is itself outside the narratable past and no longer part of the concatenation of events that make up French history. The French Revolution, this object of Michelet's nostalgic longing, is thus isolated from the narratable course of (French) history.^[65] Moreover, Michelet was himself well aware that his account transfigured the Revolution into a historical phenomenon of a different order. Discussing the "fête de fédération," to which I referred a moment ago, and which was for Michelet the very acme of the Revolution, he exclaims: "strange vita nuova, that commences for France, eminently spiritual, and that transforms its whole Revolution into a kind of dream, sometimes ravishing, sometimes terrible. . . . It has ignored space and time."^[66] The Revolution takes here the features of a sublime event, both beautiful and terrifying, lying outside space and time, hence outside the domain of what can be narrated, and detached from the signifying chain embodying the coherence of the narratable past. Time and space have thus been overcome in Michelet's nostalgic experiences of the revolutionary past.

[64] J'ai perdu mon père, avec qui j'avais vécu route ma vie, quarante-huit années. Lorsque cela m'est arrivé, je regardais, j'étais ailleurs, je réalisais à la hâte, cette oeuvre si longtemps rêvée. J'étais au pied de la Bastille, je prenais la forteresse, j'arborais sur les tours l'mmortel drapeau Ce coup m'est renu, imprévu, comme une balle de la Bastille. (Michelet, Histoire , 8.)

[65] L. Gossman, "Michelet's Gospel of Revolution," in Gossman, Between History and Literature , Cambridge (Mass.), 1990, 212.

[66] "Étrange vita nuova , qui commence pour la France, éminemment spirituelle, et qui fait de route sa Révolution une sorte de rêve, tantôt ravissant, tantôt terrible Elle a ignoré l'espace et lc temps" (Michelet, Histoire , 406).

4. Epistemology

Epistemology traditionally investigates the problem of how, in the words of Rorty, "language hooks onto the world" and, hence, of what the conditions are for the possibility of reliable and objective knowledge. If we know how words formally relate to things, we possess in that knowledge the most general criteria for reliable knowledge. I want to begin this discussion of a comparison of historism and postmodernism from the point of view of epistemology with a somewhat unusual claim, namely the claim that all epistemology is inherently metaphorical. Let me try to clarify this claim with the help of an example. If we consider the metaphor "the heart is a pump," the metaphor is not a breach of the conventions for the use of literal language, nor a well-considered proposal for changing the name of a specific type of object (in the way we might prefer to use the substantive H₂ O instead of the substantive water ). Metaphor is neither an analysis nor a correction of existing linguistic usage. Nor is the metaphor a (medical) theory about empirical reality, though it may have been inspired by the re-suits of empirical research and be actually intended to convey information about those results. Thus, the intellectual effort which the metaphor invites us to make is not a matter of semantics nor one of an investigation of empirical reality; rather, we are invited to wonder how what we ordinarily associate with the word pump could be applied to the heart. The metaphor thus provokes in us the kind of puzzlement that is systematized in epistemology ("how does language hook onto the world?") and we are required by it to do some instant epistemology for this specific case. Just like epistemology, metaphor forces us to take a position that is beyond both language and reality in order to get an idea of how, for the metaphor in question, language and reality hang together.

One might add to this a comment of more general import. The metaphor "a is b " makes us wonder how we can speak about a in terms of b .^[67] If we read "reality" for a and "language" for b , it will be obvious that the kind of question epistemology addresses (how does language enable us to speak about reality?) is essentially metaphorical. The secret of both epistemology and metaphor is that they require us temporarily to abandon our inclination to stick to either language or reality—an inclination codified by Hume with his division of "all objects of human reason" into (analytic) relations of ideas and (synthetic) matters of fact —in order to assume a point of view from which the relation between the two can be surveyed.

This insight into the metaphorical character of the epistemological enterprise permits the following view of the history of the relation between

[67] Aristotle had already stated: "Metaphor is the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species" (S. H. Butcher, ed., Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art , New York, 1951, 77).

the two. As is well known, philosophers like Descartes, Hobbes, and Kant or Popper, who all had very strong epistemological leanings, were unanimously critical of metaphor. For them metaphor is a perversion of scientific rigor and clarity. But we should not interpret their hostility as meaning that metaphor and epistemology are quite different things. The opposite is true: epistemologists hated metaphor because they were vaguely aware that epistemology and metaphor are each other's rivals in the task of guiding the human mind. They wanted epistemology to perform in a better, more final, and more definitive way the job that was only incidentally and haphazardly performed by metaphor. Just as the modem state is a monopolization of the individual citizen's capacity for violence, so epistemology wanted to monopolize metaphor in one immensely powerful and omnipresent (epistemological) metaphor. Three conclusions follow from this. First, we may expect that disciplines that have always demonstrated an anarchistic resistance to the monopolization of metaphor by epistemology—and the writing of history is the best example of such a discipline as is recognized by current theory of history^[68] —will continue to make a relatively free use of metaphor. Second, we may expect that as soon as the hold of epistemology begins to weaken, metaphor will make its reappearance on the scene. Mary Hesse's views on the metaphorical character of the sciences are an example in point.^[69] Third, because of the inherently metaphorical character of epistemology, we may expect to find a master-metaphor at the end of all epistemological systems. A metaphor, that is, which is supposed to supersede all other metaphors; a metaphor which is tantamount to the Goethean Urphänomen of metaphor and is a limit beyond which we cannot go.

It is not at all difficult to be more specific about the nature of this master-metaphor. What we ordinarily find at the end of epistemological argument is typically an optical or spatial metaphor. And who could resist the seduction of spatial metaphor when we are asked to define epistemologically the relation between these two "parallel planes" of language and reality? One may think here of Descartes's notion of the idées claires et distinctes, with its obvious reliance upon a metaphor of visual perception in

[68] Perhaps the statement requires qualification. Contemporary theory of history often presents itself in the cloak of historiography. But this "new" historiography is different from the traditional history of historical writing, as we find it in the textbooks by Fueter or Barnes. Contemporary historiography, since Harden White's influential work, often has the form ora textual analysis demonstrating "what made the historical text possible." Thus, in a way reminiscent of Foucault, epistemological preoccupations still inspire much of contemporary historical theory, though the nature of these epistemological concerns differs conspicuously from those of some twenty rears ago.

[69] M. B. Hesse, "Models, Metaphor and Truth," in F. R. Ankersmit and J. J. A. Mooij, eds., Metaphor and Knowledge , Dordrecht, 1992.

terms of which Descartes phrases his criteria for epistemological certainty. We can think, furthermore, of how Wittgenstein has popularized the notion of the Kantian transcendental self by requiring us to imagine an eye that can only see what is within its field of perception but cannot see itself. And Wittgenstein's own assertion that "the sentence is a picture [my emphasis] of reality" provides us with another example.^[70] But undoubtedly the best proof of epistemology's perennial fascination with spatial and optical metaphors can be found in Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Insofar as Rorty provides us in the first half of his book with a history of epistemological thought (a history he is, in fact, using for a "deconstruction" of the whole epistemological tradition), it is an integral part of his enterprise to demonstrate the extent to which optical metaphors, like the one of our "glassy essence" or the one of language or the mind being a "mirror" of reality, have always determined the nature and the content of epistemological thought.^[71]

If we now take a look at the writing of history and historical thought we will encounter a roughly similar picture. As everybody will realize, spatial metaphors have always been quite popular in historical theory. Subjectivists liked to use the hackneyed metaphor of the "spectacles of the historian" that "color" his "view" of the past; next we find the ubiquitous and virtually obligatory metaphors of historical "insight," of "perspective" (Nietzsche), of conspectus (Cassirer), or of point of view (a metaphor to which I shall return in a moment). And in order to contest the argument that spatial metaphors only occur in impressionistic accounts of the nature of historical knowledge, I would like to recall Foucault's rapture with spatial metaphors, for instance his epistemological fields that ought to be or-thogonalistically projected onto the plane of historical representation.^[72] However, if we wish to get hold of what comes closest in historical theory to an epistemological "master-metaphor," we can best turn to a most suggestive spatial metaphor proposed by L. O. Mink. Mink argues that the historian's task is essentially one of synthesis and integration: the historian must effect in his work what Mink refers to as a configurational comprehension of the different constituents of the past. Furthermore, within this configurational comprehension, the historian aims for an integration as complete as possible of the events related at the beginning of his historical narrative with those of the end—and with everything between:

But in the configurational comprehension, the end is connected with the promise of the beginning as well as the beginning with the promise of the

[70] L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , London, 1961, section 4.01.

[71] R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , Oxford, 1980, 42ff.

[72] H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralisrn and Hennentutics , Brighton, 1982, 85ff.

end, and the necessity of the backward reference cancels out, so to speak, the contingency of the forward reference. To comprehend temporal succession means to think of it in both directions at once and thus time is no longer the river which bears us along but the river in aerial view, upstream and downstream in a single survey.^[73]

The spatial metaphor thus suggests a "deconstruction" of time through space, in the sense that temporal succession is nullified thanks to the point of view located in a space outside the river of time itself.

I want to emphasize that Mink's metaphor is in agreement with how historism traditionally conceived of the nature of historical knowledge—and the implication is, of course, that because of their shared reliance upon a spatial metaphor, historism is inspired by the same mentality as epistemology in its effort to provide science with a sound epistemological foundation. First, it should be observed that Mink's configurational comprehension is identical to the historical ideas which, according to Humboldt, in his famous essay on the historian's task, the historian should discover in the manifold of the historically given.^[74] Both the configurational comprehension and the historical idea individuate a point of view from which the past can be seen as a coherent unity. But what is more important, Ranke in his theoretical writings used exactly the same metaphor as Mink. Thus Oadamer quotes Ranke as follows: "I imagine the Deity—if I may allow myself this observation—as seeing the whole of historical humanity in its totality (since no time lies before the Deity), and finding it all equally valuable."^[75] Ranke places God here in a transhistorical place that is formally identical to the point of view outside the flow of time, where Mink located the historian in his attempt to gain a survey of a part of the past. And Gadamer comments that Ranke invokes here the notion of an infinite understanding (intellectus infinitus ), for which—and this is in agreement with the suggestion of Mink's metaphor—everything takes place at one and the same time (omnium simul ). The infinite intellect or understanding that the historist historian strives for effects a supersession of time; a supersession that is ultimately realized in the mind of God. Indeed, this is the kind of

[73] L. O. Mink, Historical Understanding , eds. Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T Vann, Ithaca, 1987, 56-57.

[74] Humboldt, Ranke ,14. Humboldt discusses here the notion of the historical idea.

[75] Quoted in Gadamer, Truth , 185. The crucial role played by point of view in historical writing was already recognized by the German eighteenth-century scholar Johann Martin Chladenius:

We cannot avoid that each of us looks on the story according to his point of view and that we also retell it according to that point of view. . .. A narration wholly abstracted from its own point of view is impossible, and hence an impartial narration cannot be called one that narrates without any point of view at all, for such simply is not possible. (See Gossman, Literature , 230.)

understanding of the past that is the final aim of all historist understanding of the past. As Ranke says himself, the more the historian succeeds in thinking historically in the way just defined, "the more his thought is Godlike."^[76]

At this stage it must be pointed out where the historist and the postmodernist nostalgic views of the past crucially differ. As we have seen, the postmodernist, nostalgic experience of the past rejects a dissociation of the present from the experience of the past: the experience of the past is the experience of a difference between the past and the present, from which the latter eo ipso cannot be detached. This is quite different in his-torism. It is true that the historist will also see "differences," but these are always differences within the past itself (as , for instance, the distance in the past corresponding to the beginning and the end of the river of time that is surveyed by the historian in Mink's metaphor). The present, the historian himself, is no ingredient in this difference. For the historian is reduced to a merely transcendental, transhistorical self without an empirical (temporal or historical) self. Here we find another explanation of why traditional (historist) philosophy of history was not interested in developing a critique of historical experience or doing for the writing of history what eighteenth-century philosophy had done for science. Historist historical theory excluded the realm of (historical) experience from its considerations. Evidently, to contrast historist and postmodernist historical theory in this way is tantamount to criticizing historism for its tendency to place the historian in the God-like position Ranke had in mind for him. Our next step will now obviously be to ask ourselves how the historist can amend his mistake within the matrix of his historical theory.

One way of effecting such a correction would be to place the historical subject in an extension of the flow of Mink's river of time. And, indeed, as I have tried to show in an analysis of Tocqueville's L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, such a solution is possible. However, the price the historist will have to pay for this solution is high (and will probably exceed the amount of intellectual capital he has at his disposal). For, as will become clear if we visualize Mink's metaphor, the disappearance of the metaphorical point of view, on a safe hilltop high above the river of time (that has now been exchanged for the point the river of time has now reached), will also mean that the possibility of surveying the flow of time has disappeared, and history hence becomes essentially unnarratable. And, indeed, such a destruction of narrative takes place in the work by Tocqueville just mentioned. Metaphor, point of view, and all that the historist likes to associate with

[76] Gadamer, Truth , 186.

these then lose their function, and what remains is a past that is nothing more than a system of variations on a single theme.^[77]

Because of these problems which we run into when opting for the above correction of historism's shortcomings, we are well-advised to consider Gadamer's solution for the historist's predicament. Gadamer's characterization of the historist's problem is as follows. He correctly points out that what most needs correction is the historist's decision to place the historian himself outside the flow of historical time; indeed, the major insight informing the whole of Gadamer's magnificent study is "that we only understand historically because we are ourselves historical beings.^[78] Gadamer shows, next, that since Grimm, Gundolf, and Dilthey, there has been no lack of attempts to effect such a historicization of the historical subject.^[79] But these attempts, Gadamer argues, never bore fruit—and consequently historical thought always remained swaddled in the tight cloth of an epistemological historism.

The lack of success of these earlier attempts to be a "consistent" his-torist (if the historist wishes to historicize everything, how could he possibly exclude himself from the process?) already suggests that a historicization of the historical subject is not an easy task. First, there is the problem of relativism that will result from the historicization of the historical subject. But the problem of relativism is not an interesting one from the present point of view. Relativism results when we historicize the historical subject and historical knowledge but nevertheless retain a nostalgia for absolute, transhistorical certainties. If we bear in mind the way that historism placed the historical subject in a transcendental position, we will see that, in this context, the problem of relativism is merely a restatement of the problem at hand in this discussion rather than the addition of a new dimension to it.

A more interesting problem is that the historicization of the historian and historical knowledge effects a coalescence of the level of the writing of history and that of historiography (the history of historical writing). Whereas, the historicization of, for example, physics, need not obliterate our capacity to distinguish clearly between the discussion of physical reality on the one hand and the history of scientific debate on the other; in the case of history, we cannot be so confident about the possibility of telling historiography apart from history itself. The explanation is, of course, that an easy and straightforward distinction between the object

[77] See my "Tocqueville and the Sublimity of Democracy," The Tocqueville Review XV (1994).

[78] Gadamer, Truth, 203.

[79] Gadamer, Truth , 267.

level and metalevel is more complicated here since we are dealing with the same discipline (that is, history) at both levels. One level will unavoidably become contaminated with the problems of the other. Surely, this is a problem that is not completely new to historical theory and practice. As far as theory is concerned, one may think of Hegel's philosophy of history. According to Hegel, historical insight itself is an integral part of the plot of history, since historical insight into the historical process of the self-realization of the Spirit is the very essence of history.^[80] Thus the history of historical insight became part of the plot of history itself. With regard to historical practice, we will observe that historians generally consider the history of historical debate about a certain historical issue as not merely a propaedeutics to new historical insight but as a crucial part of it. This is especially true for domains of history like intellectual history. If we study contemporary interpretations of, say, Locke, Montesquieu, or Rousseau, we will acknowledge that it is impossible to say where a discussion of previous interpretations leaves off and a discussion of Locke or any of the other political thinkers themselves begins. Both levels of debate are inextricably bound up in the practice of intellectual history.

And here, then, we encounter the aporia of a consistent historism that has the courage to historicize the historical subject too. If we opt for this historicization of the historical subject, the historist metaphor that was so aptly formulated by Mink will disintegrate into incoherence. For, a metaphorical view of the past itself —as such—is now no longer possible; what misleadingly announces itself as such a view has become indiscernible from the fluctuating positions of historical writing. Points of view mingle with points of view on points of view, and the past itself with interpretations of the past. The spatial metaphor of the point of view destroys itself.

After having become aware of this problem of historism's self-destruction—if it really has "le courage de ses opinions"—we must return to Gadamer again. For with an appeal to the concept of "effective-history" (Wirkungsgeschichte ), Gadamer has made an impressive attempt to solve the aporias of historism and to move to a historical hermeneutics in which the transcendentalist proclivities of traditional historism have been overcome. "True historical thinking," writes Gadamer,

must take account of its own historicality. Only then will it not chase the phantom of an historical object which is the object of progressive research, but learn to see in the object the counterpart of itself and hence understand

[80] Spirit is, for Hegel, both historical consciousness and an active principle: "Der Geist handelt wesentlich, er macht sich zu dem, was er an sich ist, zu seiner Tat, zu seinem Werk; so wird er sich Gegenstand, so hat er sich als ein Dasein vor sich" (G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Band I. Die Vernunft in der Geschichte , Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1970, 67).

both. The true historical object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other [as in the nostalgic experience of the past], a relationship in which exist both the reality of history and the reality of historical understanding. A proper hermeneutics would have to demonstrate the effectivity of history within understanding itself. I shall refer to this as "effective-history" (Wirkungsegeschichte ). Understanding is, essentially, an effective-historical relation (ein wirkungsgeschichtlicher Vorgang ).^[81]

So Wirkungsgeschichte is not merely an auxiliary discipline of history, like that most peculiar discipline of the history of historical writing (commonly referred to as historiography). Historiography in its traditional form—one may think here of the books by Fueter, Iggers, or Breisach, whose value I respect no less than those of their historist counterparts in the domain of historical writing—has a most artificial cognitive status since it repeats at the level of the objectification of historical writing that same isolation or transcendentalization of the historical subject that we found in historism at the level of historical writing itself. Historiography, contrary to appearances, is not a fulfillment of the Gadamerian requirement of the historicization of the historical subject but is, in fact, a double refusal to do so. Thanks to this double refusal, an artificial no-man's-land is created between historiography and the writing of history that automatically robs historiography of the value it ought to have, in Gadamer's view, for the writing of history. According to Gadamer, the historicization of the historical subject should not result in a mere multiplication of layers in historical thought or writing: historicization must become part of historical writing itself. Only if we recognize that an awareness of Wirkungsgeschichte is, before all, an awareness of the hermeneutic situation, shall we be able to effectively vindicate the inconsistencies of historism.

Nevertheless, the objections formulated against traditional historiography in the previous paragraph may also make us suspicious of Wirkungsgeschichte. For we may wonder whether there is really an alternative to traditional historiography as the notion of Wirkungsgeschichte suggests. What, in fact, is Wirkungsgeschichte? Let us grant Gadamer that we can never obtain full and definite knowledge of Wirkungsgeschichte because of the inherent limitations of historical knowledge: "That we should become completely aware of effective-history is just as hybrid a statement as when Hegel speaks of absolute knowledge, in which history would become completely transparent to itself and hence be raised to the level of a concept."^[82] Surely, this would not be a convincing argument against the notion of Wirkungsgeschichte; for the same could be said of a historical notion like the French Revolution, a notion that we could never do without and do

[81] Gadamer, Truth , 267.

[82] Gadamer, Truth , 268.

not hesitate to use. The fundamental problem is, rather, that there can be no end to the process of historicization of historical insight as will be required if the notion Wirkungsgeschichte is to stand for, or at least refer to, some aspect or phase in historical writing. The term suggests that there is a nameable entity we can refer to by the term Wirkungsgeschichte (what else might justify the use of the term?), but any attempt to identify that entity can only mean that we will push it further away again. To give content to the notion Wirkungsgeschichte is like the attempt to jump over one's shadow. For why stop with Wirkungsgeschichte, and why should we not historicize Wirkungsgeschichte itself (and so on indefinitely)? Thus Wirkungsgeschichte dissolves itself into an endless proliferation of historical self-reflections within an ever expanding historiographical present.

This is, nevertheless, how I propose to conceive of Wirkungsgeschichte. According to this proposal the notion does not refer—as is suggested by Gadamer's use of it—to a certain history or to a certain historical interpretation of historical debate. For me Wirkungsgeschichte is not a newly devised model for traditional historiography, and it does not possess an identifiable origin either in an objective past or in a completely comprehended tradition of historical analysis; for me Wirkungsgeschichte is a movement. It is a movement which is perpendicular to the flow of Mink's river of time and in which the historicization of Mink's configurational comprehension has neither origin nor end. As such, the movement of Wirkungsgeschichte is, paradoxically, both the fulfillment and the death of historism. It is its fulfillment since Wirkungsgeschichte no longer excludes the transcendental historical subject standing on his safe hilltop from historiciza-tion; it is the death of historism since the historist points of view that always allowed historist transcendentalism to historicize the past have lost the fixity that was essential for their ability to function as point of view. In the movement of Wirkungsgeschichte, points of view absorb points of views and since there is no end to the movement there can be no final or "master" point of view from which we can evolve and reconstruct the previous and more elementary ones. Thus, the most consistent and radical form of historism is, at the same time, the transcendence of historism.

In his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which is partly an investigation of the fate of spatial and optical metaphors in the history of epistemology, Rorty ends with an exposition of what he sees as the consequence of Gadamer's destruction of epistemological pretensions. Rorty's equivalent of Gadamer's Wirkungsgeschichte is what Rorty refers to as the editing philosopher. Just as Gadamer's Wirkungsgeschichte results in the abandonment of all "striving towards stability,"^[83] a striving which had always been at the

[83] Gadamer, Truth , 208.

very heart of epistemology, so Rorty's edifying philosopher has surrendered all pretense to fix once and for all a "vertical" link between language and reality. The edifying philosopher knows that everything he says and writes is part of "the conversation of mankind" and that what most counts is how what he says relates "horizontally" to what was and will be said before and after him.^[84] The philosophers who agree with Gadamer's argument will therefore, Rorty writes,

present themselves as doing something different from, and more important than offering accurate representations of how things are. They will question the notion of "accurate representation," but, in order to be consistent, the edifying philosopher must also avoid taking the position that "a search for accurate representations of. . . (e.g., 'the most general traits of reality' or 'the nature of man')" is an inaccurate representation of philosophy. Whereas less pretentious revolutionaries can afford to have views on lots of things which their predecessors had views on, edifying philosophers have to decry the very notion of having a view, while avoiding having a view about having views.^[85]

In other words, the historicization of (historical) points of view not only makes them hard to identify (which would be the relativist query) but puts us in the paradoxical position that we should adopt the point of view of not having a point of view. Metaphorizing metaphor—as happens in Wirkungsgeschichte—means the elimination of metaphor and hence of the whole epistemological apparatus originating in metaphor. It results in the oxymoron of "the point of view of the absence of points of view."

5. The Postmodernist Object of Historical Experience

In the previous section we witnessed the autodestruction of historism resulting in the dissolution of the metaphorical point of view. We can derive from this most, if not all, of the features we attributed above to the postmodernist attitude toward the past. It follows from this that we can justifiably say that postmodernism is a radicalization of historism, a consistent historism that is no longer content with the halfway houses in which traditional historism was content to live. Let me clarify this claim.

First, if there is one methodological precept universally accepted by his-torists and even those who (vainly) tried to struggle to free themselves from historist conceptions (such as the protagonists of "history as a [social] science"), it is the rule that the historian must place the object of his investigation in its historical context if he wishes to understand it. Domi-

[84] Rorty, Mirror , 359.

[85] Rorty, Mirror , 370-371.

nick LaCapra has recently attacked this central historist dogma for the domain of intellectual history by pointing out that "an appeal to context is deceptive (. . .) one never has—at least in the case of complex texts— the context. The assumption that one does relies upon a hypostatization of 'context,' often in the sense of misleading organic or overly reductive analogues."^[86] The context is historically no less complex and no less problematically given than the historical object we want to understand by contextualizing it. And one may suppose that the (mistaken) belief that we can gain access to a historical object by placing it in its wider historical context is a methodological reminiscence of the historist metaphysics of Universalgeschichte. With the disappearance of metaphor (and epistemology), however, historist contextualization will be replaced by decontextualization. For it was always the historist point of view that permitted the historian to see the contextual coherence of the elements of the past. With the collapse of Mink's metaphor of the vantage point, from which the flow of the river of time can be surveyed, and with the emergence of the postmodernist oxymoron of "the point of view of the absence of points of view," the elements of the past regain their autonomy and become independent of one another. And the result is the fragmentation of the past so characteristic of the postmodernist picture of the past.

Second, and in close connection with the preceding point, it is only thanks to metaphor that unity and coherence could be attributed to the past. For metaphor effects an organization of (historical) knowledge,^[87] and this metaphorical organization is intended to reflect or to embody the unity the historian attempts to discover in, or project onto, the past. Again, with the dissolution of metaphorical organization, the past is transformed from a unified whole into an anarchistic totality of independent petits récits, to use Lyotard's postmodernist language. Third, with the greater autonomy of the elements of the past with regard to each other, and with the "democratization" of historical meaning, so to speak, the "aristocratic" hierarchization of the past into layers that are self-evidently of central importance (and those that are not) will have to yield to postmodernist "depthlessness." Note, furthermore, that historism always effected the illusion of "depth" by comprehending everything as the result of a historical evolution. For the historist, "depth" is historical perspective; for him the essence (or identity) of a nation, an institution, a social class, and so on, lies in its history.^[88] In accordance with its distrust of contextualism, postmodernist historical writing will have little sympathy for the rhetorics of

[86] D. LaCapra, "Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts," in LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language , Ithaca, 1983, 35.

[87] See chap. 3, paragraph 5 of this volume.

[88] See note 19.

change that created the historist illusion of depth. This may explain why postmodernist historical writing feels an elective affinity with anthropology. As Rüsen has perceptively pointed out, in anthropology "we have to do with those times and spaces of human life that do not let themselves be subsumed by a genetic conception of the coming into being of modern societies" (my translation).^[89] The fascination of postmodernist historical writing with anthropology testifies to its wish to cut historical phenomena loose from the roots they have in their past.^[90] And, fourth, the reification of the past effected by the historist metaphor of the transhistorical historian, surveying the objectively given reality of the river of time, will have to be exchanged for a "nostalgic' experience of the past in which the past is no longer an external reality. Because of the dissolution of metaphor, the objective reality of the past is abandoned for postmodernist hyperreality, for a historical reality that only comes into being thanks to historical experience, thinking, and writing, in a way that will be clarified in the remainder of this section.

We may ask, next, where this radicalization and transcendence of his-torism can be encountered in actual historical practice. In answering this question, we may do well to consider Braudel's Méditerranée, since it can plausibly be argued that Braudel's opus famosum is both the culmination point of the historist search for unity and synthesis and the first announcement of a postmodernist experience of the past. For a clarification of this interpretation of Braudel's book, I shall draw on Hans Kellner's most perceptive analysis of this work. Kellner shows that most reviewers and commentators (e.g., Febvre, Van Houtte, Bailyn, and others) were indeed

[89] "geht es um diejenigen Zeiten und Raumen des menschlichen Lebens, die sich nicht under eine genetische Vorstellung yon der Entstehung modernen Gesellschaften subsumieren lassert" (J. Rüsen, "Historische Aufklärung im Angesicht der Post-Moderne: Geschichte im Zeitalter der 'neuen Unübersichtlichkeit," in Rüsen, Zeit und Sinn: Strategien historischen Denkens , Frankfurt am Main, 1990, 243).

[90] It is sometimes argued that modernism has an elective affinity with time, and postmodernism with space. See, for example, D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change , Oxford, 1990, 201ff. One might say, therefore, that postmodernist historical consciousness "spatializes" time: what was temporally different is transformed into spatial dispersion. Here we find part of the explanation of anthropology's popularity within postmodernist historical writing. For, anthropology succeeds in confronting us with the different historical stages of human evolution existing contemporaneously at different parts of the globe. Stocking describes the transformation of historical consciousness at the end of the eighteenth century as follows: "Although later eighteenth-century progressivists often acknowledged a great debt to Montesquieu, between him and them the primary axis of cultural comparison had been displaced by ninety degrees, from the horizontal [or spatial] to the vertical [or temporal]" (G. W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology , New York, 1987, 6). If Stocking is correct, one might discover in postmodernist historical writing a wish to return to a prehistorist historical consciousness.

deeply impressed by Braudel's capacity for achieving a majestic synthesis of the chaotic manifold of the economic and political reality of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean world. But then Kellner strikes a different note by quoting Claude Lefort when the latter writes that Braudel was often led to "a pointillism that seems contrary to the sociological inspiration of the work."^[91] Kellner brilliantly expounds the nature and textual origins of this pointillism. In doing so he draws our attention to the "quicksand of the surface" of Braudel's text; he explores the "continuous series of oxymorons" we find there—for example, when Braudel chooses to speak of "liquid plains," "watery Saharas," and of "islands that the sea does not surround."^[92] Illustrative of Braudel's penchant for oxymoron and paradox is a map in which the Mediterranean is related to the rest of the world: the map shows a globe that has "the South Pole at the top and is dominated by an enormous looming Africa."^[93] Clearly, as Kellner notes, these textual ploys are intended to "defamiliarize" the past and systematically to undermine any fixed notions about the past we might already have. But most striking is Braudel's own statement that his book could best be seen as "an hourglass, eternally reversible."^[94] Surely, no metaphor could be more hostile to the metaphorical, historist approach to the past than this metaphor of a continual reversal and destruction of vantage points. This metaphor is a metaphor of the death of metaphor. Consequently, this great book of Braudel, ordinarily seen as the paradigm of "scientific" historical writing and of the powers of historical synthesis, contains at the same time the seeds of the disintegration of a metaphorical, synthetic understanding of the past.

But these postmodernist, antihistorist tendencies would long remain unechoed in contemporary historical writing. Attempts to transform history into a science, together with Braudel's own program for a histoire totale or globale, assured for a long time the ascendency of historical synthesis in the discipline. And although the route to postmodernist conceptions had already been paved one or even two decades ago by, for example, Fou-cault's genealogy and Ginzburg's microstorie, it is only in recent years that we have come across historians who are ready to make an outright attack on the synthetical centrism of historist historical theory and practice. An indication of this recent change of mood can be found in the rejection by the German historian Hans Medick of what he refers to as "centrist points

[91] H. Kellner, "Disorderly Conduct: Braudel's Mediterranean Satire," in Kellner, Language and Historical Representation , Madison, 1989, 158-159. See also, by the same author, "'As real as it gets. . .': Ricoeur and Narrativity," Philosophy Today 1990 (34,3); especially 236ff.

[92] Kellner, Language , 164-165.

[93] Kellner, Language , 167.

[94] Kellner, Language , 168.

of view," with the argument that "such points of view prematurely locate historical phenomena at the periphery or at the center of historical development, in both cases by having recourse to the notion of the 'Big Change,' be it modernization, industrialization, urbanization or the coming into being of bureaucratic institutions and nation states."^[95]

Medick is a well-known protagonist of Alltagsgeschichte, and since All-tagsgeschichte can best be seen as a branch of the larger historical subdiscipline of the history of mentalities, we may expect that the latter will provide us with the best and most representative examples of postmodernist historical writing. If we return, then, to the history of mentalities, we will recognize that one of its most conspicuous features in comparison with other historical subdisciplines is its remarkable discovery of new objects of historical research. This inventiveness of the history of mentalities is of special interest in the context of this discussion. For, a crucial difference between historist and postmodernist historical thought is that the latter resists the reification of the past that comes so naturally to historism (and positivist theories of historical writing). We may expect, therefore, that a close look at the discovery of new objects of historical investigation by the history of mentalities will introduce us into the magic circle, within which the postmodernist historical reality and historical experience originate. By studying the discovery of new objects of historical investigation in the history of mentalities, we may succeed in giving some more concrete detail to the postmodernist "nostalgic" experience of difference I discussed in a previous section.

The crucial datum here is that the history of mentalities finds its new objects and looks for the experience of difference in places where previous historical writing would have seen only an absence of difference. The history of mentalities is the history of love, of sexuality, of the fear of death, and so on (i.e., of those aspects of human existence that were believed to be relatively immune to historical change and to possess a quasi-natural permanence). Put differently, the history of mentalities problematizes our intuitive convictions of a "familiarity" with the past. It turns the defamiliarization of the past, so surreptitiously introduced by Braudel, into a historical program. It is in this defamiliarization of the quasi-natural (obviously, a decontextualization of the quasi-natural) that we can find our most valuable clue for gaining a grasp of the postmodernist historical object and

[95] "solche Sichtweisen rücken historische Phänomene vorschnell and den Rand bzw. im Zentrum historischen Geschehens, in beiden Fallen stets unter dem Gesichtspunkt der 'grossen Veränderung,' sei es der Modernisierung, Industrialisierung, Verstädterung oder der Entstehung bürokratischen Anstalte und Nationalstaaten" (H. Medick, "Entlegene Geschichte? Sozialgeschichte im Blickpunkt der Kulturanthropologie," in Comité international des sciences historiques, ed., 17e Congreso internacional de ciencias historicas. Vol 1. Grands thèmes, methodologie, sections chronologiques 1. Rapports et abrégés, Madrid , 1990, 181.

the postmodernist experience of difference. We must observe that defamiliarization is a tearing apart of what originally was seen as an ahistorical, natural present into a historical present and a historical past, while the experience of the unfamiliar presupposes a continuous awareness of the separation process. In other words, defamiliarization is a duplication of the originally natural present, while the memory of the unity antedating the duplication is the background against which the experience of the unfamiliar can only articulate itself. The similarity between defamiliarization in contemporary history of mentalities and the historical experience or sensation, as described by Goethe and Huizinga, will need no elucidation.

The duplication of the familiar (and the concomitant experience of de-familiarization) has been closely analyzed by Freud in his essay on the uncanny. That the uncanny should turn up in our discussion need not be surprising. The feeling of nostalgia, or Heimweh, of being far away from one's Helm or home contrary to one's wishes, must be closely related to the feeling of Unheimlichkeit—Freud's term for the uncanny.^[96] The experience of the uncanny is characterized by Freud as such: "that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self."^[97] The similarity between the experience of the uncanny and the way the history of mentalities opposes a part of our initially natural self (the part historicized by the history of mentalities) to that natural self is that both effect this division of the self Freud described in the passage just cited. In both cases we can observe a process of duplication that grants an uncanny independence to what we think ought to be part of ourselves, of our "natural" identity, of our Heim (= home), but no longer is. Thus, according to Freud, the objects that paradigmatically evoke in us a feeling of Unheimlichkeit are chopped-off limbs that seem to have kept a life of their own; a chopped-off head, arm, or foot may "have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when they prove capable of independent action in addition."^[98] Similarly, the history of mentalities bestows an uncanny independence on those aspects of ourselves that we always believed to be part of our unchanging nature, but that the historian of mentalities demonstrates to be historically contingent—an independence which historism would always seek to neutralize again by making these uncanny aspects of the past

[96] Megill demonstrates that Heidegger had already linked nostalgia and the uncanny. See Megill, Prophets , 119.

[97] S. Freud, "The Uncanny," in Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , vol. 17, London, 1955, 243.

[98] Freud, Uncanny , 244.

into a part of the process of historical evolution that was expected to integrate them into our essence or our identity.

Apart from these formal similarities, there also is a material affinity between the uncanny and postmodernist historical writing. Consider, first, that the history of mentalities began as the history of love, sexuality, the fear of death, et cetera. Especially the themes of death and of speculations concerning death are clearly in agreement with Freud's assertion that "many people experience the uncanny in the highest degree in relation to death, and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts."^[99] This link between the uncanny and the return of the past in some way or other to the present is, of course, quite interesting from the perspective of this chapter. And from here the history of mentalities evolved into a history of the belief in witches, in the animistic powers certain people were believed to possess, and into the history of a wide variety of superstitions—in short into a "history of the uncanny." Because of its fascination with the history of superstition, the history of mentalities seems in a curious way to retrace the same route as the Enlightenment. But if the Enlightenments's aim was to destroy superstition by laying bare the (corrupt) historical conditions that gave rise to it, postmodernist history of mentalities presents superstition as a permanent potential possibility since it is, and was, the result of a duplication of the self and not a world that is radically alien to us. Superstition is the "other" of our culture. Hence, the "production" of the uncanny in the history of mentalities may demonstrate the futility of all our attempts to minimize superstition as merely the sad remnants of a less Enlightened past. For such attempts are, in fact, attempts to repress what we subconsciously know to be a part of ourselves (which certainly does not mean that this repression is a bad thing in all cases). We must recognize that 'this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression."^[100]

But there is another element in Freud's train of thought that no less deserves our attention. Freud describes in his essay how he himself once experienced the uncanny when he had lost his way on a hot afternoon in a small Italian village. He wandered through the streets that were deserted because of siesta time and found, to his dismay, that in his effort to retrace his route he returned to the same street three times. This unintended

[99] Freud, Uncanny, 241. Quite interesting here is Goethe's remark about his (nostalgic) experience of the past, that it "brought something spectral in the present"; see note 52.

[100] Freud, Uncanny , 241.

threefold return to the same place gave him a sudden feeling of helplessness and of Unheimlichkeit.^[101]

This association or combination of an experience of the uncanny, of siesta time, and of, in Freud's own words, "die beständige Wiederkehr des Gleichen" (the eternal return of the same),^[102] brings us to the strange and complex topic known as "the terrors of noontime," the historical roots of which can be traced back to the dawn of human civilization. In a series of both learned and poetic essays, the French historian Roger Caillois has described the role this topic has played in the folklore and poetry of preclassical and classical Greece.^[103] He demonstrates that for the Greeks—and the Egyptians—noontime was just as much a fatal hour as midnight often was in Western folklore and provoked similar fears and anxieties concerning death, the dead, and, characteristically, the return of the dead. Noontime is thus associated with an undoing of what seemed to have become irrevocable in and by the past, and the fact that noontime awakens in us the paradoxical fear of the return precisely of whom we have loved most only adds to our anxiety and confusion. Indeed, it was at noontime that one's thoughts were with the dead; thus Sophocles explicitly states in his Antigone that Antigone offered a sacrifice to Polynices, her dead brother, at noontime. At noontime the curtains of the temples were ordinarily drawn, not because at that time the temple should be reserved for the Gods, but because noontime is the hour of the dead and then it is dangerous for mortals, even for the priests, to enter the temple.^[104] It was at noontime that the Sirens, the ancestresses of the vampires of a later date, threatened the sailors in open sea with all the more chance of success since the heat of the sun and the absence of wind at that time of the day weakened the defenses of the sailors against their seductions.^[105] It was at noontime that the shepherds of Arcadia abandoned their herds and hid from the sun under the scanty shrubbery of the stony and burning fields. If the heat of the day already forbade all activity, the fear of awakening Pan by playing their shepherd's flutes condemned them even more so to a "lourde inac-

[101] Freud, Uncanny , 237.

[102] Freud, Uncanny , 234. Later on Freud speaks of "the theme that achieves such an indubitably uncanny effect, the unintended recurrence of the same thing" (Freud, Uncanny , 269).

[103] R. Caillois, "Les demons de midi," Revue de l'histoire des religions 115 (1937): 142-173 (referred to as Gaillois, Démons I ); R. Caillois, "Les démons de midi," Revue de l'histoire des religions 116 (1937): 54-83 (referred to as Caillois, Démons II ); R. Caillois, "Les demons de midi," Revue de l'histoire des religions 116 (1937): 143-187 (referred to as Caillois, Démons III ). I want to thank Drs. J. G. den Hollander for his valuable advice concerning the topic of "the terrors of noontime").

[104] Caillois, Démons I , 166ff.

[105] Caillois, Démons II , 54ff.

tivité.^[106] Yet falling asleep was no less dangerous since sleep made the shepherds an all-too-easy victim for the nymphs that fed on human blood and sperm and in doing so reduced their victims to permanent insanity. It was at noontime, lastly, that Christ died on the Cross, that the earth trembled and the skies darkened, as is testified by the Gospels. As the final example suggests, Christianity could be no less sensitive to "the terrors of noontime" than pagan Antiquity. There can be no doubt, Caillois comments, that the "acedia" suffered by monks since St. Anthony and described by so many worried authors throughout the Middle Ages, is the direct descendant of the mysterious and irrational anxieties provoked by "the terrors of noontime."^[107]

Evidently, the experience of "the terrors of noontime" must essentially be an experience of nature. As such, its characteristics are several: there is, above all, the heat of the early afternoon, when the sun has its greatest power; there is the absence of wind; there is a kind of metaphysical silence that seems to overwhelm nature around noon; and, last but not least, there is the danger of sunstroke (whose pathological symptoms are, in a most significant way, already anticipated in the physical and mental paralysis effected by the discomforts of noontime).^[108] But more important than all these phenomena is the following: Noontime, in southern countries, effects a quite characteristic change in the manner the natural world presents itself to us. Normally, especially in the morning and the evening, nature, trees, shrubbery, houses, et cetera, seem to be part of a greater totality encompassing them all. The main reason for this is that objects and their shadows intermingle and thus blend into one another. By contrast, "l'individualité de l'heure de midi vient, comme on l'a vu, de la diminution de l'ombre"^[109] —shadows disappear at noon when the sun is at its zenith, everything withdraws, together with its shadow, into itself, becomes what it is, coincides with its essence, while no longer leaving any room for the "shadowy" nuances between what is essential and what is contingent or mere appearance. At noontime in Mediterranean countries the "contact" between the objects we see around us seems momentarily suspended, and objects appear no longer to take an interest in each other—and in us. The effect this has on the human psyche—and this gives us the essence of the "terrors of noontime"—is a feeling of being ejected or excluded from

[106] Caillois, Démons III , 149.

[107] Caillois, Démons III , 168ff.

[108] Caillois, Démons II , 61. See also Caillois, Démons III , 166. In this third essay in the series Caillois is most explicit about the sexual dimensions of the experience of noontime: "d'une façon générale, midi est une heure sexuelle" (Caillois, Démons III, 150). Sexually, then, noontime stimulates pederasty and autoeroticism, hence a fascination with one's own sexuality.

[109] Caillois, Démons I, 155-156.

reality itself. The experience was well expressed by Leconte de Lisle as follows:

Homme, si le coeur plein dejoie ou d'amermre,
Tu passais vers midi dans les champs radieux,
Fuis! la nature est vide et le soleil consume;
Rien n'est vivant ici, rien n'est triste nijoyeux.^[110]

Nature has turned away from us, becomes absorbed within itself, and can no longer function as the receptacle for our joys and griefs. The world has turned its back to us and no longer invites us to be part of it. Put differently, the physical reality that used to be our natural home or Urawelt, in which we recognized ourselves and which is therefore ordinarily felt to be an indissoluble part of ourselves, suddenly has become strange, unfamiliar, and inhospitable. Nature becomes unheimlich. A reality that was part of our life has become independent of us (like Freud's chopped-off limbs), alien and intent upon leading its own life. Temporarily, we have thus lost a part of ourselves and of what we thought to be a proper and natural part of our identity. We are most painfully reminded of what, in all likelihood, is the most traumatic event in the life of each human individual: the separation process that forever and irretrievably broke down the solipsistic unity in which we lived with reality for the first months of our existence; a process that placed us for the rest of our lives as lonely individuals opposite physical and social reality. And the futility of our nostalgic yearning for a reestablishment of that primeval unity is demonstrated each time we experience "the terrors of noontime."

With his usual historical acumen, Hegel recognized all this in what Pan symbolized for the Greeks (though it must be admitted that the Hegelian scheme of the objective, the subjective, and the absolute spirit, the scheme dictating Hegel's periodization of history, happened to be peculiarly helpful and suggestive in this case). "Panic fright," the kind of fright Pan might inspire in the Arcadian shepherds, was how the Greeks liked to conceive of "the terrors of noontime." And about Pan, Hegel notes:

The position of curious surmise, of attentive eagerness to catch the meaning of nature, is indicated to us in the comprehensive idea of Pan. To the Greeks Pan did not represent the objective whole, but that indefinite neutral ground

[110] "Man, if you pass through the radiant fields at noontime, / And your heart is full of joy or bitterness, / Flee, nature is empty and the sun engulfs all; / Nothing is alive here, nothing is sad or joyous" (my translation). (Quoted from "Midi," in C. M. R. Leconte de Lisle, Poèmes Antiques , Paris 1872. See also T. Lemaire, "De Middag," in Lemaire, Filosoie van her Landschap , Baarn, 1970.) This essay, is a most remarkable and sensitive interpretation of the experience of noontime. Most illuminating is Lemaire's characterization of Van Gogh's Mediterranean landscapes as expressive of "the terrors of noontime."

which involves the element of the subjective ; he embodies that thrill which pervades us in the silence of the forests.^[111]

As Hegel suggests with his assertion that "panic fright" contains "a moment of the subjective," nature, or Pan, does not so much frighten us in its sudden appearance as a total "other," but because this "other" is recognized as a former part of ourselves. It is the fright caused by the familiar that has become defamiliarized, unfamiliar, and that suddenly confronts us; a fright, therefore, that contains what is essential in the experience of the uncanny.

And here, finally, my argument closes. The nostalgic experience of the past, the experience of the past as we find it in the relevant domains of the history of mentalities, is not the experience of a (historist) quasi-object, outside ourselves and as little part of ourselves as the kind of physical objects investigated by the physicist. We unproblematically accept the independence from us of the objects the physicist investigates; the independence of the objects dealt with in the history of mentalities gives us an experience of the uncanny because we correctly discover in these objects estranged parts of our cultural and historical identity. It is precisely this aspect of them that is investigated in the history of mentalities; however, they are not investigated as objects, but as objects embodying a "distance" from and yet, at the same time, within ourselves. The uncanny independence of the objects discussed in the history of mentalities does not serve to objectify the past, but, on the contrary, to undo (historist and positivist) objectification; it suggests the mysterious existence of a realm lying between ourselves and the reified past of the historist and the positivist.

Several scholars, amongst them Schlechta and Bollnow, have demonstrated the prominence of the notion of noontime in the later work of Nietzsche. However, in contrast to the classical tradition, the association of the experience of noontime with unpleasant feelings or with the uncanny is curiously absent from Nietzsche's writings on the topic. The grosser Mit-tag is for Nietzsche rather his favorite symbol for happiness, completion,

[111] G. W. E Hegel, The Philosophy of History , trans. J. Sibree, New York, 1956, 352. For the original, see G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Band II-IV. Die orientalische Welt. Die Griechische und die Römische Welt. Die germanische Welt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1976), 235. The original passage is as follows:

Die Form des Lauschens des Geistea, des Ahnens, der Sinnigkeit haben wir angegeben. Beim blossen Ahnen and Sehnen aber bleibt der Geist nicht stehen; er muss sich auf dss Sehnen Antwort geben. Dss liegt z.B. in der Vorstellung des Pan; es ist dies das All, nicht als ein Objektives allein, sondern zugieich als das wodurch ein Schauer erweckt wird. . .: in Griechenland ist er [i.e., Pan] nicht das objektive Ganze, sondern das Unbestimmte, das dabei mit dem Momente des Subjektiven verbunden ist.

and perfection. It may seem, as has been argued by Schlechta, that while Nietzsche emphasized even more than classical authors the basic and original character of the experience of noontime, he was tempted to transform the experience into an allegory (or parody) of Christ's coming—certainly a procedure one would hardly have expected from this herald of the antichrist.^[112] However, it is true that Nietzsche attributed to the experience of noontime a feeling of happiness that is not entirely without the elements we noted above; Bollnow describes the feeling as "ein schweres und dunkles, irgendwie unheimliches [my emphasis] und hintergründiges Glück." (A heavy and dark, somehow uncanny and shadowy kind of happiness.)^[113] However, what may justify this short excursus on Nietzsche's view of the experience of noontime is the interesting fact that he projected onto it a certain notion of historical time. This enables us to add a final detail to the account offered here of the differences of historism and postmodernism. Admittedly, the linkage of the experience of noontime with a notion of historical time can already be found in the writings of classical authors. Thus, Callimachos and Hermias observed that time—as represented by the movement of the shadows projected by trees, buildings, et cetera—seems to slow down when noontime approaches in order to stop completely for a fractional moment when that moment has in fact arrived. At that moment, linear time (which has produced the moment) and eternity (when time has come to a stop) seem to coincide.^[114]

But Nietzsche gave an even more dramatic meaning to the notion of time as symbolized by the experience of noontime by relating the latter to his idea of the eternal return of the same (die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen). Nietzsche's notion of time and the experience of noontime are explicitly related, for example, in the following passage: "and in each cycle of human existence there will always be an hour, when first one, then many, then all embrace the most powerful thought, the thought of the eternal return of all things:—for humanity this is each time the hour of noontime."^[115] These and related pronouncements by Nietzsche (mostly in Also

[112] K. Schlechta, Nietzsches grosser Mittag , Frankfurt am Main, 1954, 52. Schlechta speaks here of "Zarathustra's Bibelparodie" and gives an impressive number of examples in order to support his claim.

[113] O. F. Bollnow, Das Wesen der Stimmungen , Frankfurt am Main, 1956, 222.

[114] Caillois, Démons I , 157-158. Gaillois adds the following comment: "II est d'ailleurs une raison décisive de s'intéresser à l'ombre; c'est que, très généralement sinon universellement, l'âme lui est identifiée et que la force de l'une dépend de la longeur de l'autre." At noontime, therefore, the world has become "soulless"; its essence, or soul, has disappeared. The world has disintegrated into an infinity of vaguely threatening fragments, strange, uncanny, and clearly beyond our grasp.

[115] "und in jedem Ring des Menschendaseins gibt es immer eine Stunde, wo erst einem, dann vielen, dann allen der mächitgste Gedanke auftaucht, der von der ewigen Wiederkunft aller Dinge:—es ist jedesmal für die Menschheit die Stunde des Mittags" (quoted in Bollnow, Stimmungen , 233).

sprach Zarathustra) have been a favorite challenge to the interpretative acumen of Nietzsche's numerous commentators at least since Heidegger^[116] —especially so since Nietzsche himself is nowhere very clear about his exact intentions. But what most, if not all, commentators agree upon is that the combination of the two ideas of the grosset Mittag and of the myth of eternal return are meant by Nietzsche to be a critique of linear (historist) time—the conception of time within which each present emerges within a linear series from the past that immediately preceded it. The myth of eternal return breaks down this linear and evolutionary conception of time by strongly emphasizing the moment itself, at the expense of its merely being a part of a developing series of moments (which gives us historism). The idea is as follows: If, in conformity with the myth of eternal return, each moment is repeated endlessly, the moment will emancipate itself from the links it has with its past and its future and become an "eternal moment" itself. The moment will dissociate itself from its past and future, become independent from them, and thus appear to us sub specie aeternitatis . One might think here of the following metaphor. Within the conception of time suggested by the myth of eternal return, time is no longer the (his-torist) line, but should rather be thought of as a plane—a plane consisting of an infinity of parallel (historist) lines. In this plane, instead of linking the points on one and the same line, one could also draw a line connecting all the points representing the same moment on each individual line. And of that line we can justifiably say that it symbolizes a conjunction of one moment (the line connects the points representing the same moment) and eternity (by crossing all the individual parallel lines of the plane, this line is part of the eternity in which the eternal return of the same must be situated). Thus Bollnow writes:

But what is essential is that the Eternity that presents itself here introduces a dimension lying beyond the extension of finite time [here we have the line connecting all the returns of one and the same moment] and is therefore no part of it, but is only possible as an extensionless moment of time [and this is the moment itself]. (my translation)^[117]

[116] For a discussion of the views of Kaufmann, Fink, Heidegger, and Stambough, see I. N. Bulhof-Rutgers, Apollo's Wiederkehr, Eine Untersuchung der Rolle des Kreises in Nietzsche's Den-ken tiber Geschichte und Zeit. The Hague, 1969; especially 136ff. Megill resolutely rejects the Nietzschean notion of eternal return as incomprehensible and incoherent; see Megill, Prophets , 84. For a most original interpretation of the myth of eternal return, see A. C. Danto, "Nietzsche," in D. J. O'Connor, ed., A Critical History of Western Philosophy , New York, 1964, 399-400. The idea is that since the number of energy states of the universe is finite and time is infinite, each energy state must return an infinite number of times.

[117] "Aber wesentlich ist jetzt, dass die Ewigkeit, die hier aufbricht, eine Dimension be-deutet, die jenseits der Erstreckung der endlichen Zeit liegt und darum in dieser gar keine Zeitstrecke erfüllt, sondern. . . im ausdehnungslosen Augenblick selber möglich ist" (Bollnow, Stimmungen , 223).

Whether we accept Nietzsche's speculation about eternity and eternal return or not (I do not, since I see in them merely a "transfiguration" of the historist's ideology of Universalgeschichte), it will be clear to anyone that Nietzsche proposes here a conception of time in which the moment, so to speak, revolts against its subjection to the historist historical series. It is the revolution of the moment against (historical) evolution—a revolution that is both liberating and full of new dangers and uncertainties. Nietzsche's transfiguration of historism gives us, however, anti- or post-historism in a way similar to, though not identical with, my argument above. And as far as similarity is concerned, in both cases the moment assumes an "uncanny" independence—uncanny in the sense that what was made familiar and part of our historical identity is now outside the reach of historist "appropriation."

So if noontime effects, as we saw, a dissolution of the connections between the objects of the world and between those objects and ourselves, this movement of dissolution will be strongly reinforced if it is related to the myth of eternal return stimulating similar effects. The symbolism of noontime and the myth of eternal return both effect a disintegration of the reassuring linear sequence, with the help of which we—and the his-torists—tried to appropriate the past and to make ourselves feel "at home" in it. "Let me therefore agree," writes Kundera when commenting on Nietzsche's myth, "that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature." But, though the events of our personal past or those of human history now take on this uncanny independence from one another, a compensation for this dissolution of the past's coherence is offered to us since these events now can present themselves to us with the intensity of nostalgic remembrance. By a curious paradox, the dissolution of the historist past is the condition for the possibility of having what really is an experience of the past. As Kundera goes on to say, in the Nietzschean process "of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."^[118] Only the defamiliarized past is the past we can really feel and touch.

Here we find, then, a last indication of how historism and postmodernism are to be compared and how we should conceive of the postmodernist object of historical experience. Historism objectified the past and thought of it as a linear process; it could do both things at the same time by placing—as suggested by Ranke and by Mink—the historian on his secure, transcendental, and transhistorical hilltop from where he could survey the flow of the river of time. The category of difference could only be

[118] M. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being , London, 1984, 4.

located in the objectified past itself, since the "distance" from the transcendental hilltop to the river of time belongs to the realm of epistemology and not to that of history. By contrast, the postmodernist and the postmodernist's experience of time, as exemplified by Nietzsche's speculation on the grosser Mittag and on eternal return, urge us to historicize the his-torist's epistemological distance. It does this by presenting the past as a de-familiarized present, as a part of our identity that has become strange, alien, and uncanny. Within this "constitution" of the past, it is not an objectified past itself, but "difference" that is the object of historical experience.

6. Conclusion

In this essay, I have made an attempt to draw up an inventory of differences and parallels between historism and postmodernism. To that end, I have compared historist and postmodernist historical theory from the perspective of representation, ontology, epistemology, and historical experience. The major obstruction to my enterprise has been the fact that postmodernist historical theory up till now has never made a serious and sustained effort to define clearly its position from the perspectives just mentioned. The relevant positions thus had to be developed here for the sake of the comparison I wanted to make. One might object that I have thereby sinned against the spirit of postmodernism, one of the most essential differences between modernism (or historism) and postmodernism being that the latter is simply not interested in well-articulated views on ontology, epistemology, et cetera. To entertain such views is thus a typically modernist preoccupation. Indeed, postmodernists often are largely indifferent to traditional philosophical issues (a fact partially to be explained by the roots postmodernism has in literary theory). Yet, it is precisely for the sake of philosophical debate that I have permitted myself the liberty of extrapolating from postmodernist views a position on the above-mentioned traditional philosophical topics. My excuse for doing so is that I believe that the postmodernist can tell us something about the contemporary practice of history (especially in the field of the history of mentalities) that we do not yet know and that can best be expressed in terms of an, albeit imaginary, debate between the postmodernist and the historist (or the positivist). However, at this stage, the postmodernist might object that he is not interested in debate and argument and, once again, the facts about how postmodernists tend to react to their modernist opponents strengthens my suspicion that this is how the postmodernist might actually respond. Unfortunately there is much truth in Habermas's criticism when he castigates in postmodernism "the methodical exaggerations of an uncompromising critique of rationality that is symptomatic of a con-

fused spirit of the times rather than a help in understanding it" (my translation).^[119] But if this indeed is the postmodernist reaction to the challenge of the debate with the modernist or the historist, I would like to confront him with his postmodernist kindred spirit Richard Rorty, who has made it so very clear that it is in debate and discussion that we should invest our hopes of the fruitfulness of all intellectual pursuit.

The conclusion of the comparison is that postmodernism is a radicalization of historism and therefore neither so strange nor so irrational or objectionable as many scholars believe. The fragmentation of the historical world, the detail that is no longer seen as an expression of a greater whole, a nominalist tendency with regard to the ontology of representation, all these postmodernist views are already present in historism. But where historism and postmodernism most conspicuously differ is in the matter of the historical object. The historist's historical object is a reified past; postmodernism also knows a historical object, but one with an "uncanny" independence and autonomy of its own; yet this independence only announces itself in "the noontime of historical experience." It is a historical object that has its status of being part of an objective reality only thanks to a duplication in our awareness of ourselves and of our present; as such, it is not part of a reified past but situated in the distance or difference between past and present. It is the nostalgic historical sensation in which the different ways in which the historist and the postmodernist experience the past most clearly articulate themselves.

The purpose of this essay has not been to offer a eulogy for postmodernist historical theory. It is true that postmodernism (as presented here) may be able to avoid some of the halfway houses that historism built for itself. Yet it still has to be seen whether postmodernism is more successful than historism in its support of historiographical practice. For no historical theory has guaranteed historical writing greater and better-deserved triumphs than historism. And there may be much truth to Rorty's assertion that, to a large extent, postmodernist theories depend and even feed upon their modernist counterparts.^[120] This essay, therefore, does not wish to advertise a route from historism to postmodernism which we are all compelled to follow; it is merely a rough and provisional map for charting the intellectual territory in which the modernist historist and the postmodernist can both live and thrive. We must understand, not recommend.

[119] "den methodischen Übertreibungen einer total gewordenen Vernunftkritik, die einen diffusen Zeitgeist eher symptomatisch zum Ausdruck als auf den Begriff bringt" (J. Habermas, Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit: Kleine politische Schriften , Frankfurt am Main, 1985, 135).

[120] R. Rorty, "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing," in Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism , Brighton, 1982, 107-108.