Dissolving and Inflating the Historical
The status of history was already in question before the waning of metaphysics forced the more insistent reconsideration of cultural priorities that has marked the period since about 1960. Indeed, it has long been a commonplace that the break into twentieth-century culture was bound up with a retreat from the premium on historical approaches that marked "the great age of history" in the nineteenth century.[4] Somehow the sphere of public, objective history, which
[3] "Aestheticism" is central to Allan Megill's account in Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985). See also Alexander Nehamas's aestheticist reading of Nietzsche in Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); and Richard Rorty's discussion of the category in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 119n.
[4] Introducing the pioneering modernism of Vienna, Carl Schorske refers to "our century's ahistorical culture" almost in passing. See Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1981), xviii.
had seemed deeply meaningful, grew blurry, and the focus shifted to subjective temporal experience or, at most, to one's own personal history. The advent of Freudian psychoanalysis has frequently been cited as the most significant example.[5] In addition, the modernist use of simultaneity and collage seemed to challenge the notion of linear time and thus to undermine the confidence in linear narrative that was apparently essential to any historical approach.[6]
At the same time, the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century seem to have constituted such a rupture that history, with its connotations of continuity, coherence, and intelligibility, must surely diminish as a cultural component. In his widely admired The Great War and Modern Memory , Paul Fussell notes that World War I "was perhaps the last to be conceived as taking place within a seamless, purposeful 'history' involving a coherent stream of time running from past through present to future."[7] Especially insofar as "history" necessarily carries this particular baggage, it seems to have been undermined by the events of history itself in the twentieth century. Some insist that only literature, even if still in narrative form, can get at the real, lived reality of what is commonly taken as a historical experience or event, such as the First World War.[8]
Indeed, changes in the cultural situation seemed to thrust a new kind of leadership on the literary culture, even responsibility for what once seemed part of the historians' domain. The distinguished critic Harold Bloom noted this tendency with a certain grim resignation in the early 1970s, when he pondered the special difficulties we have come to encounter in conceiving the relationship between our present experience and our tradition or history:
The teacher of literature now in America, far more than the teacher of history or philosophy or religion, is condemned to teach the presentness of the past, because history, philosophy and religion have withdrawn as agents from the Scene of Instruction, leaving the bewildered teacher of literature alone at the altar, terrifiedly wondering whether he is to be sacrifice or priest. If he evades his burden by attempting to teach only the supposed presence of the present, he will find himself teaching only some simplistic, partial reduction that wholly
[5] Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 63; Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna , chap. 4.
[6] See, for example, Eugene Lunn's lucid discussion of this direction, especially as represented by Brecht and resisted by Lukács, in Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1982), 48–55, 121–124. See also Gianni Vattimo, La fine della modernità (Milan: Garzanti, 1985), 18, for a comparable argument about the impact of the modern media, especially television, in dehistoricizing our experience through simultaneity.
[7] Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 21.
[8] Modris Eksteins, in Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 290–291, 296, argues explicitly that literary writers proved better able than historians to get at the reality of World War I. The war itself had undermined the historical imagination, so that history could not make sense of the experience.
obliterates the present in the name of one or another historicizing formula, or past injustice, or dead faith, whether secular or not. Yet how is he to teach a tradition now grown so wealthy and so heavy that to accommodate it demands more strength than any single consciousness can provide, short of the parodistic Kabbalism of a Pynchon?[9]
Only one chunk of the cultural terrain is at issue in this passage, and for Bloom responsibility for it falls to the literary culture by default, not as the booty of confident imperialist conquest. But the notion that literature must assume responsibility for a historical world grown too overwhelming for the competence of historians was central to the overall rethinking of cultural priorities.
If history was still to contribute to the wider culture, it seemed to need major recasting in light of the twentieth-century experience. Writing in 1966, Hayden White argued that "the historian serves no one well by constructing a specious continuity between the present world and that which preceded it. On the contrary, we require a history that will educate us to discontinuity more than ever before; for discontinuity, disruption, and chaos is our lot."[10] But as even categories ancillary to historiography, such as continuity, chronology, and narrative, became suspect, the notion that "history" is ending, along with God, metaphysics, and the true world, became widespread in humanistic discussion.
Poststructuralists like Foucault and Derrida were widely assumed to have shown "that there really is no such thing as 'history.'"[11] All we can do is think instead in terms of sheer becoming, or mere flux, or slippage, or the play of differences. Throughout his Radical Hermeneutics , John D. Caputo falls back on the notion of "flux," which he takes to be a kind of neutral, premetaphysical category capable of withstanding even the postmodernist critical onslaught.[12] It comes to seem that in shaping the formless ooze into "recorded history," we are simply seeking an antidote to "the primitive terror" we feel in the face of the real nothingness of the flux.[13]
Tainted with metaphysical prejudices, historical-mindedness came to seem but another Western pretense, even a form of domination by the winners, who
[9] Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 39.
[10] Hayden V. White, "The Burden of History," reprinted in his Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 50.
[11] David Hoy, "Jacques Derrida," in The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, ed. Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 48–49, referring to the stance of Foucault, Derrida, and "other modern Nietzscheans." See also pp. 59–60, and, in the same volume, Mark Philp, "Michel Foucault," 78–79, for further indications that any premium on continuity or tradition has come to seem conservative, limiting, even authoritarian.
[12] John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); see, for example, pp. 97–98.
[13] See T. S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages," in Four Quartets (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971; orig. pub. 1943), 39, lines 96–103. See also hans Kellner's way of making the point in his "Beautifying the Nightmare: The Aesthetics of Postmodern History," Strategies 4–5 (1991): 292–293.
enforce remembrance of the course of the actual and forgetting of all the rest. History is always written by the victors, and victory conflates with domination and exclusion.[14] From this perspective, any premium on historical thinking is inherently conservative, since it justifies the present power configuration by affording privilege to the course of the actual and thus the status quo.
However, another body of evidence suggests that what ends with the erosion of metaphysics is not history writ large but simply a certain approach to history—and a certain way of understanding our own place within our particular history. Our idea of history had indeed come to carry a good deal of metaphysical baggage, but to jettison that baggage may force us to take history seriously in ways inconceivable before.[15]
Recent antihistorical thinking often simply assumes that any notion of history must carry such baggage. There is a tendency to conflate the coherence and continuity that do seem necessary, if we are to speak of "history" at all, with the progressivism and even teleology that may not be. Indeed, postmetaphysical discussions of history persistently slip in G. W. F. Hegel at key junctures, as if a cultural emphasis on history necessarily entails Hegelian assumptions.[16]
The metaphysical tradition rested on the belief that, on some level, things are a certain way that we might discover, that there are stable, suprahistorical foundations or essences, origins or purposes, "firsts" or "ends." In one form or another, metaphysics seemed to specify a kind of container for all the variable and contingent stuff of history. For Rorty, in fact, traditional philosophy was fundamentally "an attempt to escape from history—an attempt to find nonhistorical conditions of any possible historical development."[17] But if so, then something like history might seem what remains as, with the end of metaphysics, we recognize that any such suprahistorical realm is inaccessible, even inconceivable.
[14] See especially Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253–264. See also Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvízdala , trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1991), 166–167, for a more recent example of this tendency.
[15] What it means "to take history seriously" is crucial. See David Couzens Hoy's way of framing the issue in "Taking History Seriously: Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34, no. 2 (Winter 1979): 85–95.
[16] For Michel Foucault, "our age . . . is attempting to flee Hegel." See "The Discourse on Language" (1970), published with The Archaeology of Knowledge , trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, Colophon, 1976), 235. See also Megill, Prophets of Extremity , 186–187, on Foucault's enduring preoccupation with Hegel; and Vattimo, La fine della modernità , 10–17, on the effort to escape Hegel in Nietzsche and Heidegger. In questioning the Hegelian legacy, Jacques Derrida, like Vattimo, worried plausibly about the notion of Aufhebung , or "overcoming," but a sense that the ghost of Hegel lurked everywhere may have led these thinkers to load certain categories with unnecessary baggage. See especially Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 25.
[17] Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 9.
In one sense, the modern subjectivism that began with René Descartes was a new, more radical attempt at a suprahistorical metaphysics in the face of Renaissance skepticism. With the Cartesian recasting of Western philosophy, subjectivity or consciousness became the bedrock, that which could not be doubted. Taking form as the self or ego, subjectivity was a priori and somehow transcendent, capable of seeing the world whole, even mastering it.
In some of our accounts, to be sure, we accent the sense in which modern subjectivism was itself postmetaphysical. As the old metaphysics no longer seemed to hold, a new kind of humanism emerged, accenting the scope for human beings to make their own world on earth. Thus the Enlightenment project and the several political strands that followed from it; thus, eventually, the idea of progress and the particular relationship to history that it entailed. In this sense, the departure from antihistorical metaphysics involved embracing history as meaningful—as the arena for making the world, thereby creating or revealing ourselves. But even insofar as modern subjectivism entailed this premium on action in history, the ahistorical core of that tradition remained in place. The metaphysical tradition led us still to posit a universal rational standard, a congruence between mind and reality, and a direction, even a telos, to history itself.
What happens when "modernity," combining still-metaphysical assumptions with one brand of historical consciousness, loses its aura? Most basically, the subjective ego or consciousness no longer seems a priori and transcendent but is "thrown" into some particular context. And this means not only that individual subjectivity is always historically specific but also that my selfhood emerges only through the larger historical happening into which I am thrown. My self-understanding begins in a past I did not create and is projected into a future I cannot control.[18] But it is equally crucial that with the waning of metaphysics, we cannot conceive this history as an overarching process of human self-realization, of "becoming what we are." Because there is no a priori human essence, there is no scope for fulfilling ourselves by overcoming some fragmentation or alienation.
So the subject is neither transcendent nor in process of self-realization but is rather bound up with some specific situation that is historical in a non-Hegelian sense. It would seem, then, that a post-Hegelian form of historical inquiry might replace subjectivity or consciousness as the key to self-understanding.
From within the modern framework, "modern" was an honorific term expressing our sense of ourselves as the privileged culmination of a benign historical process. The West was superior, and Western modernity was the culmination of human development, because scientific reason afforded a
[18] Georgia Warnke makes the point nicely in specifying the central Heideggerian insight influencing Hans-Georg Gadamer. See her Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 40.
privileged access to the truth of things—and thus an increasing technological mastery of the world. But on this level, too, we come to seem more significantly bound up with history as our modern world comes to seem merely a contingent historical resultant, "modern" in no more than a neutral chronological sense and certainly not metaphysically privileged. As modernity loses its aura, we become postmodern, relating to our earlier pretensions in a newly self-conscious way, perhaps through parody or nostalgia.[19] But the res gestae, the stuff history deals with, still may be sufficiently coherent to make possible historical inquiry, and such inquiry may have deeper cultural import precisely insofar as history is not progressive, with an a priori frame.
For over a century, those assaulting the metaphysical tradition have found themselves face-to-face with something like history—but not the history that nineteenth-century advocates of a historical approach had in mind. Even as he deplored the implications of the hypertrophy of one kind of historical consciousness, Nietzsche reduced reality to perpetual becoming and emphasized the contingent constructedness of the worlds we fashion for ourselves. By the first decade of the century, Croce was submerging philosophy within history as he sought to posit an absolute historicism. Heidegger thought through first the centrality of historicity to human living, then the particularity of our world as a purely historical resultant. By midcentury, Wittgenstein had reacted against his earlier attempt to provide a suprahistorical map of language and was suggesting that, on every level, we may alter or devise the rules as we go along, subject to the historically specific form of life in which we find ourselves. A bit later, Thomas Kuhn modestly proposed "a role for history" even in the self-understanding of the natural sciences, thereby initiating one of the most fruitful discussions of the century. By the 1980s, Robert C. Solomon was offering a strikingly contemporary Hegel whose "closing" telos proves the empty yet liberating awareness that the world is perpetually incomplete; Michael Ryan was suggesting that "history" is another name for the undecidability that Derrida allots us; and Richard Rorty, underscoring the historical contingency of what once seemed the inevitable philosophical problems, was proposing that history affords the only therapy when we find ourselves intellectually befuddled. More recently still, Brook Thomas concluded that, with the end of all we have encompassed under the term "metaphysics," ours is "a historically contingent world" in which "there are only historical ways of knowing."[20]
[19] Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; orig. French ed. 1979) focused attention on these possibilities within the postmodern discussion.
[20] Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 14–16, 636–637; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations , trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, n.d.), no. 83 (p. 39e); Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 21; Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 215–216. I discuss Rorty in chap. 10.
Examples could be multiplied, and, though disparate, they have a significant family resemblance. For a hundred years, some have suggested that as we cease to believe in foundations, essences, or "metanarratives," we are left with a world that is particular and provisional, endlessly differing, forever incomplete; ever more of reality seems but a contingent historical resultant. A kind of "inflation of history" or "reduction to history" seems to have been at work. With the dissolution of metaphysics, history could no longer be understood simply as the mundane testing ground specified in our religious tradition, or as the revelation or dramatization of truths, principles, or values already there, or as the path to a goal given beforehand. Rather, history was left standing alone, naked, for the first time—as all there is.
But whether what is left can usefully be termed "history" obviously depends on the baggage the term must carry. Perhaps, to avoid metaphysical heresies, we must settle for empty becoming, or, with Caputo, mere flux. However, it is possible that we must understand the world more fully as "historical" than ever before, but "historical" in a new, "weak" way in the absence of metaphysical buttressing.[21] Even if we find ourselves doing so, however, it is not obvious how the human relationship to such a world is to be conceived. Nor is it clear how we might respond to a purely historical world. A simple dichotomy between pro- and antihistory does not seem sufficient to sort out the cultural directions that have opened in response to this inflation of history.
At this point, it is enough simply to grasp the overall line of questioning that these preliminaries suggest. If our conventional ways of understanding history prove to rest on outmoded metaphysical assumptions, are we left with sheer becoming, mere flux, or the play of differences, or can we make new sense of history, both as a conception of what "there is" and as a mode of inquiry and understanding? If our world seems to reduce to nothing but history, what is the range of plausible responses? Does the mix of extremity and aestheticism rest on a fair reading of the possibilities, or has there been something prejudicial about the way the alternatives have been sorted out? What is the scope for a moderate, constructive orientation toward history within a postmetaphysical culture, and how would any such orientation relate to the extremes?
[21] The notion of "weakness" in recent humanistic discussion is associated especially with the Italian Gianni Vattimo, whose thinking derives from his innovative and illuminating synthesis of Nietzsche and Heidegger. For a good brief introduction, see his "Dialettica, differenza, pensiero debole," in Il pensiero debole , ed. Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983), 12–28. In English, see Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture , trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988; orig. Italian ed. 1985). Although I am indebted to Vattimo's work, I depart from his position in accenting the divergence between Nietzsche and Heidegger within the postmetaphysical space, as well as the scope for a constructive alternative between the extremes they were the first to establish. Thus my use of the term "weak" is not precisely congruent with Vattimo's.