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-

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-

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-

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-

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

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-

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.