Re-Thinking History PDF

Re-thinking History ‘Far and away the best introduction to the state of the question currently available.’ Hayden White, University of California at Santa Cruz ‘It is a model of concise argument and poses fundamental questions concerning the nature of historiography in a post modernist world.’ Alan White, University of East London ‘An excellent introduction to historical method.’ Kevin Harrison, Mancat School ‘A valuable, concise introduction to the inﬂuence of post-modernism on history.’ M. Thomson, Shefﬁeld University ‘A challenging book which makes accessible recent developments in the philosophy of history.’ David Dean, Goldsmith College, University of London ‘An excellent introductory text to the ﬁeld,... a very manageable and accessible work written in an attractively informal style.’ C. M. Williams, University of Wales ‘Keith Jenkins’ Rethinking History is a startlingly clear and thought- provoking introduction to current central debates in history and his- toriography. It is accessible to history students, students in subjects that draw on historical past and to the general reader. Already, a classic text book.’ Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London Keith Jenkins Re-thinking History With a new preface and conversation with the author by Alun Munslow London and New York First published 1991 by Routledge First published in Routledge Classics 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 1991 Keith Jenkins Preface to Routledge Classics edition and ‘In Conversation: Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow’ © 2003 Alun Munslow All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-42686-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-43977-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–30443–1 (pbk) (Print Edition) For Sue Morgan with much love C ONTENTS Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition by Alun Munslow xi In Conversation: Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow xv Introduction 1 1 What history is 6 2 On some questions and some answers 33 3 Doing history in the post-modern world 70 Notes 85 Index 93 Every discipline, I suppose, is, as Nietzsche saw most clearly, constituted by what it forbids its practitioners to do. Every dis- cipline is made up of a set of restrictions on thought and imagination, and none is more hedged about with taboos than professional historiography – so much so that the so-called ‘historical method’ consists of little more than the injunction to ‘get the story straight’ (without any notion of what the relation of ‘story’ to ‘fact’ might be) and to avoid both conceptual overdetermination and imaginative excess (i.e., ‘enthusiasm’) at any price. Yet the price paid is a considerable one. It has resulted in the repression of the conceptual apparatus (without which atomic facts cannot be aggregated into complex macrostructures and constituted as objects of discursive representation in a historical narrative) and the remission of the poetic moment in historical writing to the interior of the discourse (where it functions as an unacknowledged – and therefore uncriticizable – content of the historical narrative). Those historians who draw a ﬁrm line between history and philosophy of history fail to recognise that every historical dis- course contains within it a full-blown, if only implicit, phil- osophy of history.... The principal difference between history and philosophy of history is that the latter brings the con- ceptual apparatus by which the facts are ordered in the dis- course to the surface of the text, while history proper (as it is called) buries it in the interior of the narrative, where it serves as a hidden or implicit shaping device.... Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse, pp. 126–7 P REFACE TO THE R OUTLEDGE C LASSICS E DITION Everything, everybody and every book have a history. What Keith Jenkins’ book Re-Thinking History, published in 1991, made us all aware of is that such histories are, indeed, just that. They are only histories. This means we would do well to recognise and remember that the histories we assign to things and people are composed, created, constituted, constructed and always situated literatures. And, what is more, they carry within them their author’s philosophy or ‘take’ on the world present, past and future. Such is the importance and inﬂuence of this book, especially among the younger generation of history students, that it now seems quaintly old fashioned to bother to point out that ‘history’ is not the same as ‘the past’. By the same token that as a form of knowledge history is – plainly and palpably – a narrative representation. That history is not some kind of mirror of past reality (and not because it is distorted by the bees in the bonnet of the historian, or their poor inference, or the poverty of their sources) seems a pretty obvious thing to say these days. This, the xii preface to the routledge classics edition essential ‘historicist’ message of Re-Thinking History has, of course, itself a history. Keith Jenkins admits his indebtedness at the outset with the lengthy quotation from the American philosopher of history Hayden White. What White is pointing to is what Keith Jenkins views as the doubtful belief – still shared by a great many historians – that we can know the truth of the past through a detailed knowledge of what happened: the facts of the matter. In other words, through the ‘empirical method’ we ‘discover’ our ‘subject knowledge’, which constitutes the only way we can possess ‘objective knowledge’ in our history. And, hence, this is how we get the story straight. The point at issue is the one about knowledge – what and how it is possible ‘to know’ the past? Taking his cue from White but also the other great contemporary philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit, Jenkins pointed out that history is ﬁrst and foremost a literary narrative about the past, a literary composition of the data into a narrative where the historian creates a meaning for the past. The implication is that in producing our historical narra- tives we must no longer suppress history’s character as literature. But there is a hugely important consequence of this. As Jenkins argues, we must acknowledge the epistemological and philo- sophical assumptions historians make about the ‘proper’ way to ‘do history’. As you will have gathered by now, the ﬁrst, most widespread and most misleading philosophical assumption that Jenkins nails is that history can correspond with the reality of the past through a knowledge of its content. Jenkins refuses to let those historians oﬀ the hook who endorse this fundamental misconception. He brings this crucial issue out into the open, taking it from the obscurity of philosophy of history seminars, forcing us to confront it. And in so doing he compels we his- torians to recognise our basic assumptions about how we con- ventionally think of history as an empirical method rather than preface to the routledge classics edition xiii epistemologically as a form of literature that carries within it our philosophies of life. Invoking the French theorist of discourse Michel Foucault and the American pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty, Jenkins sus- tains his onslaught on the naïve idea that the past world and the present word can match each other to do the work of truth. Jenkins pushes home what we need to be reminded about his- tory. That it is not the same as the past. That history is always for someone. That history always has a purpose. That history is always about power. That history is never innocent but always ideological (and not in the sense of political bias, but moral judgements about right and wrong and how the individual his- torian thinks the world works). He insists we think and re-think that which we call a historical fact so that we understand it is only a description of things that happened and which, therefore, cannot have an intrinsic meaning (facts never speak for them- selves). Moreover, we cannot empathise with people in the past because not only is it plainly impossible to ‘get inside someone else’s head’ but to translate another’s intentions from their actions is an epistemological step too far. And ﬁnally, that the logic of history is not one of discovery but of construction – building on referentiality but deploying ﬁgurative thinking, argument, theory, concept and ethics. The past for Jenkins is a building site, not a foreign land to be explored. For Jenkins, what all this means is that no amount of archival immersion, or scientiﬁc-like methods, or the wish to be rational and objective, or to be rigorous in our inferences, or distance ourselves from the past, or empathise with it, can change the essential nature of historical study. While all these things do not necessarily do damage to the past, as a written representation of something that cannot be recovered, history cannot be rescued as a form of knowledge by laying it ‘ﬁrmly’on its empirical or analytical foundations. What this means is that there is no ‘hidden’ or ‘true’ story to be ‘found’. There is no centre to xiv preface to the routledge classics edition history because there is no knowable past in terms of what ‘it’ means. There is only what we might call the-past-as-history. This is what the French critic Roland Barthes called the ‘reality eﬀect’. We can only represent the past through the form we give to its reality. Jenkins closes the book by posing the question of how can we cope with the past under these circumstances? His answer (which he has developed far more radically of late) is that we recognise what history clearly is: a knowledge production pro- cess that cannot work as a reconstructionist exercise. If we accept that we all have epistemological choices open to us, that we make ontological pre-judgements, and that we have method- ological preferences, then there is no privileged or ‘right’ route to the past. Because of this argument – that all history is unavoidably situated – the fact that Re-Thinking History is now oﬃcially a classic text does not mean most historians endorse it. I would say they don’t. Some still regard it as a dangerous book. Often you will hear something to the eﬀect that it has provided the profession with a useful reminder that we should pay more attention to the role of language in doing history and that historians usually do have bees in their bonnet so readers must be aware. But such comments only serve to illustrate that the message is still sinking in. Ahead of its time in 1991, Keith Jenkins’ polemic has earned its classic status for the way in which, more than any other late- twentieth-century work, it tried to wake up the historical pro- fession from its empirical sleepwalking. And while still too many in the history profession continue to slumber, the need for this radical text continues. A M J 2002 I N C ONVERSATION Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow Alun: Can I begin by asking you a rather obvious question; namely, what made you write Re-Thinking History in the ﬁrst place? Keith: There are a lot of reasons, but I suppose the main, under- lying one, was my long-time interest in theory – at least a little bit unusual for a historian. In the 1970s I had read Medieval and Modern History at the University of Nottingham – a very trad- itional degree – but then I ‘transferred’ to the Politics Depart- ment where I wrote a Ph.D. in political theory (a thesis on Nietzsche, Freud and Sorel). It was then my intention to lecture in political theory, but jobs were scarce and in 1978 I joined the History Department at what is now University College Chiches- ter. At ﬁrst I taught a range of history courses but, in the early 1980s, I began to work on the History PGCE, an experience which brought me into contact with postgraduate students drawn, over the years, from practically every university in Britain and which – for these were trainee secondary history teachers – concentrated my mind on the way they thought about the xvi in conversation ‘subject’ they were themselves going to teach. And these were ‘theoretical’ issues. For example, what is history? Why should it be taught? What is the epistemological status of historical know- ledge? And so on. And what struck me here was – with notable exceptions – not only the students’ lack of interest in such theor- etical questions but often their intense hostility towards them. Most had clearly managed to obtain good degrees (and often higher degrees) in a ‘discipline’ whose epistemological, meth- odological and ethical constituents remained not only a mystery but one they had little inclination to probe: why keep thinking about history – why not just do it! And it seemed to me that this unreﬂexive attitude – to my mind a tremendous indictment of ‘our’ history degrees – was unacceptable. Consequently, the courses I taught right across the board increasingly drew on historical theorising in ways inﬂuenced by my own reading as I began to ‘move over’ from political to ‘history theory’. And here my earlier interest in Nietzsche in particular – a ‘post-modernist’ well before the term had been invented – combined with my discovery, in the early 1980s, of the work of Hayden White, made me receptive to ‘postist’ theorising then circulating in literary and cultural theory and, more generally, in philosophy. Accordingly, it was this experience which provided the more immediate basis for a series of articles published throughout the 1980s and which I drew on for Re-Thinking History in 1990–1. Designed to be a short, cheap and cheerful polemic, it was delib- erately opposed to the kinds of thinking about history which undergraduates were overwhelmingly exposed to – if at all – on their courses, thinking dominated by people like E.H. Carr and Geoﬀrey Elton (whose ‘controversy’ was, in the 1960s when it took place, already passé relative to the developing work of, say, Barthes and Foucault and White, let alone Derrida), and by introductory overviews on ‘the nature of history’ by people like Arthur Marwick and John Tosh. Re-Thinking History, then, gave me the chance to develop the idea I then had of the ‘best’ way to in conversation xvii theorise history – as a narrative prose discourse the content of which is as much imagined as found and the form of which is expungeably problematic après Hayden White – in ways which hadn’t been much done before for history undergraduates as opposed to ‘philosophy of history’ specialists, and it was this popularising intention which, I suppose, may have accounted for its relative success at the time and since. Alun: Were you surprised at its huge success both in terms of sales and in helping to get ‘postmodern’ ideas into what was – and still is – arguably a very conservative ‘discipline’? Keith: Yes and no. I mean, in many ways the kinds of things I discussed in Re-Thinking History only appeared ‘radical’ within his- tory. The ideas I discussed had long been circulating in practic- ally all the other discourses around: art, architecture, literature, sociology, philosophy. Indeed, these were the areas I drew upon, and so the popularity (and also the vehement attacks on the book, by Marwick for example) were a little surprising. But, on the other hand, I knew how intellectually backward the general condition of ‘the discipline of history’ was, and how rabidly anti-theoretical the academic pursuit of history was, and so I thought there was a niche market just waiting to be opened up... and which needed to be opened up. In my view history, like any other discourse in any culture, is not of ‘a natural kind’, and is thus a theoretical, speculative experiment ‘all the way down’. And students ought – simply by virtue of being engaged in the processes of history production – to know something about the product they are making and its wider conditions wherein, as an idea, it seems ‘to make sense’. And they still do. Alun: This leads me to ask you about the current state of xviii in conversation ‘history and theory’. Has it developed in the last ten years in appreciable ways and, if so, would you re-write Re-Thinking History very diﬀerently if you were to write it today? Keith: Well, things have certainly developed. I suppose I was a fairly lonely voice – certainly a fairly lonely popularising voice – in the early 1990s. But today the number of really sophisticated texts on historical theory, historiography, historical methods and epistemology, has multiplied enormously; there are some brilliant texts around. And I think that it is the impact of the ‘posts’ – post-structuralism, post-Marxism, post-feminism, post-colonialism... and especially the inﬂuence of various deconstructionist approaches – which has been responsible for trying to pull historical study – certainly of the academic, pro- fessional type (genre) taught in universities – into the late twen- tieth century. Whether they can get it into the twenty-ﬁrst remains to be seen... As to re-writing Re-Thinking History diﬀerently today, that is obviously the case: history does not and should not repeat itself! On the other hand, I think the issues it tried to raise have by no means gone away, and that is why I haven’t changed anything for this Routledge Classics edition. Rather, what I have done, as you know, is to write a new book (which will be out a little time before this edition – in the Autumn of 2002) called Re-Figuring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline – which tries to bring things together in ways which, for what it’s worth, I see some things now. But I regard this text as, in a way, complementing rather than superseding Re-Thinking History: they’re both part of the same project of trying to encourage theoretical reﬂections at a fairly introductory and hopefully accessible level for students about to embark on serious historical work. Alun: My last question and it’s to do with what I’d like to call in conversation xix your style. I know that, personally, you are an enormously laid back and cheerful person, that you have a certain ‘lightness’ (and the expected ironic take on things) coupled with an adventurous openness towards newness... and yet you write in ways which appear to be incredibly serious, even zealous. And, in some ways, as your own reﬂections on history have developed since Re-Thinking History you have become more extreme, writing more and more not only on the problematical nature of history per se but on its possible end... on ‘the end of history’. So is there, if I can put it this way, not so much an irony but a paradox or even a contradiction here? Keith: I don’t think there is a contradiction. I mean to say, yes, as a person I think I am (certainly speaking intellectually) fairly cheerful and, though it may not appear that way, highly opti- mistic. If you are a mainstream academic historian, or if indeed you are a radical historian, then my attempt to re-think/re- ﬁgure/deconstruct/post-modernise an old discourse may appear destructive. And in a way it is. But as I’ve put ‘if’ before, there is more to life – more at stake in life – than the hegemonic continuation of an ideologically positioned set of guild practices reiﬁed by their beneﬁciaries into tablets of stone, and it may well be that the having of a ‘historical consciousness’ of that or, indeed, any other type is no longer necessary in a social forma- tion that is, arguably, ‘no longer modern’. And so in the name of, I suppose, future emancipation and empowerment, I am optimistic about the kinds of histories that are now being written of an experimental kind beyond the limits of the academic genre – even when most generously construed – if histories per se are still deemed to be required. And I am also optimistic about living in a world ‘without histories’ if what passes for history, however imagined, is a block to the imagining of things that, in the name of emancipation and empowerment, are altogether more relevant and to the point. xx in conversation As I see it, the historicisation of the past – a particular, pecu- liar, time-space product of a certain kind of essentially Western European and North American consciousness of the nineteenth century – is only one way of ‘past thinking’, only one way of domesticating and making familiar the radical otherness of the ‘before now’ which, though ideologically understandable, is not immune from the usual ravages of time. Things come, things go. History as I read it, in both its meta-narrative forms (certain Hegelianised Marxisms, say; certain productions of an immanent kind) and in its academic, professional forms, are both interest- ing experiments in the construction of, as I say, something pecu- liar on the face of the earth: historicisations of something that doesn’t have histories in it: the past; the ‘before now’. And so, as I say, I’m optimistic about either re-thinking the histories that were a crucial part of this ‘experiment of the modern’, or of thinking thoughts of a prescient kind through another gaze, another discursive practice that will be, hopefully, future orien- tated and liberating: post-modern (and post-modernism dis- courses) of a type, perhaps, as yet little imagined. J 2002 I NTRODUCTION This book is addressed primarily to students who are embarking upon a study of the question, ‘what is history?’ It has been written both as an introduction (in the literal sense that there may be some points in what follows that have not been encountered before) and as a polemic. In the following pages I am running a particular argument as to what I think history is, not that you should accept it but rather that you might engage critically with it. The aim, throughout, is to help in the devel- opment of your own self-consciously held (reﬂexive) position on history... to be in control of your own discourse.1 Both these things – an introductory text and a polemic – seem to me to be necessary at this point in time. For although there are introductory texts on the market already, popular primers such as Edward Carr’s What is History?, Geoﬀrey Elton’s The Practice of History and Arthur Marwick’s The Nature of History2 these, despite their sometime revision, still carry with them the ballast of their formative years (the 1950s and 1960s) such that they have now eﬀectively become old favourites. They are also in a sense (as are 2 introduction more recent additions to the genre such as John Tosh’s The Pursuit of History3) very ‘English’ texts, a characteristic which has had the somewhat unfortunate consequence of helping isolate history from some of the wider and arguably more generous intellectual developments that have recently been taking place in related discourses. Both philosophy and literature, for example, have engaged very seriously with the question of what is the nature of their own nature.4 It might therefore well be argued that history is, vis-à-vis these neighbouring discourses, theoretically backward, a remark that perhaps calls for an immediate illustration in order to prevent any misunderstandings. If you go into an academic bookshop and look over the shelves occupied by texts on philosophy, you will ﬁnd a vast array of works wherein the problem of the foundations and limits of what can be known and what can be done ‘philo- sophically’ are the staple diet: texts on ontology (theories of being), epistemology (theories of knowledge) and method- ology; texts on scepticism, on language and meaning, on types of analysis – idealist, materialist, realist, phenomenological – and so on. If you then wander over to the shelves on literature, you will ﬁnd a separate section on literary theory (in addition to a section on literary criticism). Here are texts on Marxist and feminist readings, on Freudian and post-Freudian analyses; on deconstructionism, critical theory, reception theory and inter- textuality; on poetics, narratology, rhetoric, allegory and so forth. But then continue over to the history area. Here it is almost certain that there will be no section on history theory (even the phrase looks odd and clumsy – beﬁtting unfamiliarity) but only, tucked away discreetly amongst the serried ranks of history books, the aforementioned Elton and others with, if you are lucky, perhaps an odd copy of (a now domesticated) Geyl or Bloch or Collingwood or, if you are luckier still, a ‘recent’ Hayden White or a Foucault.5 In other words, in moving across a introduction 3 few feet of ﬂooring you are, in the main, moving across a gener- ation gap; from theoretically rich and very recent texts to works on the nature of history produced twenty to thirty years ago or, in the case of Bloch and his contemporaries, in the 1930s and 1940s. Now this is obviously not to say that enormously sophisti- cated and more recent texts on history and ‘history theory’ do not exist (thus, variously, Callinicos or Oakeshott; thus various post-modernist works; thus developments in the areas of intel- lectual and cultural history6). Nor is it to say that this lack of concern for history theory and its consequences has not been regularly noticed. Long ago Gareth Stedman-Jones pointed to the poverty of English empiricism; more recently Raphael Samuel has commented on the relatively retarded condition of much historical work with its fetishism of the document, its obsession with ‘the facts’ and its accompanying methodology of ‘naïve realism’. David Cannadine’s essay, with his strictures against the sterility, downright dullness and myopia of much mainstream history, has been much referred to by professional historians, whilst Christopher Parker’s study of the major characteristics of the ‘English tradition’ of historical writing as exempliﬁed by its leading exponents since c. 1850, is an investigation of that deep rut within which a certain type of individualism has run, a methodological perspective largely unreﬂexive about its own ideological presuppositions.7 Yet such developments and analyses as these have not signiﬁcantly fed through so as to inform the more popular surveys and guides to the nature of history. Theoretical discussions are still on the whole skirted by robustly practical practising historians, and certainly the occa- sional text on theory does not exert the same kind of heavy pressure that the many texts on, say, literary theory, exert on the study of literature. But arguably this is the way that history ought to go if it is to be ‘modernised’. Accordingly I have drawn here on such related 4 introduction areas as philosophy and literary theory. For if ‘doing history’ is about how you can read and make sense of the past and the present, then it seems important to me to use discourses that have ‘readings’ and the construction of meanings as major concerns.8 How, then, is the text structured? It has three quite delib- erately short chapters.9 In the ﬁrst I address directly the question of what history is and how the history question can be answered in ways which do not necessarily replicate more ‘English’ for- mulations, that do not leave such dominant (common-sense) discourses as unproblematic and which begin to open up history to somewhat wider perspectives. (Bear in mind that ‘history’ is really ‘histories’, for at this point we ought to stop thinking of history as though it were a simple and rather obvious thing and recognise that there is a multiplicity of types of history whose only common feature is that their ostensible object of enquiry is ‘the past’.) In chapter 2 I apply that ‘answer’ to some of the issues and problems commonly surfacing in some of the more basic and introductory debates about the nature of history. Here I shall argue that, although regularly posed, such issues and problems are more rarely resolved or put into context, leaving them tantal- isingly open ended and/or mystifying. These are problems such as: is it possible to say what really happened in the past, to get to the truth, to reach objective understandings or, if not, is history incorrigibly interpretive? What are historical facts (and indeed are there any such things)? What is bias and what does it mean to say that historians ought to detect it and root it out? Is it possible to empathise with people who lived in the past? Is a scientiﬁc history possible or is history essentially an art? What is the status of those couplets that so often appear in deﬁnitions of what history is all about: cause and eﬀect, similarity and diﬀerence, continuity and change? In chapter 3 I pull together all the points I will by then have introduction 5 made by relating them to the position from which I am work- ing; by inserting them into the context that I think informs this text. I have said already that the point of the text is to oﬀer some assistance towards the working out of some of the arguments that gravitate around the question of what is history and so, to further this aim, I thought it appropriate to say why I consider what history is in the way that I do and not in other ways, to position myself in the discourse I have been commenting upon and consider its possibilities. I hasten to add that I do this not because my ideas are necessarily of much signiﬁcance but because, not existing in a vacuum, it may well be that the times that have produced me, that have so to speak ‘written me’, will already have and will continue to write you too. I refer to these times as post-modern and thus end with a short contextualising chapter entitled ‘Doing history in the post-modern world’ – arguably the world we live in. 1 WHAT HISTORY IS In this chapter I want to try and answer the question ‘what is history?’ To do this I will look initially at what history is in theory; secondly examine what it is in practice; and ﬁnally put theory and practice together into a deﬁnition – a methodologic- ally informed sceptical/ironic deﬁnition – that I hope is com- prehensive enough to give you a reasonable grip not only on the ‘history question’ but also on some of the debates and positions that surround it. ON THEORY At the level of theory I would like to make two points. The ﬁrst (which I will outline in this paragraph and then develop) is that history is one of a series of discourses about the world. These discourses do not create the world (that physical stuﬀ on which we apparently live) but they do appropriate it and give it all the meanings it has. That bit of the world which is history’s (osten- sible) object of enquiry is the past. History as discourse is thus in what history is 7 a diﬀerent category to that which it discourses about, that is, the past and history are diﬀerent things. Additionally, the past and history are not stitched into each other such that only one histor- ical reading of the past is absolutely necessary. The past and history ﬂoat free of each other, they are ages and miles apart. For the same object of enquiry can be read diﬀerently by diﬀerent discursive practices (a landscape can be read/interpreted diﬀerently by geographers, sociologists, historians, artists, economists, etc.) whilst, internal to each, there are diﬀerent interpretive readings over time and space; as far as history is concerned historiography shows this. The above paragraph is not an easy one. I have made a lot of statements, but all of them revolve, actually, around the distinc- tion between the past and history. This distinction is therefore crucial for you to understand, for if it is appreciated then it and the debates it gives rise to will help to clarify what history is in theory. Accordingly I will examine the points I have just made, by looking in some detail at the past-history diﬀerence and then by considering some of the main consequences arising from it. Let me begin with the idea that history is a discourse about, but categorically diﬀerent from, the past. This might strike you as odd for you may have missed this distinction before or, if not, you may still not have bothered too much about it. One of the reasons why this is so, why the distinction is generally left unworked, is because as English-speakers we tend to lose sight of the fact that there actually is this distinction between history – as that which has been written/recorded about the past – and the past itself, because the word history covers both things.1 It would be preferable, therefore, always to register this diﬀerence by using the term ‘the past’ for all that has gone on before every- where, whilst using the word ‘historiography’ for history, his- toriography referring here to the writings of historians. This would be good practice (the past as the object of the historians’ attention, historiography as the way historians attend to it) 8 what history is leaving the word ‘History’ (with a capital H) to refer to the whole ensemble of relations. However, habit might be hard to break, and I might myself use the word ‘history’ to refer to the past, to historiography and to the totality of relationships. But remember if and when I do, I keep the said distinction in mind – and you should too. It may well be, however, that this clariﬁcation on the past-history distinction seems inconsequential; that one is left thinking, so what? What does it matter? Let me oﬀer three illustrations of why the past-history distinction is important to understand. 1 The past has occurred. It has gone and can only be brought back again by historians in very diﬀerent media, for example in books, articles, documentaries, etc., not as actual events. The past has gone and history is what histor- ians make of it when they go to work. History is the labour of historians (and/or those acting as if they were histor- ians) and when they meet, one of the ﬁrst questions they ask each other is what they are working on. It is this work, embodied in books, periodicals, etc., that you read when you do history (‘I am going to university to read history’). What this means is that history is quite literally on library and other shelves. Thus if you start a course on seventeenth-century Spain, you do not actually go to the seventeenth century or to Spain; you go, with the help of your reading list, to the library. This is where seventeenth- century Spain is – between Dewey numbers – for where else do teachers send you in order to ‘read it up’? Of course you could go to other places where you can ﬁnd other traces of the past – for example Spanish archives – but wherever you go, when you get there you will have ‘to read’. This reading is not spontaneous or natural but learned – on various courses for example – and informed what history is 9 (made meaning-full) by other texts. History (histori- ography) is an inter-textual, linguistic construct. 2 Let us say that you have been studying part of England’s past – the sixteenth century – at A level. Let us imagine that you have used one major text-book: Elton’s England under the Tudors. In class you have discussed aspects of the sixteenth century, you have class notes, but for your essays and the bulk of your revision you have used Elton. When the exam came along you wrote in the shadow of Elton. And when you passed, you gained an A level in English history, a qualiﬁcation for considering aspects of ‘the past’. But really it would be more accurate to say you have an A level in Geoﬀrey Elton: for what, actually, at this stage, is your ‘reading’ of the English past if not basically his reading of it? 3 These two brief examples of the past-history distinction may seem innocuous, but actually it can have enormous eﬀects. For example, although millions of women have lived in the past (in Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, Africa, America...) few of them appear in history, that is, in history texts. Women, to use a phrase, have been ‘hidden from history’, that is, systematically excluded from most historians’ accounts. Accordingly, feminists are now engaged in the task of ‘writing women back into history’, whilst both men and women are looking at the interconnected constructions of masculinity.2 And at this point you might pause to consider how many other groups, people(s), classes, have been/are omitted from histories and why; and what might be the consequences if such omitted ‘groups’ were central to historical accounts and the now central groups were marginalised. More will be said about the signiﬁcance and possibilities of working the past-history distinction later, but I would now like 10 what history is to look at another argument from the earlier paragraph (p. 5) where I said that we have to understand that the past and history are not stitched into each other such that one and only one reading of any phenomenon is entailed, that the same object of enquiry is capable of being read diﬀerently by diﬀerent dis- courses whilst, internal to each, there are diﬀerent readings over space and time. To begin to illustrate this, let us imagine that through a window we can see a landscape (though not all of it because the window-frame quite literally ‘frames’ it). We can see in the foreground several roads; beyond we can see other roads with houses alongside; we can see rolling ﬁelds with farmhouses in them; on the skyline, some miles away, we can see ridges of hills. In the middle distance we can see a market-town. The sky is a watery blue. Now there is nothing in this landscape that says ‘geography’. Yet clearly a geographer could account for it geographically. Thus s/he might read the land as displaying speciﬁc ﬁeld patterns and farming practices; the roads could become part of a series of local/regional communication networks, the farms and town could be read in terms of a speciﬁc population distri- bution; contour maps could chart the terrain, climatic geog- raphers could explain the climate/weather and, say, consequent types of irrigation. In this way the view could become some- thing else – geography. Similarly, a sociologist could take the same landscape and construct it sociologically: people in the town could become data for occupational structures, size of family units, etc.; population distribution could be considered in terms of class, income, age, sex; climate could be seen as aﬀecting leisure facilities, and so on. Historians too can turn the same landscape into their discourse. Field patterns today could be compared to those pre-enclosure; population now to that of 1831, 1871; land ownership and political power analysed over time; one could what history is 11 examine how a bit of the view edges into a national park, of when and why the railway and canal ceased functioning and so on. Now, given that there is nothing intrinsic in the view that shouts geography, sociology, history, etc., then we can see clearly that whilst historians and the rest of them do not invent the view (all that stuﬀ seems to be there all right) they do invent all its descriptive categories and any meanings it can be said to have. They construct the analytical and methodological tools to make out of this raw material their ways of reading and talking about it: discoursing. In that sense we read the world as a text, and, logically, such readings are inﬁnite. By which I do not mean that we just make up stories about the world/the past (that is, that we know the world/the past and then make up stories about them) but rather the claim is a much stronger one; that the world/the past comes to us always already as stories and that we cannot get out of these stories (narratives) to check if they correspond to the real world/past, because these ‘always already’ narratives constitute ‘reality’. Which means, in the example being discussed, that the landscape (which only becomes mean- ingful as a reading) cannot ﬁx such readings once and for all; thus geographers may interpret and re-interpret (read and re- read) the landscape endlessly whilst arguing about just what is being said here ‘geographically’. Additionally, given that geog- raphy as a discourse has not always existed, then not only have geographers’ readings had to begin and not only have they diﬀered over space and time, but geographers have themselves understood/read what constitutes the discourse they are work- ing within diﬀerently too; that is, geography itself as a way of reading the world needs interpreting/historicising. And so it is with sociology and history. Diﬀerent sociologists and historians interpret the same phenomenon diﬀerently through discourses that are always on the move, that are always being de-composed and re-composed; are always positioned and positioning, and 12 what history is which thus need constant self-examination as discourses by those who use them. At this point, then, let me assume that the argument that history as a discourse is categorically diﬀerent to the past has been indicated. I said at the start of the chapter, however, that at the level of theory vis-à-vis what is history, I would be making two points. Here is the second. Given the past-history distinction, the problem for the histor- ian who somehow wants to capture the past within his/her history thus becomes: how do you ﬁt these two things together? Obviously how this connection is attempted, how the historian tries to know the past, is crucial in determining the possibilities of what history is and can be, not least because it is history’s claim to knowledge (rather than belief or assertion) that makes it the discourse it is (I mean, historians do not usually see them- selves as writers of ﬁction, although inadvertently they may be).3 Yet because of the past-history diﬀerence, and because the object of enquiry that historians work on is, in most of its manifest- ations, actually absent in that only traces of the past remain, then clearly there are all kinds of limits controlling the knowledge claims that historians can make. And for me, in this ﬁtting together of past-history, there are three very problematic theor- etical areas: areas of epistemology, methodology and ideology, each of which must be discussed if we are to see what history is. Epistemology (from the Greek episteme = knowledge) refers to the philosophical area of theories of knowledge. This area is concerned with how we know about anything. In that sense history is part of another discourse, philosophy, taking part in the general question of what it is possible to know with refer- ence to its own area of knowledge – the past. And here you might see the problem already, for if it is hard to know about something that exists, to say something about an eﬀectively absent subject like ‘the past in history’ is especially diﬃcult. It seems obvious that all such knowledge is therefore likely to be what history is 13 tentative, and constructed by historians working under all kinds of presuppositions and pressures which did not, of course, oper- ate on people in the past. Yet, we still see historians trying to raise before us the spectre of the real past, an objective past about which their accounts are accurate and even true. Now I think such certaintist claims are not – and never were – possible to achieve, and I would say that in our current situation this ought to be obvious – as I will argue in chapter 3. Yet to accept this, to allow doubt to run, clearly aﬀects what you might think history is, that is, it gives you part of the answer to what history is and can be. For to admit not really to know, to see history as being (logically) anything you want it to be (the fact-value distinction allows this; besides there have been so very many histories) poses the question of how speciﬁc histories came to be con- structed into one shape rather than another, not only epistemo- logically, but methodologically and ideologically too. Here, what can be known and how we can know interact with power. Yet in a sense this is so – and this point must be stressed – only because of history’s epistemological fragility. For if it were possible to know once and for all, now and for ever, then there would be no need for any more history to be written, for what would be the point of countless historians saying it all over again in the same way? History (historical constructions not ‘the past/future’) would stop, and if you think that the idea of stopping history (historians) is absurd it really isn’t: stopping history is not only part of Orwell’s 1984 for example, but a part of European experience in the 1930s – the more immediate time and place that made Orwell consider it. Epistemological fragility, then, allows for historians’ readings to be multifarious (one past – many histories) so what is it that makes history so epistemologically fragile? There are four basic reasons. First (and in what follows I draw on David Lowenthal’s arguments in his The Past is a Foreign Country4) no historian can 14 what history is cover and thus re-cover the totality of past events because their ‘content’ is virtually limitless. One cannot recount more than a fraction of what has occurred and no historian’s account ever corresponds precisely with the past: the sheer bulk of the past precludes total history. Most information about the past has never been recorded and most of the rest was evanescent. Second, no account can re-cover the past as it was because the past was not an account but events, situations, etc. As the past has gone, no account can ever be checked against it but only against other accounts. We judge the ‘accuracy’ of historians’ accounts vis-à-vis other historians’ interpretations and there is no real account, no proper history that, deep down, allows us to check all other accounts against it: there is no fundamentally correct ‘text’ of which other interpretations are just variations; vari- ations are all there are. Here the cultural critic Steven Giles is succinct when he comments that what has gone before is always apprehended through the sedimented layers of previous inter- pretations and through the reading habits and categories developed by previous/current interpretive discourses.5 And this insight allows us to make the point that this way of seeing things makes the study of history (the past) necessarily a study of his- toriography (historians), historiography therefore being con- sidered not as an extra to the study of history but as actually constituting it. This is an area I shall return to in chapter 2; but now to the third point. And this is that no matter how veriﬁable, how widely accept- able or checkable, history remains inevitably a personal construct, a manifestation of the historian’s perspective as a ‘narrator’. Unlike direct memory (itself suspect) history relies on someone else’s eyes and voice; we see through an interpreter who stands between past events and our readings of them. Of course, as Lowenthal says, written history ‘in practice’ cuts down the historian’s logical freedom to write anything by allowing the reader access to his/her sources, but the historian’s viewpoint what history is 15 and predilections still shape the choice of historical materials, and our own personal constructs determine what we make of them. The past that we ‘know’ is always contingent upon our own views, our own ‘present’. Just as we are ourselves products of the past so the known past (history) is an artefact of ours. Nobody, however immersed in the past, can divest himself/ herself of his/her own knowledge and assumptions. To explain the past, Lowenthal notes, ‘historians go beyond the actual record to frame hypotheses in present day modes of thought... “we are moderns and our words and thought can not but be modern”, noted Maitland, “it is too late for us to be early Eng- lish”’.6 There are, then, few limits to the shaping power of interpretive, imagining words. ‘Look’ says the poet Khlebnikov in his Decrees To The Planets, ‘the sun obeys my syntax’.7 ‘Look’, says the historian, ‘the past obeys my interpretation’. Now this might look slightly poetical itself, so the point being made about sources at one and the same time preventing the historian’s total freedom and yet not ﬁxing things such that they can really stop endless interpretations might be illustrated by a mundane example. Thus there are many disagreements as to Hitler’s intentions after gaining power, and the causes of the Second World War. One such famous long-running disagree- ment has been between A.J.P. Taylor and H. Trevor-Roper. This disagreement was not based on their merits as historians; both are very experienced, both have ‘skills’, both can read documents and in this case they often read the same ones, yet still they disagreed. Thus whilst the sources may prevent just anything at all from being said, nevertheless the same events/sources do not entail that one and only one reading has to follow. The above three reasons for epistemological fragility are based on the idea that history is less than the past; that historians can only recover fragments. But the fourth point stresses that, through hindsight, we in a way know more about the past than the people who lived in it. In translating the past into modern 16 what history is terms and in using knowledge perhaps previously unavailable, the historian discovers both what has been forgotten about the past and pieces together things never pieced together before. People and social formations are thus caught up in processes that can only be seen in retrospect, and documents and other traces are ripped out of their original contexts of purpose and function to illustrate, say, a pattern which might not be remotely mean- ingful to any of their authors. And all this is, as Lowenthal says, inevitable. History always conﬂates, it changes, it exaggerates aspects of the past: ‘Time is foreshortened, details selected and highlighted, action concentrated, relations simpliﬁed, not to [deliberately] alter... the events but to... give them mean- ing’.8 Even the most empirical chronicler has to invent narrative structures to give shape to time and place: ‘Res gestae may well be one damned thing after another... but it cannot possibly appear as such for all meaning would then be extruded from it’.9 And because stories emphasise linkages and play down the role of breaks, of ruptures, then, concludes Lowenthal, histories as known to us appear more comprehensible than we have any reason to believe the past was. These then are the main (and well known) epistemological limits. I have drawn them quickly and impressionistically and you might go on to read Lowenthal and the others yourself. But I now intend to move on. For if these are the epistemological limits to what can be known, then they obviously interconnect with the ways historians try and ﬁnd out as much as they can. And, with historians’ methods as with epistemology, there are no deﬁnitive ways that have to be used by virtue of their being correct; historians’ methods are every bit as fragile as their epistemologies. So far I have argued that history is a shifting discourse con- structed by historians and that from the existence of the past no one reading is entailed: change the gaze, shift the perspective and new readings appear. Yet although historians know all this, what history is 17 most seem to studiously ignore it and strive for objectivity and truth nevertheless. And this striving for truth cuts through ideological/methodological positions. Thus on the empirical right (somewhat), G. Elton in The Practice of History10 states at the start of his chapter on research: ‘The study of history, then, amounts to a search for the truth’. And, although the same chapter ends with a series of qualiﬁcations – ‘He [the historian] knows that what he is studying is real [but] he knows that he can never recover all of it... he knows that the process of historical research and reconstruction will never end, but he is also conscious that this does not render his work unreal or illegimate’ – it is obvious that such caveats do not seriously aﬀect Elton’s originally stated ‘truth search’. On the Marxist left (somewhat), E. P. Thompson in The Poverty of Theory11 writes that, ‘For some time... the materialist concep- tion of history... has been growing in self-conﬁdence. As a mature practice... it is perhaps the strongest discipline deriving from the Marxist tradition. Even in my own life-time... the advances have been considerable, and one had supposed these to be advances in knowledge.’ Thompson admits that this is not to say that such knowledge is subject to ‘scientiﬁc proof ’, but he holds it to be real knowledge nevertheless. In the empirical centre (somewhat), A. Marwick in The Nature of History12 appreciates what he calls the ‘subjective dimension’ of historians’ accounts, but for him this doesn’t live in, say, the historian’s ideological position, but in the nature of the evi- dence, historians being ‘forced into a greater display of personal interpretation by the imperfections of their source materials’. This being the case Marwick thus argues that it is the job of the historians to develop ‘tight methodological rules’ whereby they can reduce their ‘moral’ interventions. Thus Marwick links up to Elton: ‘Elton is keen to establish that just because historical explanation does not depend upon universal laws, that does not mean it is not governed by very strict rules’. And so, for all these 18 what history is historians, truth, knowledge and legitimacy derive from tight methodological rules and procedures. It is this that cuts down interpretive ﬂux. My argument is diﬀerent. For me what determines interpret- ation ultimately lies beyond method and evidence in ideology. For while most historians would agree that a rigorous method is important, there is a problem as to which rigorous method they are talking about. In Marwick’s own section on method he reviews a selection from which one can (presumably) choose. Thus, would you like to follow Hegel or Marx or Dilthey or Weber or Popper or Hempel or Aron or Collingwood or Dray or Oakeshott or Danto or Gallie or Walsh or Atkinson or Leﬀ or Hexter? Would you care to go along with modern empiricists, feminists, the Annales School, neo-Marxists, new-stylists, eco- nometricians, structuralists or post-structuralists, or even Mar- wick himself, to name but twenty-ﬁve possibilities? And this is a short list! The point is that even if you could make a choice, what would be the criteria? How could one know which method would lead to the ‘truer’ past? Of course each method would be rigorous, that is, internally coherent and consistent, but it would also be self-referencing. That is, it might tell you how to conduct valid arguments within itself but, given that all the choices do this, then the problem of discriminating somehow between twenty-ﬁve alternatives just will not go away. Thompson is rig- orous and so is Elton; on what grounds does one choose? On Marwick’s? But why his? So, is it not likely that in the end one chooses say, Thompson, because one just likes what Thompson does with his method; one likes his reasons for doing history: for all other things being equal, why else might one take up a position? To summarise. Talk of method as the road to truth is mislead- ing. There is a range of methods without any agreed criteria for choosing. Often people like Marwick argue that despite all the methodological diﬀerences between, say, empiricists and what history is 19 structuralists, they do nevertheless agree on the fundamentals. But this again is not so. The fact that structuralists go to enormous lengths to explain very precisely that they are not empiricists; the fact that they invented their speciﬁc approaches precisely to diﬀerentiate themselves from everyone else seems to have been a point somewhat ignored by Marwick and the others. I want now to deal brieﬂy with just one further argument regarding method which regularly occurs in introductory debates about the ‘nature of history’. It is about concepts and it runs as follows: it may well be that the diﬀerences between methods cannot be closed down, but are there not key concepts that all historians use? Doesn’t this imply some common methodological ground? Now it is certainly the case that, in all types of histories, one constantly meets so called ‘historical concepts’ (by not calling them ‘historians’ concepts’ such concepts look impersonal and objective, as though they belong to a history that is somehow self-generating). Not only that, such concepts are referred to quite regularly as the ‘heartlands’ of history. These are concepts such as time, evidence, empathy, cause and eﬀect, continuity and change, and so on. I am not going to argue that you should not ‘work’ concepts, but I am concerned that when presenting these particular ones, the impression is strongly given that they are indeed obvious and timeless and that they do constitute the universal building blocks of historical knowledge. Yet this is ironic, for one of the things that the opening up of history ought to have done is to historicise history itself; to see all historical accounts as imprisoned in time and space and thus to see their concepts not as universal heartlands but as speciﬁc, local expressions. This historicisation is easy to demonstrate in the case of ‘common’ concepts. In an article on new developments in history, the educational- ist Donald Steel has considered how certain concepts became 20 what history is ‘heartland concepts’, showing how in the 1960s ﬁve major con- cepts were identiﬁed as constituting history: time, space, sequence, moral judgement and social realism.13 Steel points out that these were reﬁned (not least by himself) by 1970 to provide the ‘key concepts’ of history: time, evidence, cause and eﬀect, continuity and change, and similarity and diﬀerence. Steel explains that it was these that became the basis for School’s Council History, the GCSE, certain A level developments, and which have been inﬂuential both in undergraduate courses and more generally. Apparently then these ‘old’ heartlands have been pumping away for less than twenty years, are not universal, and do not come out of historians’ methods as such but very much out of general educational thinking. Obviously they are ideo- logical too, for what might happen if other concepts were used to organise the (dominant) ﬁeld: structure-agency, over- determination, conjuncture, uneven development, centre- periphery, dominant-marginal, base-superstructure, rupture, genealogy, mentalité, hegemony, élite, paradigm, etc.? It is time to address ideology directly. Let me begin with an example. It would be possible at this point in space and time to place in any school or undergraduate history syllabus a course that would be quite properly historical (in that it looked like other histories) but in which the choice of subject matter and the methodological approach was made from a black, Marxist, feminist perspective. Yet I doubt if any such course could be found. Why not? Not because it would not be history, for it would, but because black Marxist-feminists don’t really have the power to put such a course into this sort of public circulation. Yet if one were to ask those who might well have the power to decide what does constitute ‘suitable courses’, who might well have the power to eﬀect such inclusions/exclusions, then it is likely that they would argue that the reason for such a non-appearance is because such a course would be ideological – that is, that the motives for such a history would come from what history is 21 concerns external to history per se; that it would be a vehicle for the delivery of a speciﬁc position for persuasive purposes. Now this distinction between ‘history as such’ and ‘ideological his- tory’ is interesting because it implies, and is meant to imply, that certain histories (generally the dominant ones) are not ideo- logical at all, do not position people, and do not deliver views of the past that come from outside ‘the subject’. But we have already seen that meanings given to histories of all descriptions are necessarily that; not meanings intrinsic in the past (any more than the ‘landscape’ had our meanings already in it before we put them there) but meanings given to the past from outside(rs). History is never for itself; it is always for someone. Accordingly it seems plausible to say that particular social formations want their historians to deliver particular things. It also seems plausible to say that the predominantly delivered positions will be in the interests of those stronger ruling blocs within social formations, not that such positions are automatic- ally achieved, unchallenged or secured once and for all and ‘that is it’. The fact that history per se is an ideological construct means that it is constantly being re-worked and re-ordered by all those who are variously aﬀected by power relationships; because the dominated as well as the dominant also have their versions of the past to legitimate their practices, versions which have to be excluded as improper from any place on the agenda of the dom- inant discourse. In that sense re-orderings of the messages to be delivered (often many such re-orderings are referred to academ- ically as ‘controversies’) just have to be constructed continuously because the needs of the dominant/subordinate are constantly being re-worked in the real world as they seek to mobilise people(s) in support of their interests. History is forged in such conﬂict and clearly these conﬂicting needs for history impinge upon the debates (struggle for ownership) as to what history is. So, at this point, can we not see that the way to answer the question of ‘what is history?’ in ways that are realistic is to 22 what history is substitute the word ‘who’ for ‘what’, and add ‘for’ to the end of the phrase; thus, the question becomes not ‘what is history?’ but ‘who is history for?’ If we do this then we can see that history is bound to be problematic because it is a contested term/ discourse, meaning diﬀerent things to diﬀerent groups. For some groups want a sanitised history where conﬂict and distress are absent; some want history to lead to quietism; some want history to embody rugged individualism, some to provide strat- egies and tactics for revolution, some to provide grounds for counter-revolution, and so on. It is easy to see how history for a revolutionary is bound to be diﬀerent from that desired by a conservative. It is also easy to see how the list of uses for history is not only logically but practically endless; I mean, what would a history be like that everyone could once and for all agree on? Let me brieﬂy clarify these comments with an illustration. In his novel 1984, Orwell wrote that those who control the present control the past and those who control the past control the future. This seems likely outside ﬁction too. Thus people(s) in the present need antecedents to locate themselves now and legitimate their ongoing and future ways of living. (Actually of course the ‘facts’ of the past – or anything else – legitimate nothing at all given the fact–value distinction, but the point being addressed here is how people act as if they do.) Thus people(s) literally feel the need to root themselves today and tomorrow in their yesterdays. Recently such yesterdays have been sought for (and found, given that the past can and will sustain countless narratives) by women, blacks, regional group- ings, various minorities, etc. In these pasts explanations for current existences and future programmes are made. A little fur- ther back and the working classes too sought to root themselves by way of a historically contrived trajectory. Further back still the bourgeoisie found its genealogy and began to construct its history for itself (and others). In that sense all classes/groups write their collective autobiographies. History is the way what history is 23 people(s) create, in part, their identities. It is far more than a slot in the school/academic curriculum, though we can see how what goes into such spaces is crucially important for all those variously interested parties. Do we not know this all the time? Is it not obvious that such an important ‘legitimating’ phenomenon as history is rooted in real needs and power? I think it is, except that when the domin- ant discourse refers to the constant re-writing of histories it does so in ways that displace such needs: it muses blandly that each generation re-writes its own history. But the question is how and why? And the arguable answer, alluded to in Orwell, is because power relations produce ideological discourses such as ‘history as knowledge’ which are necessary for all involved in terms of conﬂicting legitimation exercises. Let us conclude the discussion of what history is in theory. I have argued that history is composed of epistemology, method- ology and ideology. Epistemology shows we can never really know the past; that the gap between the past and history (his- toriography) is an ontological one, that is, is in the very nature of things such that no amount of epistemological eﬀort can bridge it. Historians have devised ways of working to cut down the inﬂuence of the interpreting historian by developing rigor- ous methods which they have then tried variously to universal- ise, so that if everyone practised them then a heartland of skills, concepts, routines and procedures could reach towards objectiv- ity. But there are many methodologies; the so-called heartland concepts are of recent and partial construction, and I have argued that the diﬀerences that we see are there because history is basically a contested discourse, an embattled terrain wherein people(s), classes and groups autobiographically construct interpretations of the past literally to please themselves. There is no deﬁnitive history outside these pressures, any (temporary) consensus only being reached when dominant voices can silence others either by overt power or covert incorporation. In the end 24 what history is history is theory and theory is ideological and ideology just is material interests. Ideology seeps into every nook and cranny of history, including the everyday practices of making histories in those institutions predominantly set aside in our social forma- tion for that purpose – especially universities. Let us now look at history as that sort of practice. ON PRACTICE I have just concluded that history has been and will be made for many diﬀerent reasons and in many places, and that one such type is professional history, that is, the history produced by (generally) salaried historians working (on the whole) in higher education and especially universities. In The Death of the Past14 the historian J. H. Plumb described such (Elton-like) professional history as the process of trying to establish the truth of what happened in the past and which could then be pitched over against popular memory/common-sense/recipe-knowledge ‘pasts’ in order to get such half-formed, half-digested (and for Plumb) half-baked constructions out of the way. In On Living in an Old Country,15 Patrick Wright has argued that not only is Plumb’s task impossible because, as we have seen, there are no unproblematic historical (historians’) truths as such; and that not only is Plumb’s aim possibly undesirable because in, say, popular memory, there may well lie strengths and alternative readings which it might be necessary to oppose at times to ‘oﬃcial’ histories (Wright suggests we think here of the proles’ memories in Orwell’s 1984) but also because one type of institu- tion where such eradication might be carried out, the edu- cational institution, is itself intimately involved in popular memory-type socialisation processes. For although professional historians overwhelmingly present themselves as academic and disinterested, and although they are certainly in some ways ‘distanced’, nevertheless, it is more illuminating to see such what history is 25 practitioners as being not so much outside the ideological fray but as occupying very dominant positions within it; to see pro- fessional histories as expressions of how dominant ideologies currently articulate history ‘academically’. It seems rather obvious that, seen in a wider cultural and ‘historical’ perspec- tive, multi-million pound institutional investments such as our national universities are integral to the reproduction of the on- going social formation and are thus at the forefront of cultural guardianship (academic standards) and ideological control; it would be somewhat careless if they were not. Given that I have tried so far to locate history in the interstices of real interests and pressures, I need to consider ‘scholarly’ pressures too, not only because it is their type of history that predominantly deﬁnes the ﬁeld as to what ‘history really is’, but also because it is the type of history studied on A level and undergraduate courses. On such courses you are, in eﬀect, being inducted into academic history; you are to become like the pro- fessionals. So what are the professionals like and how do they make histories?16 Let us start this way. History is produced by a group of labourers called historians when they go to work; it is their job. And when they go to work they take with them certain identiﬁable things. First they take themselves personally: their values, positions, their ideological perspectives. Second they take their epistemological presuppositions. These are not always held very consciously but historians will have ‘in mind’ ways of gaining ‘knowledge’. Here will come into play a range of categories – economic, social, political, cultural, ideo- logical, etc. – a range of concepts across/within these categories (thus within the political category there may be much use of, say, class, power, state, sovereignty, legitimacy, etc.) and broad assumptions about the constancy, or otherwise, of human beings (ironically and a-historically referred to very often as 26 what history is ‘human nature’). Through the use of these categories, concepts and assumptions, the historian will generate hypotheses, formu- late abstractions, and organise and reorganise his/her materials to include and exclude. Historians also use technical vocabular- ies and these in turn (aside from being inevitably anachronistic) aﬀect not only what they say but the way they say it. Such cat- egories, concepts and vocabularies are constantly being reworked, but without them historians would not be able to understand each others’ accounts or make up their own, no matter how much they may disagree about things. Third, historians have routines and procedures (methods, in the narrow sense of the term) for close working on material: ways of checking it for its origins, position, authenticity, reliabil- ity... These routines will apply to all the materials worked on albeit with various degrees of concentration and rigour (many slips and mistakes occur). Here are a range of techniques running from the elaborate to the nitty-gritty; these are the sorts of practices often referred to as ‘historians’ skills’, techniques which we can see now, in passing, as but themselves passing moments in that combination of factors that make histories. (In other words history is not about ‘skills’.) So, armed with these sorts of practices, the historian can get down more directly to ‘make up’ some history – ‘making histories’. Fourth, in going about their work of ﬁnding various materials to work on and ‘work up’, historians shuttle between other historians’ published work(s) (stored up labour-time as embodied in books, articles, etc.) and unpublished materials. This unpublished ‘newish’ material can be called the traces of the past (literally the remaining marks from the past – docu- ments, records, artefacts, etc.), these traces being a mixture of the known (but little used) trace, new, unused and possibly unknown traces, and old traces; that is, materials used before but, because of the newish/new traces found, now capable of being placed in contexts diﬀerent to those they have occupied what history is 27 before. The historian can then begin to organise all these elem- ents in new (and various) ways – always looking for that longed- for ‘original thesis’ – and so begins to transform the traces of the once concrete into the ‘concrete in thought’, that is, into histor- ians’ accounts. Here the historian literally re-produces the traces of the past in a new category and this act of trans-formation – the past into history – is his/her basic job. Fifth, having done their research, historians then have to write it up. This is where the epistemological, methodological and ideological factors agains come into play, interconnecting with everyday practices, as they will have done throughout the research phases. Obviously such pressures of the everyday will vary but some include: 1 Pressures from family and/or friends (‘Not another week- end working!’ ‘Can’t you give your work a rest?’); 2 Pressures from the work-place, where the various inﬂu- ences of heads of faculty, departmental heads, peer group, institutional research policies and, dare it be said, the obligation to teach students, all bear down; 3 Pressures from publishers with regard to several factors: wordage: the constraints on wordage are considerable and have eﬀects. Think how diﬀerent historical knowledge could be were all books a third shorter or four times longer than ‘normal’ size! format: the size of page, print, with or without illustra- tions, with or without exercises, bibliography, index, etc.; in looseleaf, with accompanying tape or video – all these have eﬀects too. market: who the historian sees as his/her market will inﬂuence what is said and how: think how the French Revolution of 1789 would have to be ‘diﬀerent’ for young school children, sixth-formers, non-Europeans, ‘revolutionary specialists’, the interested layman. 28 what history is deadlines: how long the writer has in total to do the research and write it up, and how that time is allocated (one day a week, a term oﬀ, at weekends) aﬀects, say, the availability of sources, the historian’s concentration, etc. Again, the sorts of conditions the publisher sets regarding completion are often crucial. literary style: how the historian writes (polemically, dis- cursively, ﬂamboyantly, pedantically, and in combin- ations of these) and the grammatical, syntactical and semantic reach, all aﬀect the account and may well have to be modiﬁed to ﬁt the publisher’s house-style, series format, etc. referees: publishers send manuscripts to readers who may call for drastic changes in terms of the organisation of material (this text, for example, was originally nearly twice as long); again, some referees have been known to have axes to grind. re-writing: at all stages until the text goes to print re- writings take place. Sometimes sections will require three drafts, sometimes thirteen. Bright ideas that seemed initially to say it all become weary and ﬂat when you have tried to write it all a dozen times; again, things you were originally putting in are left out and things left in often seem hostages to fortune. What kinds of judgements are involved here as the writer ‘works’ all those traces read and noted (often imperfectly) so long before? And so on. Now, these are obvious points (think here how many outside factors, that is, factors outside ‘the past’, operate on you and inﬂuence what you write in essays and studies), but the thing to stress here is that none of these pressures, indeed none of the processes discussed in this chapter, operated on the events being accounted for; on, say, manpower planning in the First what history is 29 World War. Here, again, the gaps between the past and history yawn. Sixth, what has been written so far has been about the produc- tion of histories. But texts also have to be read; consumed. Just as you can consume cake, in many diﬀerent ways (slowly, gulping it), in a variety of situations (at work, driving a car), in relation to other courses (have you already had enough, is digestion hard) and in a variety of settings (if you’re on a diet, at a wedding), none of which ever comes round in exactly the same way again, so the consumption of a text takes place in contexts that do not repeat themselves. Quite literally no two readings are the same. (Sometimes you might write comments in the mar- gins of a text and then, returning to it some time later, not remember why you wrote what you did; yet they are exactly the same words on the same page, so just how do meanings retain meaning?) Thus no reading, even by the same person, can be guaranteed to produce the same eﬀects repeatedly, which means that authors cannot force their intentions/interpretations on the reader. Conversely, readers cannot fully fathom everything the authors intend. Further, the same text can be inserted ﬁrst into one broad discourse and then into another: there are no logical limits, each reading is another writing. This is the world of the deconstructionist text where any text, in other contexts, can mean many things. Here is a ‘world of diﬀerence’. And yet these last remarks seem to raise a problem (but on your reading did a problem arise for you; and is yours diﬀerent to mine?). The problem raised for me is this: although the above seems to suggest that all is interpretive ﬂux, in fact we ‘read’ in fairly predictable ways. So, in that sense, what pins readings down? Well, not detailed agreement on all and everything because the details will always ﬂoat free – speciﬁc things can always be made to mean more or less – but general agreements do occur. They do so because of power; here we return to ideol- ogy. For what arguably stops texts from being used in totally 30 what history is arbitrary ways is the fact that certain texts are nearer to some texts than others; are more or less locatable into genres, into slots; are more or less congenial to the needs that people(s) have and which are expressed in texts. And so, après Orwell, they ﬁnd aﬃnities and ﬁxing posts (booklists, recommended readings, Dewey numbers) that are themselves ultimately arbitrary, but which relate to the more permanent needs of groups and classes: we live in a social system – not a social random. This is a compli- cated but essential area to consider and you might note here texts by theorists such as Scholes, Eagleton, Fish and Bennett, wherein how this might well work is discussed.17 You might also reﬂect upon how this somewhat baﬄing situation – of the way- ward text which does not logically have to settle down but which does so in practice – relates to an interpretive anxiety which students often have. Their anxiety is this: if you under- stand that history is what historians make; that they make it on slender evidence; that history is inescapably interpretive and that there are at least half a dozen sides to every argument so that history is relative, then you might think well, if it seems just interpretation and nobody really knows, then why bother doing it? If it is all relative what is the point? This is a state of mind we might call ‘hapless relativism’. In a sense this way of looking at things is a positive one. It is liberating, for it throws out old certainties and those who have beneﬁted from them are capable of being exposed. And in a sense everything is relative (historicist). But, liberating or not, this still sometimes leaves people feeling as if they are in a dead end. Yet there is no need to. To deconstruct other peoples’ histor- ies is the precondition of constructing your own in ways which suggest you know what you are doing; in ways which remind you that history is always history for someone. For although, as I have said, logically all accounts are problematic and relative, the point is that some are actually dominant and others marginal. All are logically the same but in actuality they are diﬀerent; they are what history is 31 in evaluative (albeit ultimately groundless) hierarchies. The question then becomes ‘why?’ and the answer is because know- ledge is related to power and that, within social formations, those with the most power distribute and legitimate ‘know- ledge’ vis-à-vis interests as best they can. This is the way out of relativism in theory, by analyses of power in practice, and thus a relativist perspective need not lead to despair but to the be- ginning of a general recognition of how things seem to operate. This is emancipating. Reﬂexively, you too can make histories. ON A DEFINITION OF HISTORY I have just argued that history in the main is what historians make. So why the fuss; isn’t this what history is? In a way it is, but obviously not quite. What historians do in a narrow working sense is fairly easy to describe; we can draw up a job description. The problem, however, comes when this activity gets inserted, as it must, back into the power relations within any social for- mation out of which it comes; when diﬀerent people(s), groups and classes ask: ‘What does history mean for me/us, and how can it be used or abused?’ It is here, in usages and meanings, that history becomes so problematic; when the ques- tion ‘What is history?’ becomes, as I have explained, ‘Who is history for?’ This is the bottom line; so, what is history for me? A deﬁnition: History is a shifting, problematic discourse, ostensibly about an aspect of the world, the past, that is produced by a group of present-minded workers (overwhelmingly in our culture salaried historians) who go about their work in mutually recog- nisable ways that are epistemologically, methodologically, ideologically and practically positioned and whose products, once in circulation, are subject to a series of uses and abuses that are logically inﬁnite but which in actuality generally 32 what history is correspond to a range of power bases that exist at any given moment and which structure and distribute the meanings of histories along a dominant-marginal spectrum.18 2 ON SOME QUESTIONS AND SOME ANSWERS Having given a deﬁnition of history I now want to work it such that it might give answers to the sort of basic questions that often arise with regard to the nature of history. Because this text is short my comments will be brief; but brief or not, I hope that the answers I will be suggesting point both in the direction and to the way in which more sophisticated, nuanced and qualiﬁed responses can be made. Besides, I think a guide such as this (a sort of ‘rough guide to history’) is needed, not least because, although questions on the nature of history are regularly raised, the tendency is to leave them open so that you can then ‘make up your own mind’. Now I too want that, but I am aware that very often the various ‘nature of history’ debates are perceived only dimly (I mean there seems so many alternatives to ﬁt in, so many possible orderings of the basic constituents) such that some doubt and confusion can remain. So for a change as it were, here are some ques- tions and some answers. 34 on some questions and some answers 1 What is the status of truth in the discourses of history? 2 Is there any such thing as an objective history (are there objective ‘facts’ etc.), or is history just interpretation? 3 What is bias and what are the problems involved in trying to get rid of it? 4 What is empathy; can it be done, how, why, and if it cannot be achieved, why does it seem so important to try? 5 What are the diﬀerences between primary and secondary sources (traces) and between ‘evidence’ and ‘sources’: what is at stake here? 6 What do you do with those couplets (cause and eﬀect, continuity and change, similarity and diﬀerence) and is it possible to do what you are asked to do through using them? 7 Is history an art or a science? ON TRUTH It may look as if I have dealt already with whether we can know the truth of the past. I have run arguments from Elton and others where the aim of historical study is to gain real (true) know- ledge, and suggested this is, strictly speaking, unachievable. Again I have tried to show the epistemological, methodological, ideological and practical reasons why this is so. However, I think that two remaining areas still need to be explored so that previ- ous points can be developed: ﬁrst, if we cannot ultimately know the truths of the past then why do we keep searching for them and, second, how does the term ‘truth’ – irrespective of whether or not there is any such thing – function in the discourses of history? So why do we need truth? At one level the answer seems obvious. For without it certaintist concepts – objectivity, essence, essential, unbiased, etc. – which ﬁx things and close them down, would be powerless. Without objectivity how do on some questions and some answers 35 we discriminate between rival accounts of the same phenom- enon; more mundanely, how can we actually decide what were the most important causes of the 1832 Reform Act? These sorts of worries seem to haunt us. But why? Beyond the immediately practical, where does this desire for certainty come from? The reasons are many, ranging from generalisations about the ‘western tradition’ to psycho- social fears of ‘loss’ before uncertainty. The often-quoted comment by the philosopher A. N. Whitehead, that the domin- ant philosophical tradition in the west (‘The Western Tradition’) is a series of footnotes to Plato explains much, given Plato’s view that absolute knowledge (of justice, of virtue, of the best polity) in its pure forms was possible and could be ascertained through philosophical argument (with the implication that it would not be rational to act non-virtuously if one knew what virtue was; a view that good/true knowledge ought to entail good/true prac- tice). Also crucial are Christian arguments that the word of God was the word of Truth, and that knowing Him was knowing Truth; that Christianity provides criteria for judging everything and everyone on the scales of right and wrong. Additionally, constant attempts within western thought in so many of its manifestations (philosophy, theology, aesthetics, etc.) to formu- late some connection between word and world through corre- spondence theories of truth, long kept a destructive scepticism (sophism, nominalism, anti-foundationalism) somewhat at bay. The development of rationality and science and the fact that science really does seem ‘to work’ are further contributing fac- tors. Add to them that in everyday life truth and its synonyms are in common usage (‘tell the truth’; ‘did you truly say that?’; ‘how can I trust you?’; ‘are you absolutely certain?’); add to that one’s experiences of education (‘who can give me the correct answer?’ ‘do it again, it’s wrong’); add to that all those certaintist ticks and crosses on all those exercise books; and add to that all those textbooks that intimidate us because we cannot see how their 36 on some questions and some answers ‘contents’ have been made – in all these ways truth seems natur- ally at hand. But in a culture nothing is natural. Today we know of no foundations for Platonic absolutes. Today we live with the idea of God’s absence. We have deconstructed and made arbitrary and pragmatic the connections between word and world. We have seen, this century, the incapacity of reason to demonstrably dis- empower irrationalism. Although physicists and engineers get on with their work and their hypothetico-deductive reasonings, the grounds for their success remain enigmatic: ‘Why it should be that the external world, in the naïve, obvious sense, should concur with the regularity-postulates, with the mathematical and rule-bound expectations of investigative rationalism, no one knows.’1 And we understand, of course, the ‘common sense’, of persistent habitual homilies, long after the reasons for them have gone: ‘We still speak of “sunrise” and “sunset”. We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded ﬁgures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaﬀolding and recesses of our common parlance.’2 All this then, if we can still use the word, we know. We are (our culture is) a-moral, sceptical, ironic, secular. We are partners with uncertainty; we have disturbed truth, have tracked it down and found it to be a linguistic sign, a concept. Truth is a self-referencing ﬁgure of speech, incapable of accessing the phenomenal world: word and world, word and object, remain separate. Let us examine now these points in general terms, and then relate them to that similar separation between the phenom- enal past and discursive history and so draw this ﬁrst question to a close. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault points to both the absurdity and yet the practicality of correspondences between words and things: on some questions and some answers 37 This book ﬁrst arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accus- tomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and con- tinuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes ‘a certain Chinese Encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor (b) embalmed (c) tame (d) sucking pigs (e) sirens (f) fabulous (g) stray dogs (h) included in the present classiﬁcation (i) frenzied (j) innumerable (k) drawn with a very ﬁne camel-haired brush (l) et cetera (m) having just broken the water pitcher (n) that from a long way off look like ﬂies. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that... is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of [us] thinking that.3 Foucault’s point is clear. It is the arbitrariness of the deﬁnition, one that looks so odd to us but not to the encyclopaedist to whom it literally made sense whilst, of course, any deﬁnition we oﬀered would look odd to him/her. What is missing here then is 38 on some questions and some answers any necessary connection between word and world. Thus the literary and cultural theorist, George Steiner: It is this break... between word and world which constitutes one of the very few genuine revolutions... in Western his- tory.... The word rose has neither stem nor leaf nor thorn. It is neither pink nor red nor yellow. It exudes no odour. It is, per se, a wholly arbitrary marker, an empty sign. Nothing whatever... in its phonemic components, etymological history or grammat- ical functions, has any correspondence whatever to what we believe or imagine to be the object of its purely conventional reference.4 This ‘break’ has been underlined by the American pragmatist Richard Rorty, commenting that about two hundred years ago Europeans realised that truth was always created and never found.5 Yet, despite the slippage between word and world, and despite the fact that all meanings/truths a

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