How History Works: The Reconstitution Of A Human Science [1 ed.] 1138932124, 9781138932128, 1138296252, 9781138296251, 1315672154, 9781315672151, 1317372301, 9781317372301, 131737231X, 9781317372318, 1317372298, 9781317372295

Table of contents :
How History Works - Front Cover
How History Works
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Introduction
What are you doing when you do history?
History: working the way the world works
What does history do?
Note
Chapter 1: The situation of historical knowledge: The historicized world
A world already shaped by history
A world that has historically superseded itself
The compulsive self-historicization of the world
Notes
Chapter 2: The technology of historical knowledge: Management systems
The constitution of academic disciplines
The academic standpoint
Preconditions for the production of historical sense
Notes
Chapter 3: The logic of historical knowledge: Causality, rationality, identity
‘Universal idealized causality’
The insufficiency of reason
Identitary thinking
Notes
Chapter 4: The organization of historical knowledge: Categorical coordinators; rhetorical strategy
Structures of coherence
Dynamic forces
Stabilizing components
Summary
Notes
Chapter 5: The purpose of historical knowledge: Comprehension
Historicization: a ‘natural attitude’
Comprehensive knowledge: institutionalized knowledge
The redundancy of a ‘great truth’
Notes
Conclusion: The psychopathology of historicized life
Between aftermath and premonition
‘A world of frightened men’: apprehension
‘Reality precisely reflected’
Notes
Glossary
References
Index

Citation preview

How History Works

How History Works assesses the social function of academic knowledge in the humanities, exemplified by history, and offers a critique of the validity of historical knowledge. The book focusses on history’s academic, disciplinary ethos to offer a reconception of the discipline of history, arguing that it is an existential liability: if critical analysis reveals the sense that history offers to the world to be illusory, what stops historical scholarship from becoming a disguise for pessimism or nihilism? History is routinely invoked in all kinds of cultural, political, economic, psychological situations to provide a reliable account or justification of what is happening. Moreover, it addresses a world already receptive to comprehensive historical explanations: since everyone has some knowledge of history, everyone can be manipulated by it. This book analyses the relationship between specialized knowledge and everyday experience, taking phenomenology (Husserl) and pragmatism (James) as methodological guides. It is informed by a wide literature sceptical of the sense academic historical expertise produces and of the work history does, represented by thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Valéry, Anders and Cioran. How History Works discusses how history makes sense of the world even if what happens is senseless, arguing that behind the smoke-screen of historical scholarship looms a chaotic world-dynamic indifferent to human existence. It is valuable reading for anyone interested in historiography and historical theory. Martin L. Davies is Emeritus Reader in History at the University of Leicester. His publications include Identity or History? Marcus Herz and the End of the Enlightenment (1995), Historics: Why History Dominates Contemporary Society (Routledge, 2006) and Imprisoned by History: Aspects of Historicized Life (Routledge, 2010).

Routledge Approaches to History

1 Imprisoned by History Aspects of Historicized Life Martin L. Davies 2 Narrative Projections of a Black British History Eva Ulrike Pirker 3 Integrity in Historical Research Edited by Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland 4 History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence Time and Justice Berber Bevernage 5 Frank Ankersmit’s Lost Historical Cause A Journey from Language to Experience Peter P. Icke 6 Popularizing National Pasts 1800 to the Present Edited by Stefan Berger, Chris Lorenz and Billie Melman 7 The Fiction of History Alexander Lyon Macfie 8 The Rise and Propagation of Historical Professionalism Rolf Torstendahl

9 The Material of World History Edited by Tina Mai Chen and David S. Churchill 10 Modernity, Metatheory, and the Temporal-Spatial Divide From Mythos to Techne Michael Kimaid 11 The Struggle for the Long-Term in Transnational Science and Politics Forging the Future Edited by Jenny Andersson and Egle˙ Rindzevicˇiuˉtuˉ 12 ‘A New Type of History’ Fictional Proposals for dealing with the Past Beverley Southgate 13 Beyond Memory: Silence and the Aesthetics of Remembrance Edited by Alexandre Dessingué and Jay Winter 14 The Soviet Past in the Post-Socialist Present Methodology and Ethics in Russian, Baltic and Central European Oral History and Memory Studies Edited by Melanie Ilic and Dalia Leinarte

15 Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies From Documentation to Intervention Jaume Aurell

16 How History Works The Reconstitution of a Human Science Martin L. Davies

“Persuasively written and developing a challenging thesis based on the pervasiveness of historicised understanding in giving illusory meaning to our world, this book expresses a thought-experiment that needs to be experienced by all historians willing to reflect on the theoretical nature and social impact of their discipline.” Jonathan Gorman, Queen’s University Belfast, UK “Martin L. Davies’s How History Works is the sharpest barrage of arrows directed at history in a long time. Davies is especially severe in his treatment of ‘public history,’ and of ‘normal’ history in its ‘public’ (regime-stabilizing) function . . . I much admire Davies’s wit, erudition, insouciant style, and, let it be said, hard work.” Allan Megill, University of Virginia, USA

How History Works The reconstitution of a human science

Martin L. Davies

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Martin L. Davies The right of Martin L. Davies to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 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. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. 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 Davies, Martin L. How history works : the reconstitution of a human science / Martin L. Davies. pages cm. —(Routledge approaches to history; 16) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. History—Philosophy. 2. History—Social aspects. I. Title. D16.8.D259 2015 901—dc23 2015016293 ISBN: 978-1-138-93212-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-67215-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

For Ras

‘. . . almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.’ – Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World ‘Das Niveau einer Wissenschaft bestimmt sich daraus, wie weit sie einer Krisis ihrer Grundbegriffe fähig ist.’ (‘The status of a science is determined by how far it can withstand a crisis of its basic concepts.’) – Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit

Contents

Preface Introduction

xiii 1

What are you doing when you do history? 1 History: working the way the world works 3 What does history do? 8 1 The situation of historical knowledge: the historicized world

19

A world already shaped by history 20 A world that has historically superseded itself 24 The compulsive self-historicization of the world 32 2 The technology of historical knowledge: management systems

45

The constitution of academic disciplines 46 The academic standpoint 55 Preconditions for the production of historical sense 61 3 The logic of historical knowledge: causality, rationality, identity

68

‘Universal idealized causality’ 71 The insufficiency of reason 77 Identitary thinking 86 4 The organization of historical knowledge: categorical coordinators; rhetorical strategy Structures of coherence 95

90

Dynamic forces 99 Stabilizing components 105 Summary 112 5 The purpose of historical knowledge: comprehension

116

Historicization: a ‘natural attitude’ 118 Comprehensive knowledge: institutionalized knowledge 121 The redundancy of a ‘great truth’ 132 Conclusion: the psychopathology of historicized life

137

Between aftermath and premonition 140 ‘A world of frightened men’: apprehension 143 ‘Reality precisely reflected’ 150 Glossary References Index

160 166 177

Preface

How History Works: The Reconstitution of a Human Science complements Historics: Why History Dominates Contemporary Society (2006) and Imprisoned by History: Aspects of Historicized Life (2010). These studies were not planned as a triptych: each can be read independently of the others. Rather, the second book emerged out of issues raised by the first, and this one, the third, is a further attempt to clarify what history actually does. In the present historicized culture history offers itself automatically as a natural way of thinking about the world, of making what happens make sense. Like the two books that preceded it, the present study argues that history is just one form of understanding, a technology for producing sense whatever happens, the adaptable instrument of a comprehensive way of thinking, and that this way of thinking needs to be elucidated. Like those books, the present study also shows that there are many ways of thinking that do not have automatic recourse to history, that do not need such a recourse, that thus all the better reveal the destitution of existence and the climate of apprehension that constitute the ethos of a historicized world. In Historics the analysis of history was motivated by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Valéry, and by European-Jewish philosophy in general. In Imprisoned by History it was also indebted to the work of A.N. Whitehead, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, Ilya Prigogine, and Isabelle Stengers. In the present study it turns to a way of thinking already implied in Historics from the start: Husserl’s phenomenological method and his sense of the crisis occasioned by the unquestioned authority of disciplinary expertise; Benda’s sense of the betrayal of their vocation perpetrated by academics and intellectuals; and Cioran’s apprehensive visions of existential destitution in a world that has already seen too much. This way of thinking is, of course, anything but disciplinary. Instead it is deliberately eclectic, since (as Diderot remarked) ‘the eclectic thinker is someone who recognizes no master’ (Diderot 1994: 300). In particular, it rejects sophistry, the commodification of knowledge, for an immediately pragmatic attitude. Hence, for Socrates (according to Xenophon) it meant sharing with ‘good friends’ the ‘good things’ extracted from the ‘treasures that the wise

xiv Preface men of old have left us in their writings’ for the sake of being useful to one another (Xenophon 1979: 72–5; I. vi. 13–4). Certainly history offers itself as a natural way of thinking: it provides convenient patterns for thinking automatically to follow. But thinking that automatically follows prescriptions no longer merits that name: it is merely dressage. Particularly in a historicized world defined by its ever expanding capacity for comprehensive knowledge amplified by technical expertise supported by disciplinary dogma, thinking – as Kant insisted – must for its own sake orientate itself.

Introduction

What are you doing when you do history? ‘I wish I knew a history was a history.’ So says Gertrude Stein in her Geographical History of America (1936) (Stein 1973a: 72). The simplicity of the statement belies the complexity of the definition – a word’s uncertain grasp of the reality it describes. How does anyone know that what they are writing is a history? Because it is like the writings of other people that they call history. But how do they know that what they are writing is a history? Because what they are writing is already recognized by everyone else as a history. The result: thought stranded in tautology. We identify something by its conceptual label: to know what that something is we consult the label we ourselves stuck on it. But the adhesive is weak: the label holds only because some people – in this case, historians – keep pressing it on. (Needless to say, Gertrude Stein’s Geographical History is not like any other history.) But why the regret? Stein wishes she knew. But don’t we already know? History is, after all, the study of “the Past”. This seems so obvious: surely it terminates the discussion? But here how a word relates to its referent is immediately problematic. The noun “Past” implies an existing former reality. It had for those who lived then an experiential texture comparable to the experiential immediacy the world has for us living now. But that reality and its experiential texture no longer exist. From their remains, by means of induction or inference, its experiential texture must be reconstituted, “brought to life”, now, in the present. “The Past” is also indeterminate: it cannot be retrieved or reconstituted in its entirety. Rather it is constantly being revived in fragmented, tessellated form, through the multifarious perspectives of current specialized interests, be it to satisfy their curiosity, be it to serve their various intentions, academic and politicized alike. “The Past” too has a pragmatic value. As administered and managed by historical scholarship, let alone arranged and rearranged by historical action, it apparently offers a multifarious resource of information about human institutions of all kinds. It is the sole resource – and so, on the assumption of historical continuity, it is valued as an essential means of orientating current human enterprises. Finally, “the Past” has also a numinous, mythical

2 Introduction authority since it legitimizes in various ways the basis of human selfunderstanding. It thus vindicates the sense of human existence – produced by religion, politics, culture, including historical scholarship itself – as an essential component of the human sciences. But precisely because “the Past” as it figures in disciplined historical and historicizing discourse comes habitually with so many presumptions and preconceptions about its social cognitive value, it occludes rather than clarifies any insight into what history might be. So “the Past” appears here in inverted commas and capitalized to show that the present argument challenges both its natural presence in consciousness and the thought-habits that unthinkingly defer to its cognitive precedence. Viewed in this way, “the Past” appears not as a natural “object”, but as the result of describing the world in a certain way or the effect of looking at the world from a certain perspective (cf. Husserl 2003: 206). It is the synthesis – here and now – of intersecting strands of internal time-consciousness, particularly of personal, social, cultural, and “world-historical” recollection (what Husserl defines as Retention or as Wiedererinnerung), coordinated with anticipation of the future these strands variously imply (what Husserl defines as Protention or as Vorerwartung). Acquired through perception, as a ‘stable cognitive acquisition’ [bleibend erworbener Erkenntnisbesitz], as an always accessible ‘unified multiplicity of objects’ [eine vereinheitlichte Mannigfaltigkeit von Gegenständen], both dimensions together constitute a world, the world we actually live in. Thus, phenomenologically, in the always ongoing self-reflection we can actualize [vergegenwärtigen] how things once were and how they might yet be and can, therefore, plan and decide accordingly (cf. Husserl 2003: 204; 2000: 431ff.). Consequently, the tautological outcome of wondering how a history can be a history suggests a different argument – an argument not deferential to “the Past”, an argument that goes against the grain of disciplined, scholastic habit. In phenomenological terms the argument presented here offers an ‘eidetic reduction’ of history. It aims to discern the ‘sense’ of historical science that a priori predetermines its scope and procedures (Husserl 1986b: 15). This means stripping away all the affirmative and euphonic claims made on its behalf (on their own behalf) by its practitioners that pre-empt dissent and occlude the decisive issues to see how history works, how it reconstitutes itself through its work. This method is indispensable for discovering how and why history works, evidently keeps on working, whatever happened, whatever happens. So rather than expatiate on what history is supposed to be, the argument here clarifies what history does, or claims to do, and assesses the veracity of these claims. Specifically, it focusses on how history works. And it turns out that – in one sense – history is nothing special: it works the way the world works. But that also means it is redundant. If history does work the way the world works, the world is already doing its work for it. The world is already historicized, already predetermined by historical

Introduction 3 action and historical knowledge: what remains for history to do amounts to nothing. In another sense, involving the claims – existential, cognitive, ethical – history makes in its own self-interest, for its own purposes, in order to represent itself as something special, it works exceptionally well precisely because of its gratuitous redundancy. The world is already doing historicizing work. History working the way the world works, arranges and rearranges the world according to its own comprehensive but free-floating designs: it thus keeps itself busy, producing with its redundancy the illusion of meaningful industriousness. However (and this is the crucial point), situated in the no-man’s-land between the unremitting historicizing work done by the world and history’s empty cognitive ideals, finding the euphonic affirmation of historical study by historians and the way history actually works irreconcilable, subjective consciousness – the sense of one’s self constituted by the flux of experiences – is left apprehensive. Self-reflection can no longer expect to start with a clean slate, with a tabula rasa, in ideal “laboratory conditions”. Instead it must cope with a depressing malaise, the all-pervasive psychopathology of already historicized life. The apprehension it induces, that induces it, is the reverse aspect of its therapeutic negation: a persistent attitude of vigilant reservation.

History: working the way the world works Concentrating on how history works and what has to be done to do history, phenomenological reduction blocks what Sartre calls the ‘seriousmindedness’, l’esprit de sérieux, that already invests an object or an issue with an essential value (Sartre 2010: 674). It comes down to focussing on social-cognitive behaviour as it exists in and for itself, without any preconceptions. In particular, it comes down to exploring the ‘experiential system’ [Erfahrungssystem] each discipline [Wissenschaft] generates. This not only constitutes the topics it deals with, but also determines the eidetic structures that predispose these topics to be known in their respective disciplinary way (cf. Husserl 1977: 106ff.). So concentrating on how history works blocks the automatic assumption of its self-determined objectivity. It analyses rather how history creates eidetic structures, mental strategies, that predispose one’s subjective consciousness to receive its accounts as objective. This shift in cognitive stance is indispensable. After all, with its “what-is?” definitions disqualified as tautological, doing history, performing historical work, constitutes a broad category of both social behaviour and cognitive practice that maintains things the way they are, that affirms current reality, the ongoing historicization of the world. History works the way the world works: that must be emphasized. Certainly the discipline of history recognizes that historical scholarship is rooted [cf. roots §3.1] in the time and in the world in which it is written.1 But, historians insist, far from being about the present, history is about “the Past”. Accordingly, they argue, if history serves the present (rather than

4 Introduction “the Past”) it is being falsified since it thereby disregards the all-important historical context [§3.1]. And then “the Past” defines a common intuition: that the world we live in pre-exists us. It was already there and, latent within it, the situation we find ourselves in, and with which we have to contend. But this conventional disciplinary thought-habit ignores a crucial sociological question. Just as it is legitimate to ask how (e.g.) a decline in the crime rate, or high youth unemployment, or a decline in marriages, or an increase in car ownership, etc., might affect social behaviour as a whole, so it is also legitimate to ask how the widespread social phenomenon of historyfocussed behaviour affects social behaviour in general. At this juncture, however, a difficulty, a crucial question, presents itself. Within social activities that constitute the everyday world we live in, just what makes continuous historical activity, this always ongoing studying, conspicuous? Given the vast range of indispensable social functions people fulfil (e.g. including inter alia doctors, lawyers, technicians, engineers, administrators, accountants, managers, teachers, journalists, clergymen, secretaries, office workers, shop workers, call-centre workers, salesmen and women, museum curators, film directors), what identifies the social historian-function as distinctive? What makes its studious, clerical behaviour recognizable? Historical scholarship is a paradigm of the way the human sciences work in the world. Instead of leading to a wealth of new insights, it merges with a whole range of administrative and managerial technologies that ‘far from making it more intelligible’ instead instrumentalize the world, ‘make it more useful’ (Husserl 1986b: 98). Take any disciplinary procedure indispensable for studying and writing history, it also figures in a wide range of social occupations and functions that in themselves have a historicizing function. These procedures involve the following. (a) Data: sources, documents, records, artefacts Historians study all kinds of information that has survived from the time it was produced until the present. They have little control over the availability of the information they work on. As Charles Péguy observes in Clio (1909), one of his critically incisive treatises on history, for ancient times too few records exist, for modern times too many (Péguy 1961a: 243ff.). Nevertheless, historians have various means of verification such as tracing the provenance of their data, cross-checking sources, or collaborating with other disciplines in the humanities and the sciences, according to the problems they need to resolve. But the reliability of data is by no means specific to history. To take out life, car, or house insurance, consumers are obliged to provide accurate information about themselves. The insurance company would be commercially compromised if it could not trust the data its clients provide. Similarly the detective faced with solving a crime will take statements from suspects

Introduction 5 and witnesses, gather forensic evidence, and so construct a case that can form the basis of a prosecution. Similarly, call-centre advisers working for the helpline of a national charity or for the customer services department of a multinational business need to take careful note of the information they elicit from their clients, if they are to make a relevant response to their critical queries. The reliability of data is fundamental, for an adequate insurance policy, for a water-tight case for prosecution, for sound advice over problems with housing or consumers’ rights, or for a trustworthy historical monograph alike. Certainly historians would object: don’t they themselves work with far greater amounts of data than these other social functions? This issue of comprehensive historical comprehension will be discussed later (Chapter 5). Suffice it to say here that in all these examples the principle of veracity still holds. Suffice it to say too that historians as social individuals have to conform to social norms of veracity anyway. Moreover, the routine commercial or legal data gathered through these norms will themselves sometime return comprehensively as history – in economic history (e.g. the history of the insurance industry), or in social history (e.g. the history of crime or of policing). (b) Structures of chronology: epochs, ages, eras, periods Historians chart temporal changes and continuities in the agencies and institutions they study. By means of categorical coordinators (see Chapter 4), they lend them a temporal structure – a time-line, at its most basic, like a main road indicated on a map – with its segments indicating innovation or decline, progress or relapse, pivotal dates and events, enduring patterns of cultural practice. As a result, the temporal segments themselves, whatever their duration, denote the ethos of the historical phenomena they structure, inter alia: “the Middle Ages”; “the Renaissance”; “the age of Enlightenment”; “1968”; “Elizabethan England”; “the Thirties”; “the Age of Austerity”; “Modernism”. As a further result the historical ethos of these eras [§1.1] and periods [§1.1] helps to account historically for the events – the already recognized historical phenomena – that occurred within them. But the productive nature of time is not acknowledged by historians uniquely. The hospital consultant has on his desk a surprisingly thick file with your name on it. Riffling through it he can scan the results of tests and examinations over the past few years, attribute any fluctuations in results not just to the medical condition itself but also to other personal problems at particular past moments. Financial consultants will be assessing the performance of the market over various time-spans by surveying fluctuations in the price of leading shares, in the cost of living, in rates of government borrowing, in unemployment numbers. They will know that over a given period surveyed the market will reflect not solely economic activity but also changes in market confidence occasioned by concomitant political or social crises. Common to all social management functions, as illustrated here by history,

6 Introduction medicine, and finance, is the principle of chronological structure, the reliance on temporal direction. (c) Truth: security, value, civilization Perhaps the most important justification for studying history, for writing history, is its claim to discover and validate truth. To know exactly what happened in “the Past” (so historians contend) has a crucial function. It offers a reliable foundation for human self-knowledge, particularly since historical study underpins the human sciences. But, just as importantly, the quest to ascertain what happened, be it in “the remote Past” (e.g. Babylon) or in recent history (e.g. the Iraq War (2003–2011)), and to provide an account of it, works as a practical demonstration of the principle of truth as an ethical value essential for current social well-being. Studying history, writing history, are held (by those who resort to historical methods) to be conducive to the ‘process of civilization’ (to use Norbert Elias’s term) because as truthful practices they stand guard over the liberal-democratic principles that sustain it (Elias 1976). But the discovery and validation of truth cannot be the prerogative of historians alone. Everyone has an interest in living in safety according to civilized and tolerant values. Everyone in some way needs to feel they are involved in supporting this interest if a civilized and tolerant society is to maintain itself. Accordingly, everyone who is involved in some incident or other – e.g. a traffic-jam on a motorway, a severely delayed train, a close elderly relative in a care home suddenly bearing cuts and bruises – wants to know how it happened, what the reason for it is. And this desire to find out is a common reflex, as the Greek historia, which means “learning by inquiry; knowledge or information obtained by inquiry”; “a narration of what one has learnt”, indicates. This lack of specificity alone suggests that history’s criteria of truthfulness must be heterogeneous. In any case, if its truthfulness were not heterogeneous, if historical scholarship promoted nothing more than a single truth – Historical Truth as sui generis, as something very special – it would mutate into quasireligious dogma. In fact, this heterogeneous form of truth, veracity defined in relation to the matter in hand, is routinely, habitually, the focus of judicial and public inquiries set up to examine issues of public concern. One example would be the Iraq Inquiry chaired by a senior civil servant (Sir John Chilcot) with its committee constituted by civil servants and historians (Sir Lawrence Freedman, Sir Martin Gilbert) alike. Truth in this heterogeneous social-historical sense confirms both the reliability of the evaluations placed on the data the public inquiry examines (cf. (a) above) and the trustworthiness of its findings. It functions generally as a criterion of public self-orientation: its demonstration in history writing is just one of its means of self-expression.

Introduction 7 (d) Orientation Another important justification for studying history is its alleged indispensable value as a means of orientation for the individual, for society, and for governance generally. It perpetuates the notion, formulated by Cicero, of history as a guide for one’s life, magistra vitae (Cicero 2001: 225; II. ix. 36). But it also invokes a more menacing prospect, as conveyed by George Santayana’s often quoted (and often misquoted) remark from The Life of Reason (1905/1906), that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ (Santayana 1998: 82). This sentence – however euphonic it seems – hardly stands scrutiny. Clearly, if you have forgotten “the Past”, you yourself will not know that you are repeating it. But if “the Past” is repeated now, in the present (where else?), it will not be “Past”, but still present. To claim that “the Past” would be present erases any distinction between them. If “the Past” through compulsively repetitive behaviour is present, what prevents the present from being anything other than a past that is perpetually being re-enacted, a psychopathological repetition-compulsion? In any case, it seems doubtful that anything can be repeated historically. As the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus observed, one cannot step into the same river twice: all things are in flux (Kirk and Raven 1969: 196–7; §§217, 218). On the other hand, there are many people, including historians, who do remember “the Past” and do try to repeat it – as anniversary celebrations or commemorations; as traditions, as received forms of behaviour they attempt to perpetuate; as symbolic re-enactments of battles or historical events (e.g. gruesome Guy Fawkes’ Night with its burnt effigies). But the function of history as an instrument of orientation focusses on its core as a social practice, on its basic usefulness as a human science. Certainly, this function seems vindicated by common sense. If we do want to know why something happened, we seek its cause in what happened before: apparently simple cause-and-effect. Conversely, a situation arising in the present (e.g. the banking crisis, 2008; Putin’s annexation of Crimea, 2014) prompts commentators to find a situation in “the Past” (e.g. the Wall Street crash, 1929; Hitler’s annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia, 1938) that might help to understand it or cope with it: the simple issue of identity. The argument will show (Chapters 3 and 4) that these “simple issues” are anything but. We need note here only that confirmation of the utility of history derives not primarily from the historian’s privileged access to academic knowledge, but from a cognitive habit (asking how? why?) historical scholarship transforms into a sophisticated technique. (e) Non-special places The procedures that produce historical knowledge are embedded in a wide range of social functions and occupations. It follows then that history does not require any special place for its ongoing studious activity. In this respect,

8 Introduction compared with other occupations, the historian appears to be disadvantaged. The doctor surveys the patient’s medical history in a surgery; in order to reconstruct what happened the police cordon off a crime scene; the lawyer or the judge has a courtroom; the technician or engineer has a specially equipped workshop or laboratory; the call-centre adviser an allotted workstation. Like many administrators and managers the historian has only his or her university office; the historian is nothing special – just another office worker. The historian really is nothing special: like millions of workers, he or she is a machine operator, working with a computer, with word-processing programs, databases, online sources and materials. He or she is thus assimilated to distinctive trends in socio-economic behaviour. One is the homogenization of work practices as the precondition for the heterogeneity of its products; the other is the erasure – through information technology – of the distinction between manual and intellectual work. (The historian operating his or her computer to produce a highly thoughtful reconstruction of past events may incur thereby a physical repetitive strain injury.) Even the library, the archive, the record office, the museum, or the heritage site, are not exclusive to historians: they share them with people from all walks of life and all kinds of occupations who visit them to satisfy their curiosity, to develop their interests, to research their family history, to indulge their nostalgia. This brief survey reveals that much of history’s work, the kind of work historians perform, is already performed by all kinds of people in all kinds of occupations within the routine world of everyday life [Lebenswelt]. “The Past”, therefore, does not haunt the present, tantalizing, just out of its reach. Rather it is an extremely dynamic, historicizing agency evinced in the cognitive habits and thought-conventions, in the current, non-special workpractices it prescribes as well as in the variety of outcomes, and commodities it generates. Typical of these non-special activities, historical practice, the ever-present countenance of whatever was, produces the very texture of current reality.

What does history do? In principle, therefore, the social historian-function (i.e. what a historian does) and history-focussed behaviour (the procedures and practices that produce or motivate historical knowledge) prove to be socially common, nothing special, nothing distinctive. Claims for history’s distinctiveness come from within the discipline. They are supported by the propensity in academic culture to create categories of socially recognized distinction (as in demarcations of status, university degree results, or the award of research cash). These categories gain general social currency by means of the inbuilt, self-affirming persuasiveness of historical writing (as Chapters 2, 4, and 5 will show). But, given that the historian-function and history-focussed behaviour are common social and cognitive habits, the distinguished professor’s relationship to his or her readers is hardly different from that of the élite long-distance

Introduction 9 runner to the wider athletic public: anyone can do it, but some have the natural ability and the determination to do it much better than anyone else. In either case, if the wider public were not somehow already involved in the activity, its distinctive personal and social performance would be pointless, a mere eccentricity – as the more specialized, esoteric forms of historical scholarship sometimes appear to be. However, when the non-special situation of the historian is seen from a different angle it changes drastically. Its non-special situation makes it distinctive. That the historian’s situation is non-special means that, unlike any other social function, its field of operation is indefinite, its jurisdiction unbounded, its scope comprehensive, its stance transcendental. At any time, it can refer to anything. This comprehensive, heterogeneous purview makes the social historian-function exceptionally performative. But this performativity is boosted by the common history-focussed behaviour that already orientates society’s routine work and normal practices and which everyone sometime somehow displays. This ensures an already existing, widespread receptivity for what the historian-function produces – for what history, its ongoing study and writing, does. If the historian’s non-special situation does make history distinctive, it also makes its distinctiveness persuasive. If no-one is beyond history’s jurisdiction, if no-one remains undetectable by its scope, then personal self-interest at least would motivate the individual sometime to take an interest in it. And this motivation is enhanced by what history’s “non-special distinctiveness” enables it to do. Principally it facilitates the persuasiveness of historical knowledge. Beyond truisms and the most simple propositions (e.g. 2 + 2 = 4), knowledge is buttressed variously by certainty, by verification, by justification; but also by what makes it persuasive, even if how much persuasion makes certainty certain or justifies justification is never clear. Due to its “non-special distinctiveness”, to the habitual character of its cognitive conventions, history finds itself ideally situated to determine, for the human sciences, appropriate parameters of certainty and degrees of justification, because its persuasiveness is already socially recognized. Because historical knowledge relies on socially common, history-focussed behaviour, its self-interested recipients justifiably find it convincing. Consequently, the distinctiveness that characterizes the cognitive potential of the historian’s non-special situation also refines the otherwise routine procedures of common history-focussed behaviour into sophisticated methodologies. How history works, what it does, is, therefore, dependent on its situation of “non-special distinctiveness”, on its unlimited cognitive potential, in the following ways. (f) Authority Knowledge is power. With its indefinite field of operation, its unlimited jurisdiction, its comprehensive reach, and its transcendental scope, the

10 Introduction cognitive potential of the historian’s non-special situation already makes it authoritative. On the one hand, “history” is the most abstract of abstractions. Transcendental to experience, it itself can never be seen or touched: it simply labels a socially pervasive practice. On the other, this abstraction manifests itself in specific objects in the world of everyday life recognized in some way as having a historical label (e.g. a Victorian penny; a letter; a wax seal; a ruined castle; or a monograph, article, or TV series). These material manifestations (historical objects) vindicate their abstract, transcendental context (history). What relates them is structured on the rhetorical figures synecdoche (e.g. “all hands on deck”) or metonymy (e.g. “the pen is mightier than the sword”) that see the overall context either in a part of it (“the crew” or “the ship”) or in a substitute for it (e.g. “intellectual power” or “physical strength”). Similarly, history is revealed as much in a historical survey that covers many centuries as in a highly specialized article that focusses on a very specific issue, or as much by an expert (e.g.) on Ancient Egyptian papyri as by a commentator on (e.g.) the emergence of 1970s punk bands. The historian’s writ runs anywhere any time: that only enhances history’s numinous presence. Further, as history particularly demonstrates, the power inherent in knowledge tends automatically to align itself with other forms of power: the force exercised by politics, commerce, or culture, especially the influence operative in the media as global commercial enterprises in public information and persuasion. Being non-special – conventional, habitual – in its own cognitive and behavioural procedures, the historian-function is by definition already adapted to them. Moreover, these powerful institutions and organizations readily associate themselves with the historian-function. They share a common enterprise. As Valéry remarks, socio-economic and political order relies on ‘fictive forces’, on a ‘fiduciary and conventional system’ that balances instincts and ideas by means of the ‘present action of absent things’ [l’action de présence de choses absentes]. Integral to this system are such things as ‘the sacred’, ‘the just’, ‘the legal’, ‘the decent’, ‘the commendable’; internalized values that work only through the power of images and words. These values are historical. They already imply a present restricted by “the Past” (by means of tradition) and the future (by means of foresight or anticipation), that are themselves ‘imaginary perspectives’. Hence the social world, apparently so natural, actually holds together by magic: it is ‘an edifice of make-believe’ [un édifice d’enchantements]. It is based on nothing but writings [écritures]: on commands, promises, images, habits, conventions – on ‘pure fictions’ [fictions pures] (Valéry 1957a: 508–9). And indispensable to the writing that affirms the social order is nothing but history, things the way they were and how they have now got to be in discursive form. And nothing other than this enchantment with (historical) words works in moments of national or international crisis – when, for example, political leaders invoke the conjectured affirmative verdict of future historians to justify their proposed present course of state action. To

Introduction 11 view the present as long since passed, as history, as something absent with a present effect, by hypothesizing a projected future retrospective assessment, is nothing but a fiction that vindicates the politician’s present calculations. (This was exemplified recently (2013) by John Kerry, the US Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, invoking the judgement of future history to justify possible recourse to military action against the government of Syria for a gas attack on its people.) “Public History” is the name given to this alignment of the historianfunction with the going political, entrepreneurial, or cultural authorities – as though history could not ever be anything but “public”. Through its website, History & Policy organizes historians as a self-appointed, reserve civil service. Here they claim to offer guidance, based on the historical analysis of analogous problems and their resolution in “the Past”, to political decisionmakers involved in formulating policies on immediate social problems. In their turn, political decision-makers – sufficiently prominent through their policy decisions to have made history, to have become distinctive in their non-special practices – subsequently write memoirs or publish diaries to vindicate themselves and their historical achievements. In any case, the historian-function is embedded in major social institutions where it manifests itself in archivists ordering their records, in curators of their public image or their brand, or in “official historians” or “official biographers” approved by the institutions or by the authoritative figures themselves to represent them to the public. Not least, this function is performed whenever historians appear in the media to comment on or contextualize important social or political occasions such as public anniversaries or commemorations (e.g. the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War) or controversial issues of public interest (e.g. the future of the monarchy; constitutional procedures; the campaign for Scottish independence; the self-assertion of “Englishness”). The knowledge-power nexus is the vital component of the social historianfunction. Its non-special distinctiveness orientates it towards others who, immersed in non-special governing or prevalent procedures, make themselves or their achievements distinctive. What “distinctive” actually means is quite arbitrary: historical interests are heterogeneous. To one historian it might be the nineteenth-century factory owner; to another it might be the repetitive, monotonous labour of Sisyphus performed by the working class. But crucially, ideologically, this nexus principally conditions the public – necessarily involved through their work-routine in non-special, history-focussed tasks – to defer automatically to those socially powerful figures who affirm this conditioning by performing these tasks distinctively, with authoritative distinction. (g) Sense If the historian-function as a social function in the present is non-special, determined by habit and convention, it distinguishes itself by claiming, in a

12 Introduction manner unparalleled by other non-special functions, jurisdiction over “the Past”, over the world as it used to be. (A Home Secretary or a Chief Police Officer focusses on criminality in the last year or so; the social historian will survey its transformations over centuries.) This special, distinctive investment of vital energy and financial and material resources into disclosing the world as it used to be, a world created by the non-special tasks that used to be, vindicates the legitimacy of this scholastic enterprise. Moreover, it gauges the importance of invoking the non-special practices that produced the world as it used to be: the vast resources this investment requires must indicate that what it comes up with has an inherent, indispensable value. To vindicate its necessity, it relies on a sophistical inference that conceals its problematic character with simplistic self-evidence: the way things were the way they were (“the Past”) reveals how things are the way they are, the way they have got to be (the present). Hence (allegedly) “the Past” provides the foundation of the present. When it studies “the Past”, the historian-function enables the present (the way things are the way they are) to discover itself in “the Past” (the way things were the way they were). Underpinning the similarities and differences revealed by these contrasting perspectives are the non-special practices they have in common precisely because of their non-special character. To make sense of the world as it used to be, the historian-function employs a number of strategies. They are articulated through the non-special social requirements the historian-function shares with other habitual social functions (mentioned above) such as data, chronological structures, values, and orientation. These strategies are also expressly in themselves non-special. On the one hand, they are psychologistic, involving, character, status, motives, intentions of historical agents; on the other, they are administrative, involving factors, influences, situations, outcomes. The similarities are expressed in terms of likeness or identity (cf. Chapter 3). The differences are expressed in terms of analogy: such as presenting (e.g.) the ballista as the ‘cruise missile of the Roman world’, or Hannibal’s elephants as ‘weapons of mass destruction’, or the nineteenth-century tea clipper as ‘the Ferrari of the high seas’ (cf. Davies 2006: 88–9; 2010: 65). Studying history involves arranging and rearranging these determining criteria in such a way that the way things used to be manifests itself in them (as though in a kaleidoscope). And this current account of the way things used to be carries conviction, makes itself persuasive, if it has a discursive resilience comparable to a current psychologistic or administrative report on the way things are now. Studying history makes sense when its written accounts vindicate human behaviour as essentially rational, when it shows that it can be captured in terms of calculable motives and situations, when intentions and outcomes disclose a causal function. But the sense history makes derives from its deferred insights or belated inferences that, as the data shows, were inevitably unacknowledged or blocked by the non-special practices that used to be. Historical knowledge is, therefore, late knowledge: it comes afterwards,

Introduction 13 in the aftermath, as an after-thought. The sense produced afterwards by the historian-function about what really happened in the world that used to be was not available to it in the way things were. That is the tragic paradox of historical understanding: the way things were, as it afterwards proved, is never the way they really were. Consequently, the sense the historian produces for the world as it used to be enables him or her to speak on behalf of its inhabitants: to be retrospectively their better self-knowledge; to outline the available possibilities their condition obscured: what they could have done, what they should have done; to apply an academic disciplinary corrective to the world. Finally, the sense history makes is indispensable for its orientating function, for its direction. The rationality of its component parts, elucidated by specialist analysis, guarantees the comprehensive rationality of history, the sense and order of its own limitless jurisdiction. (h) Meaning That history claims a limitless jurisdiction over “the Past” seems special, apparently makes it distinctive. But its claim is fundamentally illusory: the world is no longer the way it used to be. It has already been historicized. The way it used to be is here and now merely a phantom. And if it appeals to us still through its traditions, legacies, anniversaries, commemorations, or as an endless supply of stimuli to present curiosity, it does so predominantly as something painful, as a phantom pain. The historicized world is a pathogenic condition. However, history has a built-in self-redressing mechanism that can nevertheless vindicate its distinctiveness. It ensures that the sense it construes in the non-special behaviour in the world as it used to be discloses on the historical scale, in other words, special to itself, a broader, transcendental significance. History asserts its special distinctiveness by means of self-amplification. Comprehensive though its scope is, heterogeneous (non-special) though its own sense is, it can always be relied on to make more sense, to be more comprehensive. Already it discerns in the way things were the way they were a latent, unrecognized sense. Then projected onto the historical scale, calibrated by periods [§1.1], epochs [§1.1], centuries [§1.1], it acquires an amplified, selfenhancing meaning. (So, e.g., the actions of individual revolutionaries in nineteenth-century Europe can be assimilated to a wider historical process [§2.1] of the popular demand for democracy or for the formation of the nation-state.) But this structure of historical meaning, its distinctiveness, relies on nothing historical. Rather it is metaphysical. It relies on ideal, mental principles as much beyond the way things are the way they are as beyond the way things used to be. This metaphysical principle is exemplified in Leibniz’s assertion that the ‘world machine’ (created by the Supreme Being) can operate smoothly, harmoniously, rationally, as a whole even if some particular

14 Introduction components are recalcitrant (Leibniz 1969b: 94). Subsequently, in the comprehensive historical systems elaborated by Kant, Hegel, and Marx, conflict becomes a historicizing dynamic conducive to the realization of history’s eventual rational self-fulfilment. The definition of a historicized world recognizes that these conceptions of history have themselves become historicized, symptomatic of the way things used to be, typical of the way things were habitually thought to be the way they were. But even if these “strong”, deterministic historicist structures have lost credibility, they recur precisely in a weaker but no less resilient form in the categorical coordinators – the ‘psychic additions’ (Whitehead 1920: 29–30) – (such as trends [§2.1, processes [§2.1]) to which historical explanation for the sake of its self-amplified comprehension automatically resorts. But this specialized historical problem-solving, this technical piecemeal tinkering with what it means, is no less metaphysical. It leaves history scope to construe itself in pantheistic terms. Just as for Spinoza God is not a monistic principle beyond the world but a presence inherent in it, so history is not an ideal form, a preconceived cognitive template of human reality, but rather inherent in all its particular manifestations, from the specialized article to the heritage living-museum. This metaphysical implication in history’s capacity for making sense of the way things used to be, for determining what this sense means for the way things are whatever happened, whatever happens, suggests that its compulsive selfamplification has a quasi-religious motive. History would function as the ecumenical faith of a godless world. Or it could act as a rather tattered veil that conceals the unavowed nihilism endemic in current reality, a reality synonymous with the economics and ethics of global capitalism and its socio-pathological ramifications. After all, if the idea of an intelligent Supreme Being is deleted from Leibniz’s proposition, nothing prevents individual actions from making sense in themselves (as the history-function discloses) but in their entirety chaos. Whenever the sense and meaning of human existence are at issue, recourse is inevitably made to history – as the ‘common memory’ of humanity, as the story of the development of a human world, as asserting an ecumenical faith in the intrinsic value of the human enterprise, as the construction of a human Truth that transcends any given social formation. But if this humanizing vocation realized through the study of history should reveal the faintest flaw, the validity of the overall intention would be catastrophically compromised. The philosophical-cultural movement defined as postmodernism, including structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism does detect fundamental weaknesses in historical knowledge. But historians believe they can ignore them because they arise from outside the discipline, just as they leave devastating critiques by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Valéry unacknowledged. But a recent publication, À quoi sert l’histoire aujourd’hui? [What is the point of history today?] (2010) – a spin-off from the French TV programme La Fabrique de l’Histoire [The History Factory] – asserting

Introduction 15 the present relevance of “the Past” suggests a lack of conviction, a loss of nerve, internal to the discipline itself. Repeatedly the various historians from a variety of intra-disciplinary specializations validate their work, their historical speciality, by reference to its affirmation of what is human, what is humane. (That is, if they do not culminate in self-evident or tautological propositions – such as ‘history helps us to understand our current place in time’ – that still fail to explain how “time” can be a “place”.) But cumulatively these responses, almost every one concluding with this profession of ethical nobility, leave the impression that their authors could think actually of nothing else. They position “humanity” as a default value, as a value so comprehensive but so indiscriminate, that it excludes nothing (Laurentin 2010: 13, 42–3, 69–70, 77–8, 84–5, 98–9, 118, 142–3). This value functions as the academic justification that occurs to you when nothing else occurs to you, that occurs to you when faced with nothing, when nothingness, the harbinger of nihilism, inhibits thought. If the social historian-function loses its self-serving ethical conviction, if disillusioned it finally admits it never escaped its non-special status, if it recognizes that its cognitive necessity is just the result of habit-taking reinforcement, a void appears in human consciousness. How history works involves far more than defining disciplinary procedures and historiographical methods (as in the multifarious student guides to the discipline and its varieties of academic sub-disciplines). It becomes immediately a metaphysical issue. For if history works the way the world works, if the world – the selfhistoricizing world – works for history, then the sense history makes, the sense it makes whatever happens, defines the sense of the world-project. That is its historicist implication. How History Works, therefore, explores how history produces sense (i.e. what it does for itself) and how history functions in the world already shaped [§1.4] by history, by itself (i.e. what it does for the world). In its analysis of the world situation in which history works the argument here confronts the ruin of the historicist structure that supports and justifies it. It discloses that the historicized world is deceptive. It is a world in which “the Past” has become obsolete, a matter of “the Past”, but automatically still takes precedence, still sets precedents. History, working as the world works, non-special and redundant precisely because the world on its own account already works with history, still produces sense for the world. It still keeps producing sense as a matter of course, whatever happened, whatever happens, whether or not there is any sense to be had, because its management system does nothing else. In confronting a world situation it claims to manage and through its writing ‘magically’ affirms, it relies on its own internal resources: a structure-logic dependent on the metaphysical principles of causality, sufficient reason, and identity as a system of accounting and a discourse-logic constructed from categorical coordinators organizing its accounts (Chapters 3 and 4). It makes sense only because it imposes on the world its own self-approved metaphysical principles and cognitive

16 Introduction structures: because it is self-referential. In the end, it manages the world situation it confronts by means of its own comprehensive world-arrangements that, in the quest for an ever-deferred state of Truth, are self-amplifying, designed to make ever more of themselves, but at the same time and for that reason self-subverting (Chapter 5). In the end, with the collapse of its historicist basis, the redundancy of history in a historicized world produces a pathogenic condition, its own malaise, the psychopathology of historicized life. Symptomatically it betrays real apprehension: if no-one knows if a history really is a history, how does anyone know what actually happened in the world? This is not to deny that anything happened – far, far from it. Something did happen, certainly happened (and more than we can ever know) and the world does change: but what did it mean, what might it still mean? On the answer depends what anyone should do, as though someone doing anything might mean something . . . . . . As this final paragraph takes shape, ancient cities that have stood for thousands of years – Nimrud, Leptis Magna, Cyrene – are being pillaged, defaced, and destroyed (so one gathers from the nightly news info-tainment programmes). History as human heritage [§3.2] belonging to no-one and to everyone is being negated by history as savage aggression and ideological motivation. What is already historical – these ancient ruins that persist into our present – are being consigned to “the Past”, to the way things always were. They are being historicized, current historical action (i.e. chaotic political events) denying them any future historical or cultural significance: their historicization a further crime against humanity, against the idea of human values everyone shares, a further case of the inevitable coincidence of culture and barbarity. With this knowledge it is a professional self-delusion to write about history sustained by the academic’s ‘administrative gaze’, his or her ‘monographic view’: that is how to render oneself ineffectual. Intending a ‘comprehensive overview’ [un point de vue de survol] meant to ‘make the world intelligible’ but thereby adopting a position ‘impossible to locate’, it renders the fact ‘that we can know and observe it unintelligible’ (Prigogine and Stengers 1992: 186; 2005: 313) (cf. Chapter 2). Instead, writing here emerges from a cognitive situation produced by a world already historicized. The phenomenological reduction (the argument here proposes) confirms that to treat this historicization in historical terms would be pointless, the result tautology. It demonstrates (as Lévinas suggests) ‘that the meaning of each human situation is immanent in that situation’, that (according to Husserl) ‘the sense of any situation has never been determined by history’ because ‘the mind is basically a stranger to history’ [le fond dernier de l’esprit apparaît chez Husserl comme étranger à l’histoire] (Lévinas 2010: 49, 74). So, in this situation, writing here refuses recourse to a disciplinary, particularly a historicizing, ‘meta-language’ that, ‘from outside’ creating ‘semiotic unity’, delivers ‘truth in the form of pre-packaged information’ (Lotman 1990: 35, 129–30). Rather it mobilizes a deliberately eclectic discourse reserved towards the historicizations from

Introduction 17 which it arises and to which it critically-analytically responds (cf. the analysis of the academic standpoint in Chapter 2, of institutionalized knowledge in Chapter 5, and of categorical coordinators in Chapter 4). To challenge the veracity of history is to break a taboo. History is the guarantor that human existence means something, anything: to invalidate history is, therefore, something inhuman. However, this standpoint is a misconception. The demand for meaningful existence comes from the intentional nature of consciousness. Consciousness is not a passive-receptive blank screen but an agent out to find meaning, to attribute significance irrespective of the way in which an object might meaningfully exist. Certainly, where the object can be verified empirically the cognitive intention will have a correspondingly greater value. Conversely, the realm of academic knowledge provides more scope for the self-fulfilment of the cognitive intention inherent in consciousness (cf. Husserl 2009: 426ff.). To this end history works most efficiently: history guarantees to find meaning whatever happened, whatever happens. It is an intellectual convenience. It works so naturally: it makes us forget that it itself is not a form of cognition in its own right but a pliable instrument of intentional consciousness; that it is ‘constituted by thought’; that ‘it in no way commands the very fact of intentionality and of intellection’; that its ‘introduction [. . .] into the foundations of mental life [au fond de la vie spirituelle] ruins clarity and constitution as authentic modes of the mind’s existence’ (Lévinas 2010: 49, 74). So to challenge the veracity of history is not to redefine it but to locate the void its meaninglessness leaves behind, the meaningless void that remains when it leaves. It is also to discover a situation that would not restrict the intentionality of consciousness. For example, “humanity” – a classical liberal concept (as formulated by Wilhelm von Humboldt or Matthew Arnold) – might be one comprehensive object, a comprehensive categorical coordinator, that might not survive without its normative, traditional, and historical connotations. The human presence on the planet is tenuous: to diminish it further by criminal attacks on it, by crimes against humanity is absurd. No wonder that the very concept of humanity suggests something deceptively reassuring. Surely it will survive as long as human beings survive; but it also numbs the traumatic apprehensiveness induced by the psychopathology of historicized life. But the destruction of the historical heritage [§3.2] by history-making action signifies more than just a historical crisis for humanity, or for the liberal world-view in particular. From it emerges the meaningless void left by historicization itself, when history destroys what it itself hitherto meant. But this void reveals what historicization obscures: the assault on something existentially indispensable, the ever present, innate aesthetic sense – ever vital specifically as a means of fulfilling a species’ biological need to make the world somewhere “special” for its existence, for its survival. Hence it signifies an absolute loss, a loss more serious than that of liberal conceptualization or of historical data: the loss of impressive, numinous objects constituted by

18 Introduction imagination, feeling, style, and technique (on which survival depends), beautiful things not made any more, impressively beautiful particularly because no-one can make them any more.

Note 1 Numbers in square brackets after italicized terms refer to the scheme of categorical coordinators set out in the first section of Chapter 4.

1

The situation of historical knowledge The historicized world

The concept, the historicized world, has three dimensions. It defines: (i) a world that has already been shaped [§1.4] by history; (ii) a world that has detached itself from or superseded the way it used to be, because it had to, or because its historical self-comprehension hitherto had proved disastrous or become obsolete; and (iii) a world that compulsively keeps historicizing itself, that cannot help creating its own obsolescence, that sees as its overriding purpose to generate more past for itself, more of the world as it used to be, hence more obsolescence in order to affirm its own progression.1 In this definition historicized occurs expressly. Here it refers to any knowledge, behaviour, or objects – including historical issues – that by habit account for themselves in historical terms, by historicizing themselves, by perceiving themselves in relation to how things used to be; historical refers to issues – knowledge, behaviour, objects – specific to history and to historical scholarship. These dimensions designate neither characteristics of certain types of society nor a (historical) sequence of temporal schemes or epochs. Rather, they broadly categorize how history works, how it produces the way things are the way they are. They interconnect with each other concurrently. Consequently, therefore, by “world” is meant the horizon of the current situation of human consciousness. This refers primarily to individual consciousness and only secondarily to social or cultural consciousness as the collective consciousness of social or cultural groups, the consciousness these groups (or members of these groups collectively) possess of themselves. Social or cultural consciousness in any case manifests itself only as it refracts into the individual consciousness: it already colours the individual’s consciousness because this never develops in isolation. Historical consciousness is just one ingredient of social and cultural consciousness, along with friendship and hostility, hope or despair, intention or regret, likes and dislikes, equality or inequality, wealth or poverty. Nevertheless it is an atomized, all-pervasive ingredient, especially in an already historicized world. Hence, the vital need to start with the situation here and now of individual consciousness, with how it feels with things being the way they are having been the way they were. That prevents the automatic historicizing propensity of an already historicized world from pre-emptively occluding it.

20 The situation of historical knowledge

A world already shaped by history In the historicized world, as a world already shaped [§1.4] by history, history always comes first. It always happens first. It takes precedence. It takes precedence because the already historicized world is sustained by historicized consciousness, by historicized thinking, by a mentality that by default historicizes the world. Instinctively, automatically, thought concedes cognitive priority to history. After all, the world as it used to be did precede the way things are now. For this mentality, therefore, the natural attitude is to let history, historical knowledge, set precedents. To these precedents it itself defers. Consequently, in a historicized world, knowledge predicated on history, historical knowledge and historicized knowledge alike, is automatically deferential. It acknowledges already existing institutions of power, authority, or value (e.g. the state, religion, government, the family, the nation), already invested with historical significance. But it also produces historical significance for any agency it studies and represents, be that agency the victimized or the victimizer, the loser or the winner, in the matter. In being deferential, historicized knowledge positions itself as ancillary to what it studies, vindicating, criticizing, or revising it in relation not just to the accumulating historiography, but also to the social circumstances of its own self-production. But precisely the detachment offered by its ancillary self-positioning enables it to manage comprehensively the significance and value of historical knowledge for a historicized world. Historicized knowledge can be a deferential ancillary since in some way or other it is knowledge already known. By the precedents it sets it acknowledges knowledge already known. Common to a wide range of occupations sustaining social existence, the practices and behaviour that produce it are non-special. Additionally the knowledge of history that makes its non-special disciplinary practices distinctive is also socially pervasive. The world is historicized because there is hardly anyone who does not have some sense of history, a modicum of historical knowledge. This knowledge forms a major component of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, the knowledge required for society to work, for maintaining its self-reproduction (Marx undated: 594). It is socially pervasive because it disseminates itself epidemiologically, by a form of contagion. Its presence in the social imagination provides a network already set up for its transmission, just as a virus multiplies itself as it spreads through a population. (While historians might debate the real historical significance of Richard III, tourists throng the hastily erected tourist information centre to view a synthetic mock-up of the just discovered pathetic, twisted skeleton (Summer 2012) and Leicester’s citizens sign up to a petition to keep these “royal” remains in the city, and some just buy the T-shirt to show that they have been there and seen it.) That this knowledge will be imperfect and erroneous compared to that of an academic historian adept at his or her own speciality is irrelevant. Rather the imperfections in the general historical intellect only enhance the social resonance of

The situation of historical knowledge 21 historical knowledge. They increase public receptivity for more, and more reliable historical information, for historical knowledge being socially amplified. They habituate it in cognitive terms both to disciplinary correction and to the social authority that administers it. They reinforce in the general public its susceptibility to historicizing practices. In the historicized world, therefore, it is virtually impossible to dispute either the precedence or the precedents of history. That explains why historicization seems both naturally inevitable and apparently reassuring. For this reason the adepts of historicism, such as, inter alia, Schiller, von Humboldt, Droysen, Mannheim, Ortega y Gasset, or Aron, automatically define history as the authentic human habitat, as the revelation of a specifically human nature to which everyone, in some way or other, in the course of time contributes (cf. Schiller 1958; Humboldt 1980a–c; Droysen 1977; Mannheim 2000; Ortega y Gasset 1962; Aron 1986). But this conjecture is highly dubious since it places itself beyond dispute, beyond falsifiability. However, in thus absolutely guaranteeing its comprehensive necessity, history can then be freighted with moral and cultural values. Its conventional cargo is liberalhumanism: history as the repository of truth about humanity, as the guardian of a democratic and civilized society conducive to human well-being, as a guide to ethically responsible behaviour, as gradually accumulating evidence of an innate tendency towards moral and intellectual self-improvement in the human species. Underpinning these values (as Droysen asserts) is history’s specific cosmological function: to create for the Earth after its geological, biological, and zoological development, a rational, cultivated, but above all civilized ‘finish’ (Droysen 1977: 15). Moreover, these values themselves, precisely because they are humanistic values, set a precedent, thereby putting themselves too beyond dispute. In their claim to be universal, they leave nothing else besides. In this respect, they suddenly transform themselves, as in an optical illusion where the image in one perspective produces a quite different image in another. No longer ideal aspirations, they become normative and disciplinary. Since, being comprehensive, they are so much the case that there is no case they would exclude, they block any alternative value, particularly any dissent. Further they authorize the historian to condemn this dissent as inhuman, as ethically abhorrent, irrespective of its cognitive legitimacy. In thus making the validity of its practices indisputable, its cognitive authority unimpeachable, history would disqualify even the least epistemological objection they might otherwise raise. But these values are vindicated and their precedence is justifiable not only in ideational terms as knowledge but also in pragmatic terms as behaviour focussed on history. History takes precedence in a historicized world not just because it happens first, not just because it sets precedents so that things were the way they were and, consequently, are the way they are, but because it is still happening, because it is still configuring human action, still conditioning human behaviour. Reading historians’ affirmations of historical knowledge leaves the impression that the world hitherto, though created by

22 The situation of historical knowledge historical action (e.g. social reform, technological achievements, international agreements such as the United Nations or the European Community), still lacks the self-understanding only more historical scholarship can provide. Because historical knowledge is always deferred knowledge, the world as it used to be, as it used to understand itself, is automatically out of sync with the way historians might construe it now (with the benefit of hindsight). But this affirmation of current historical work plays down the fact that historical action then, the way people used to behave, the policies that historical agencies used to pursue, was itself configured by historical knowledge as it used to be at that time. Its now more comprehensive, albeit deferred, perspective apparently entitles it to discount the historical knowledge that used to be accepted, to relegate it after due scrutiny to the relevant historiography, the vast, overstocked museum of historical misconceptions. But this later, more comprehensive perspective fails to follow its implications to their logical conclusion. In studying historical action the way it was, it is also accounting for the outcome of intentions as they were, intentions informed by historical knowledge as it used to be. This later, more comprehensive, more historicized perspective fails to see that it is, therefore, entirely self-referential – that in producing behaviour focussed on history, it only ever studies how it got to be the way it is through the precedent it set for it being the way it was. In an already historicized world, a world already shaped [§1.4] by historical knowledge informing historical action, historical knowledge only ever focusses on itself: there is nothing else. This self-referential character of history-focussed cognitive behaviour is reinforced by social behaviour generally that is history-focussed. History is still happening, is still configuring human action, conditioning human behaviour, ensuring its self-referential interest. The already historicized world is most evident in high-profile political and economic affairs: national and international leaders are enmeshed in situations that have already arisen as a result of the way things used to be, of the way the world used historically to understand itself (an obvious example is global warming; or the Israeli– Palestine conflict: examples are legion). However, history-focussed social behaviour is most effectively reinforced in a non-special way in ordinary life. Many of its indispensable features (e.g. coal and oil as sources of energy; Christianity, Judaism, Islam as sources of ordinary moral values; historical epochs [§1.1] such as Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Romantic period [§1.1] as testimony to the capacities of the human imagination) derive from what historical knowledge construes as the deep structure of historical time. They themselves motivate history-focussed behaviour, be it the geologist prospecting for new energy sources, the pilgrim visiting religious sites and monuments or the tourist doing the round of museums, art galleries, stately homes and palaces. Certainly (as the reports they have commissioned show) in the tourist, leisure, and heritage industries history-focussed social behaviour could be classified as a form of free-time or part-time work since the public interest in history delivers – through transport costs, entrance fees,

The situation of historical knowledge 23 the selling of merchandising and refreshments – significant economic benefits to the regions and industries concerned. As TV programmes on all kinds of history and cinematic interpretations of historical events show, “the Past” offers a limitless and relatively cheap resource with huge, culturally endorsed commercial value. History-focussed social behaviour figures not just in a whole range of non-special occupations that rely on practices they have in common with historical scholarship, but also in this consumer society as an irresistible, paradigmatic form of consumption. The historicized world, the world already shaped [§1.4] by history is, after all, an apprehensive place. It is torn by a structural self-contradiction. On the one hand, its precedents have already been established: the way things were is now how they have got to be. On the other, it is orientated by the better comprehension afforded by deferred knowledge, by new insights – albeit those that have been postponed, unexpected recognitions even if they have come too late, after the event. The cognitive habits reinforced by historyfocussed behaviour are both theoretical (they defer to how things used to look) and practical (the non-special work sustaining social existence functions in accordance with common historical criteria). Though they act as the foundation of always more comprehensive historical comprehension of how things used to be, these habits suffer from a grievous deficiency. They can never know how the way things are now will really look as they themselves become the way they used to be. At best there can only be intimations: how things really look afterwards is not how they then really used to be. The atomic bomb shelter in Berlin becomes a tourist attraction, a historical site – but only once the Cold War has ended and the threat of nuclear conflict has passed. Its historical aspect – the historical meanings it is now free to acquire – splits away from its erstwhile immediate function as a desperate refuge of last resort. Hence, in a historicized world the action configured by historyfocussed behaviour as it used to be, and the real reality, the real history, that this self-same behaviour produces now, after the event, are by definition disjointed. Whenever it is immediately required action cannot help being deficient and misguided, because (whether or not its agents realize it) the insights that might have enhanced it, be it for good or for evil, emerge only with its allegedly “really” real, comprehensive reconstruction, afterwards. Certainly even if its cognitive basis seems adequate the most calculated action can have incalculable consequences. Moreover, the compulsive necessity to act, particularly to confront its own apprehension, is meant to make human existence meaningful. But the comprehension produced afterwards by history-focussed behaviour, particularly as it is distinctively demonstrated by historians, shows that this action in itself as it used to be never produces sufficient meaning, sufficient reason, for its motivation. It presupposes that it needs history as an indispensable supplement to make its comprehension more comprehensive, to amplify it. Far from being the natural home of humanity, history may prove to be a symptom of the human species’ uncertainty in the apprehensive circumstances in which it finds itself – a sense of

24 The situation of historical knowledge dis-ease, Unbehagen (to use Freud’s term) in the historicized world it has produced for itself; and a sense of malaise – the very ‘sickness of the times’ [mal du siècle] – indicating the need to escape [évasion] from the world defined by historical fait accompli and the self-identity it enforces (to use Lévinas’ terms) (Freud 1977: 83ff.; Lévinas 1982: 94ff., 98ff., 104ff.). The historicized world, the world already shaped by history, would be its inevitably compromised achievement – nothing else.

A world that has historically superseded itself The historicized world has an inherent propensity to supersede itself historically. In a world where there is history and nothing else, history manifests itself not just in the way things used to be, but as the latest thing, as what irrevocably has just gone before. With an already historicized world as a world superseding itself comes, therefore, not just a historical but a historicized consciousness. In a historicized world history does come first. Its historical consciousness reveals that things are not the way they used to be. It recognizes that things are the way they are now, not least it itself, because that is how they got to be. It is conscious of itself as inheriting all the hitherto accumulated knowledge and values of the world left by it as it once was. Concurrently, in a historicized world history sets precedents: it has always gone before, but now it occurs as the latest thing as well. In this case, supported by the cognitive advantage of coming afterwards, historicized consciousness realizes that how things are now did not have to be the way they got to be, that things ought never to have been arranged the way they currently are. It sees itself in a situation that supersedes the way things used to be, because it finds itself left apprehensive, at a loss – its freedom already trammelled: its prospects already pre-empted by what has recently, lately gone before, compromised by what unexpectedly, unpredictably just happened. So whereas historical consciousness appreciates the world as it used to be for its bequest of symbolic capital, historicized consciousness regards the world’s arrangement as something unstable, possibly toxic, certainly menacing. Historicized consciousness is, therefore, a historical hyper-consciousness that develops through history’s self-historicization, as history – ways of arranging the world as well as ways of accounting for the world as it is arranged – supersedes itself. Realizing that the world did not need to be arranged the way it is, this historical hyper-consciousness induces apprehension, the characteristic neurosis of a world in which history has historicized itself. No-one expresses this better than Cioran: ‘To feel the weight of history, the burden of becoming and that despondency beneath which consciousness buckles when it considers the totality and the inanity of past or possible events.’ In this historicized situation neither “the Past” nor the future offers refuge. Nostalgia cannot ‘blithely disregard any lessons extracted from everything that was’; the future is a ‘virtual cemetery as is everything that is

The situation of historical knowledge 25 waiting to be’. Thus ‘the centuries have grown heavy and weigh down the instant’ [Les siècles se sont alourdis et pèsent sur l’instant]. It is a compromised, entropic condition: ‘our exhaustion interprets history’ (Cioran 2007b: 168). Predicated on a comprehensive structure of self-reference and nothing else, in a historicized world history cannot help superseding itself, preventing itself from achieving its own historical identity, becoming de-synchronized within itself. As the latest thing to have gone before, nothing else remains for it but to negate itself, to negate the way things used to be. Thus, even though like a fabulous department store stocked high with the most heterogeneous varieties of goods, the self-referential historicized world leaves consciousness itself nothing but incriminated and isolated. Both in the actual redundancy of structures of historical knowledge that used to sustain comprehension and in the compulsive, coercive historicizations that pre-empt any redemptive action, historicized consciousness confronts its own destitute circumstances. This dis-ease that pervades historicized consciousness arises from two main sources: (a) the unreliability of its own cognitive capacities; and (b) the subversion of historical comprehension by history’s persistent self-historicization. (a) The cognitive capacity of historicized consciousness is unreliable because it is historicized. By definition it finds itself in perplexing circumstances: the self-knowledge it manages with lacks foundation; the knowledge it finds unmanageable is coercive. On the one hand (as Dilthey recognized), historicized consciousness surveys in intellectual terms a vast waste-land covered with the failed, obsolete knowledge systems human history has worked its way through (Dilthey 1961: 82). On the other (as Nietzsche and Freud realized), human cognition and behaviour are already preconfigured by instinctive drives and automatic mental tropes (such as grammar), by self-governing biological-cultural machines. The vital question here, supremely important for historicized consciousness, is whether or not human knowledge, human self-knowledge, that in some way or other is already historicized, is currently conducive to human survival. It is a question of pragmatic urgency rather than hypothetical speculation. It is a critical question of human self-orientation. If the interests of human cognitive capabilities were not paramount, the world now vulnerable to fanaticism and superstition, to ignorant self-righteousness, would inevitably become chaotic, fatally unstable. As the paradigmatic form of human self-knowledge, history is deeply implicated in these historicized circumstances. It would see itself as a form of cognition that is natural and coercive, because it is ineluctable. After all, there can be no escape from it: the world was the way it used to be so that it is the way it currently is. Additionally, unlike other natural and coercive preconfigurations of cognitive behaviour, it is supposed to be managed by historians’ distinctive performance of their non-special disciplinary procedures. Historicized consciousness finds itself facing circumstances that ought,

26 The situation of historical knowledge therefore, never to have happened. It must contend with the fact that history, meant to apply an enlightened, civilizing gloss on the world, actually does jeopardize human existence, actually does produce fatal instabilities. But, conversely, it also realizes that historical cognition has no way of gauging how much reason is sufficient for enlightening the world, for promoting countervailing values. Historicized consciousness must, therefore, cope with a sense of catastrophic disappointment. History itself is a human existential liability: it too belongs in the vast waste-land of obsolete cognitive enterprises. Historicized consciousness must contend with the fact that, though the world was the way it used to be so that it is the way it is, it eludes management. Despite historians’ assiduous performance of their non-special disciplinary procedures, they can only be ever more resourceful in vindicating history’s own inertial impetus, ever more adept at extracting from it reasons sufficient to excuse it, to exonerate its cognitive deficiencies. Historicized consciousness realizes, therefore, that historical comprehension proves unreliable, because of its own self-historicization in two crucial respects. The first involves the traditional, received metaphysical principles – such as being, essence, mind, causality, substance, rational order – that since Aristotle define the sense of human existence and establish the basis for it to manifest itself as history at all. These principles forfeit their credibility precisely through their history, through their reiterated self-reformulation, their repetitive self-revision. It takes what Heidegger calls the ‘destruction’ [Destruktion] and the ‘dismantling’ [Abbau] of these ontological principles that have hitherto underpinned Western civilization to show how their historical mutations have left human beings disorientated, alienated from their own urgent ontological concerns. In ‘breaking up hardened tradition and dissolving the occlusions it produces’ [bedarf es der Auflockerung der verhärteten Tradition und der Ablösung der durch sie gezeitigten Verdeckungen], he aims radically to re-focus on these concerns and so reconfigure the ontological status of human existence in the world (Heidegger 1979: 19, 22–3; 1978: 410–11). To illustrate the extent of this anthropic self-reconception it is sufficient to contrast it with Kant’s position still within the Aristotelian paradigm. Where Kant asserts the priority of the needs of reason, particularly when it ventures beyond the parameters of the exact sciences, in order to defend human survival, Heidegger dismisses science as thoughtless, rationality as a form of perception and representation, instead to affirm thinking as a form of questioning that aims to discern what remains mysteriously, apprehensively unconsidered, the ontological precondition of ultimately eccentric human existence (cf. Kant 1977a: 270ff.; Heidegger 1967b: 3–17; Heidegger 1979: 109). The second theoretically historicizing occurrence is just as radical. It marks at last the undeniable eruption into human consciousness of a misgiving that has always haunted it: to what extent, or even whether or not, language, a capacity uniquely developed in the human species, has any hold on the world it refers to or represents. (No wonder then that Gertrude Stein wishes

The situation of historical knowledge 27 she knew a history really was a history!) This misgiving targets historical knowledge particularly since its representation of the way things used to be is entirely based on language, on systems of signs and sounds. The way in which historical knowledge is formulated must have a necessary connection with its referent as it was the way it was. The signs and sounds it arranges must identify things as they were as the way they really were, otherwise it negates itself. To persist as the reiterated re-encoding of its source information and its historiography, historical scholarship must see itself as conducive to its comprehensive goal in that it “contributes to a more complete picture” or “takes us closer to the truth” (as historians say for the sake of amplified comprehension). Still the cognitive reliability of language cannot be taken for granted. As Plato in Cratylus points out: ‘things have some fixed reality of their own, not in relation to us nor caused by us; they [. . .] exist in themselves in relation to their own reality imposed by nature’. The crucial questions are whether language has a conventional or a natural relationship to them, identifying and imitating them, and what, if it were ideally reliable, would guarantee its immutable reliability. Conversely, to reveal sophistry, to expose the tricks of rhetoric, to test the reliability of linguistic usage hitherto ‘scientific ability’ insists ‘that we must take [language] to pieces as [the ancients] put it together and see whether the words [. . .] are given systematically or not’ (Plato 2002: 16–17, 386D–E; 140–1, 425A–B). This advocacy of ‘taking language to pieces’ contains in nuce entire philosophies of language: positivism, structuralism, and deconstructionism would be its latest avatars. It challenges directly the single metaphysical principle that can guarantee the veracity of history, the divine Logos (reason) that created the world and by definition also the world’s history, that ultimately permits Hegel to assert that ‘what is, is rational’, that what is, is essentially predisposed towards rational articulation. However, if this foundational principle of reason, Logos, is invalidated, language itself forfeits its literal reliability. Or rather, if language can be shown not only to differentiate itself from its referent (with signs and grammars having no natural identity with things) but also to differentiate itself from itself (with the same thing constructed differently by different grammars, different sets of signs), Logos, the always already synchronized identity of words, thoughts, and nature, collapses and so too does any guarantee of definitive sense or meaning it was hitherto supposed to produce. The logocentric self-orientation of the world becomes illusory; so too does history. History’s self-orientation is nothing if not logocentric. Its reconstruction of things the way they were is not poetic, not metaphorically open. Rather it is literal and metonymic: it claims to represent in its account the way things really used to be. More than that, it officiates as their self-appointed representative to the current arrangement of things as they are. In the historicized world, therefore, historicized consciousness confronts the fact that the foundational structures of human historical self-comprehension are terminally compromised, from their outset fatally flawed. If it is alert to its own historicized condition, historicized

28 The situation of historical knowledge consciousness will consign the current technical apparatus for its self-comprehension to the scrapyard. It realizes that the way it currently understands itself has become obsolete, that, if it is operative at all, its self-comprehension henceforth operates in terms of how it used to be, not in terms of anything else. It realizes also that how things are now did not have to be the way they got to be, that they ought never to have become the way they now are. But that – nothing else – is the historical dilemma of historicized consciousness in its historicized world. (b) In a historicized world, history’s constant self-historicization, therefore, keeps subverting historical comprehension. It exacerbates both the unreliability of historical comprehension and the apprehensive predicament of historicized consciousness. It demonstrates that in a historicized world, historicized action becomes an existential liability because it irrevocably damages history itself: it ruins what historians themselves allege to be the “natural habitat” of humanity hitherto. To see this involves differentiating historical action from historicized action. Historical action refers to words and deeds as they once were, to them evincing motivations as they themselves once were, with this action being justified or criticized afterwards, through subsequent historical comprehension sustained by the distinctive professional application of non-special disciplinary procedures. However, historical comprehension becomes disorientated when it confronts historical events its basic assumptions, its identitary symmetries preclude – when it finds itself superseded, when history historicizes itself. Consequently, historicized action refers to history’s self-historicization, its self-supersession whenever historical events historicize the prevailing historical assumptions based on historical events hitherto. Already constrained by its own already “trammelled freedom”, historicized action produces the occlusive, historical pre-emption not just of how things are now (hence, retrospectively, of the way they used to be) but particularly of the way they might well be in the future. Driven by its own, internal logic, it is a method for producing and distributing disaster. It thus keeps historicizing an already historicized world, as the following examples demonstrate. In his Regards sur le monde actuel [Observations on the modern world] (1960c/1945) Paul Valéry lists three incidents that confirm the historicization of European history, the self-supersession of a specifically Eurocentric conception of history symptomatic of a ‘finished’, ‘finite’ globalized world: the Sino–Japanese War (1894–1895), the Spanish–American War (1898), and Bismarck’s foreign policy with regard to Africa at the Conference of Berlin (1884–1885). A lack of foresight characterizes them. Or rather: these incidents evince a lack of foresight because they rely on the occlusive, preemptive symmetry between past and future that conventionally structures historical comprehension. In each case, deference to “the Past”, recognizing its precedence, affirming the identitary connection between past and future that is supposed to make foresight possible (because it presumes historical– causal coherence), prove dysfunctional. To the news of the victories of Japan

The situation of historical knowledge 29 and the United States Valéry reacts with a physical, visceral shock. Europe is meant to be not just a ‘geographical expression’, but a culture, a set of ethical values, the exemplification of scientific and technological progress. The shock was realizing that European culture works for non-European states in their own geo-political interests – as when for the first time ‘an Asiatic nation reformed and equipped in a European manner’ [une nation asiatique réformée et équipée à l’européenne] such as Japan defeats the Chinese Empire; or as when for the first time ‘a nation deduced and as though developed from Europe’ [une nation déduite et comme développée de l’Europe] such as the United States overpowers a European nation, Spain. Here the occlusive symmetries of the historicizing mentality pre-empted the foresight that, if the technological capacity of Europe is exported to the rest of the world, it can be turned against it, against its industrial-technological manufacturing capacity but also against its ethical and cultural values. This self-occluding effect of the prevailing conventions of historical comprehension is also confirmed by the third incident, the case of Bismarck. He too succumbed to what Valéry calls the ‘illusion of the décor of historical politics’ [l’illusion du décor de la politique historique]. Conditioned to defining Realpolitik in terms of strategies based on European history, Bismarck encouraged Germany’s European rivals (principally France, Belgium, Britain, and Portugal) in their colonial ventures, to parcel Africa out amongst themselves, and so to distract their attention from German dominance in Europe. He did not foresee that he was generating future conflict for Germany should it itself ever entertain colonial ambitions. He was (says Valéry) clearly ‘anticipating the near future, but not a near future such as had never presented itself before’ [Il a bien pensé au lendemain, mais point à un lendemain qui ne se fût jamais présenté] (Valéry 1960c: 913–8). The world in which history historicizes itself, the world history has finished with because it has superseded itself, still remains mired in the fatalism of its occlusive symmetries. Further, with an orgy of atrocities, the climax of ‘the century of megadeath’, totalitarianism too compromises the intelligibility of history. It induced theologically speaking ‘a second Fall’ and with it ‘the abandonment of the rational order of man’ – the abandonment of the very principle of historical sense so that historical meaning finds itself destitute and existence apprehensively exposed (Brzezinski 1995: 7ff.; Steiner 1971: 42–3). In these terms (as Günther Anders remarks), ‘the totalitarian era of the Hitler and Stalin regimes have not been interludes, but rather the realization of what the epoch actually intended’ [die Verwirklichung dessen, auf was die Epoche eigentlich hinaus will] (Anders 1986a: 197–8). The aftermath of totalitarianism reconfirms the human capacity for self-incrimination, for self-intimidation: ample justification for anxiety. In particular, history’s self-historicization – its totalitarian self-ruination – focusses on 1945 as ‘a date of absolute significance’ and on the Holocaust as an ‘absolute event of history’, an all-consuming fire in which history has been consumed and the movement of sense has collapsed’ [événement absolu de l’histoire [. . .] cette toute-brûlure où toute

30 The situation of historical knowledge l’histoire s’est embrasée, où le mouvement de sens s’est abîmé]. With the liberation of Auschwitz ‘a half-suppressed segment of human history enters consciousness as never before’: the barbarity it symbolizes, ‘falling outside of or terminating time’, prompts not just a keen apprehension of contemporary mass atrocities, but also a re-evaluation of the cognitive validity of history (Hartman 1997: 99–100; Blanchot 1980: 80). Further still, therefore, the same date defines the ‘atomic age’ (as Günther Anders describes it), an age that ‘since 1945 means that the epoch of successive epochs is over’ [Die Epoche der Epochenwechsel ist seit 1945 vorüber]’ (Anders 1986b: 20). As an age that is ‘final’ [endgültig], it will decide ‘whether or not there will be any further history’ (1986a: 55, 61). It leaves vacant the retrospective view of itself as it really used to be. It knows it will be the first epoch not to have any historical significance for the way things will inevitably be. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th August 1945 is, therefore, unprecedented, invested with historicizing potential, but also invalidating its technocratic motivation. The invention, manufacture, and proliferation of nuclear weapons effectively serve notice on human existence. Not only does it deliver death on a massscale, but it destroys the environment necessary for mass survival. It signifies a fatal contradiction in humanity’s historical development: the convergence of technological progress and human self-destruction, of the development of industrial society and the endangering of human existence (Marcuse 1986: ix). It confirms that the division of labour in capitalist modes of production backed by the state makes it possible for human beings to produce a technological capacity that defies their imagination. This capacity henceforth projects a comprehensive technocratic authority that, having dominated nature, supersedes its own human creator. It produces a situation that projects human history as suicidal, as not conducive to human survival – since it had only ever created a depressing culture of the death drive; since human ingenuity, dedication, and knowledge could through their own internal logic do nothing more than culminate in their own self-negation; since they could only loosen the human species’ already tenuous hold on the planet. Further, given that the US, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea in the meantime have all acquired nuclear weapons, the threat of nuclear apocalypse persists still. Given the current global stockpiles of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the genocidal capacity inherent in current technological culture exceeds by far that which drove the Holocaust.2 Thus the atomic situation pre-empts and occludes the future. ‘Turning the planet into a concentration camp impossible to escape from’, it forecloses on its liberating possibilities; it transforms it into an unending period of remission (Anders 1986a: 93–5, 203ff.). Auschwitz and Stalingrad, Hiroshima and Nagasaki (of course ‘belonging to the same historical context as genocide’) proved to be gateways through which the world had to ‘take its leave of all previous history [Abschied von der bisherigen Geschichte]’ (to use Alfred Weber’s phrase) (Weber 1946; Adorno 2003: 675). They are

The situation of historical knowledge 31 a few of the conspicuous symptoms of the ‘pandemic of social evil which is more than merely an aggregate of the dysfunctioning of subordinate societies’ – a ‘planet-wide phenomenon’, ‘a globalizing of social morbidity’ – that periodically since has kept erupting across the planet like a virulent disease, a ‘necrophilic attitude [. . .] an attitude in which death, destruction, decay have a perverse attraction’. They are symptomatic of a world that really has finished with history, that finally has to confront the senselessness [Sinnlosigkeit] of a world to which historical scholarship once upon a time dispensed intrinsic meaning [Sinngebung] (Allott 2002: 138–9; Fromm 2010: 96; Lessing 1983). These examples show the assumptions of historical comprehension being challenged and history’s capacity for making sense collapsing when confronted by human self-extermination. However, the atomic situation also already implies the ruin of the very foundations of historical interest: human experience itself. It already suspends the metaphysical structures that guarantee the sense and purpose of human life. It results in the most radical disarticulation in time-consciousness, a leap from the realm of historical contingency into ‘the absolute’, a quasi-theological Judgement Day. With them divine retribution has been naturalized. Apocalypse, the end of time, has been re-functioned for political contingencies. Either way the theistic armature of human existence is ruined. Evidently it never dispensed sufficient reason for sustaining it. It could never really ground this reason in what it is just to be, in what it is to be human. Whether or not nuclear conflict will actually destroy human civilization (as could many times over the currently globally available 26,000 nuclear warheads), human beings have in the end – have already – made themselves an endangered species. With humanity confronting ‘real non-being’ [wirkliches Nichtsein] for the first time ever, Anders sees himself as belonging to ‘the first generation of the last human beings’ [der ersten Generation der letzten Menschen] (Anders 1986a: 174).3 But the fact that these questions can be asked at all exposes a further temporal disarticulation in the atomic predicament, a bleak perspective beyond nihilism: what Anders calls the degradation of human beings and with it the ‘degradation of history’. Certainly nuclear apocalypse would end history; but, with its nuclear historicization imminent, a species that had seen its development as being essentially historical would realize not just that its history had come to an end, that its future history would be lost, but also that the ‘history that has been’ (what Anders calls die gewesene Geschichte) would be annihilated too (Anders 1986a: 172, 174–5). No-one would remain to remember it, to recall its achievements – no-one to ponder what otherwise it might have been. The historicized world historicizes history itself: that it renders categorical coordinators – e.g. epoch [§1.1], age [§1.1], generation [§2.1] – inoperative is incidentally symptomatic. Thus the already historicized world, a world that has historically superseded itself, ‘does not demonstrate that the sense of history has begun to change, but rather that what happens is no longer history’ [Nicht die

32 The situation of historical knowledge Geschichte beginnt den Sinn zu ändern, sondern das Geschehen ist nicht Geschichte mehr] (Jünger 1983: 16). The concept of a historicized world thus recognizes that history as a comprehensive form of knowledge becomes redundant through being overwhelmed by what happens. Though experienced temporally – because consciousness can order experience only in terms of internal time-structures – as the final demise of the hegemony of the European world order or as the ‘end times’ occasioned by internal crises of capitalism, this situation symptomatic of a historicized world actually renders threadbare the veil of the illusion that is historical (temporally ordered) meaning (cf. Gray 1997; Žižek 2011). Worn thin and frayed, it exposes what was always constantly behind it: the irredeemable nothingness that haunts human existence. History is meant to accommodate “change over time”; but once change reaches a tempo and an intensity that exceed historical comprehension – comprehension that can never anyway be sufficiently comprehensive – it annihilates it. This is evident from George Steiner’s reflections on the Holocaust: ‘Needing Hell, we have learned how to build and run it on earth. [. . .] No skill holds greater menace. Because we have it and are using it on ourselves, we are now in a post-culture. In locating Hell above ground, we have passed out of the major order and symmetries of Western civilization’ (Steiner 1971: 48). As this quotation suggests, human existence is left apprehensive, if not traumatized, confronting alone its vulnerability the collapse of historical meaning, of historical sense discloses. The historicized world, therefore, defines an unprecedented ontological situation: hence the apprehension it generates. In exceeding and so invalidating historical norms, human potential actually precludes its historical self-comprehension: it becomes evident (as Spengler remarks) ‘that world history is itself the problem’ [die Weltgeschichte überhaupt als Problem zu sehen] (Spengler 1931: 1). Now, far from history inferring change from the pattern of events, the ‘event is change itself’ – and with it comes ‘the threat of an order of things out of all proportion to who we are’ [la menace d’un ordre de choses disproportionné à ce que nous sommes], and with that the subversion of the self-same identity principle meant to guarantee historical sense (Halévy 2001: 14–5). In this situation Weltanschauungen retain their persuasive power while being treacherous because they are perpetually asynchronous. As exemplified by the comprehensive, historicist concept of the age [§1.1], the culture’s capacity to produce them as a means of existential support now generates anxiety rather than reassurance. The resulting apprehension is undeniable.

The compulsive self-historicization of the world The historicized world, a world that has historicized itself, sees itself irrevocably disconnected from any of its historical precedents, as having taken leave of them. It designates ruptures in historical continuity, moments when the historical continuity of time and the dynamics of reality sharply diverge.

The situation of historical knowledge 33 It sees itself in an apprehensive, intractable situation: by way of compensation it desperately generates more history, more historical knowledge, even though, exposed as fallacious, historical sense in itself disintegrates. Fatally an ethos of aftermath sets in that transforms the circumstances of human existence. The historicized world is, therefore, a world (a) in which its self-historicization manifests itself subjectively as an apprehensive experience; (b) which is finished, finite; (c) where capitalism is a dynamic historicizing principle; (d) where technology – driving capitalism – further amplifies historical processes [§2.1]; and (e) defined by basic instabilities in its cognitive structure: the collapse of temporal contexts [§3.1] and the demographic expansion of historical agency [§1.3]. (a) Historicization could be defined as the quintessential experience of modernity, if Modernism as the culture of modernity did not already connote a historical period [§1.1], a bureaucratic-disciplinary historical category. Instead, Modernism can be re-functioned to signify the apprehension of a historicizing occurrence, the eidetic configuration of historicization as such. In this respect Péguy’s remark in 1913 that ‘the world [had] changed less since Jesus Christ than it [had] changed in the last thirty years’ [Le monde a moins changé depuis Jésus-Christ qu’il n’a changé depuis trente ans] is symptomatic of a tectonic historicizing shift (Péguy 1961b: 1104). The change he identifies is the obsolescence of traditional, popular French culture displaced by the formation of bourgeois society – sustained by technologically enhanced production and commerce generated by capitalism, affirming itself through the social and cultural ethos of liberalism. But the historicization a liberalcapitalist bourgeois society signifies is not just the “historical change” it itself constitutes, but also its inherent historicizing principle, its self-perpetuating dynamic of exponential change, modernization, and historicization. This specific aspect is evident in a similarly historicizing response by the industrialist and politician Walther Rathenau in 1912 to the ‘mechanization of the world’ [Mechanisierung der Welt]. A rift [Schnitt] through the middle of the preceding nineteenth century marks this transformation. It leaves ‘the old times, old-fashioned culture and the historical past on one side’ while on this side lie ‘our fathers, ourselves, new times [Neuzeit], the present’ (Rathenau 1918: 13). It induces the premonition of a totally organized, bureaucratically monitored planet encased in a globalized scientific, economic, and political armature, supported by a world-wide information technology as the means to meet the needs of a rapidly increasing world population. At the same time it triggers apprehension: as work becomes more intellectualized, abstract, life becomes more stressful, more anxious, more conducive to apprehensiveness; as an ever greater variety of commodities is produced, life becomes more artificial, values, opinions, information become ephemeral; even though thinking is applied to all aspects of social and economic life to an unprecedented extent, any spiritual enlightenment it might offer is pre-empted by its disintegration into infinite forms of specialized expertise; not least for the

34 The situation of historical knowledge nationalist Rathenau, this “Americanization” of modern life spells the ‘deGermanization’ [Entgermanisierung] of European culture, the demise of the Germany’s natural right to European political leadership. Further examples of irrevocable historicization would include: • • •

•

the current inception of global warming since this fundamentally compromises the dynamics of history based on the presumption of unrestricted economic growth as integral to human self-development; the advent of a global information technology constantly shifting the coordinates of time and space in human consciousness; successively, Stalinism, the collapse of Communism, and the end of the Cold War (1989), revelations that exposed the travesty of (what Lévinas calls) the ‘generosity’ Marxism represented (cited by Poirié 2006: 165). This confirms the historical-political obsolescence of a utopian aspiration that had proved corruptible. More than this it marked the ‘end of a certain kind of Europe, the definitive end of the hope of instituting charity in the form of a regime, the end of Socialist hope’. It represents, this demise of socialism, the ‘greatest spiritual crisis of modern Europe’ [la plus grande crise spirituelle de l’Europe moderne] (Poirié 2006: 165). But the ensuing ideological self-vindication of totalitarian capitalism permanently mutilates the principle of hope [das Prinzip Hoffnung] hardwired into human consciousness (Bloch 1979); the hegemony of a globalized technology that induces what Günther Anders calls ‘Promethean shame’, a sense of existential inadequacy induced by the performativity of its own creations and implying the ‘antiquatedness of mankind’ itself, the historicization of the very idea of humanity as the measure and focus of all things (Anders 1985: 23ff.).

(b) The historicized world is, therefore, finished with history. But then the world – now with its globalized arrangement – is itself finished. The goal of historicism to bestow on the world a final moral veneer (as Kant and Droysen suggested) has been realized in a global economy, a global communications network, and a system of international law. (That they are far from perfect is no objection. The global city – the cosmopolis – like any large city has quarters of luxury adjacent to districts of poverty, tranquil parks not far from violent suburbs.) With its developmental work over, the intentionality that used to drive history fragments into numberless actions with their unforeseeable ramifications producing chaotic collisions and ricochets in now endless time in a now confined space. This, the current historicized situation, is identified as claustrophobic by the ever perspicacious Gertrude Stein. She asserts that the eighteenth-century desire for individual liberty had exhausted itself by the mid-nineteenth century. It was then (she says) ‘they began inventing machinery and at the same time they found virgin lands that could be worked with machinery and so they began organization, [. . .] and the more they began organization the

The situation of historical knowledge 35 more everybody wanted to be organized and the more they were organized the more everybody liked the slavery of being in an organization’. But ‘now [she adds] organization is getting kind of used up’. What is using organization up is organization itself in a finite, finished world. The world’s global self-organization is the finish of the world: ‘The virgin lands are getting kind of used up, the whole surface of the world is known now and also the air, and everywhere you see organization killing itself by just ending in organization.’ As her reaction shows, this situation immediately triggers apprehension: total historicization induces global claustrophobia. With the planet mapped and parcelled out by the nation-states amongst themselves, its limitations emerge. Technological developments such as facilities for international travel, communication, and commerce also diminish it. Total historicization produces a finite world. It compresses time and space, the very parameters of immediate experience, given that due to organization ‘everybody will have been as quickly everywhere as anybody can be’ (Stein 1974: 111–2). Further, this same historicization draws a scornful response from Henry Miller. He describes the globalized commerce sustaining and sustained by liberal-bourgeois civilization as toxic and self-destructive. As he says, ‘the whole world has become one great big organism dying of ptomaine poison. It got poisoned just when everything was beautifully organized.’ The “finish” this civilization applies to the world is thus pathogenic, a fatal, congenital sickness, a ‘cancer and leprosy’ of the soul. It comes with a global transport system to service a global economic system: ‘The aeroplane [. . .] spits you down in Bagdad, Samarkand, Beluchistan, Fez, Timbuctoo, [. . .]. All these once marvellous places whose very names cast a spell over you are now floating islets in the stormy sea of civilization. They mean homely commodities like rubber, tin, pepper, coffee, carborundum and so forth.’ It requires a global organization that, being global, being ‘finished’, being ‘finite’ [fini], being restricting, is inevitably demoralizing: ‘The natives are derelicts exploited by the octopus whose tentacles stretch from London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, New York, Chicago to the icy tips of Iceland and the wild reaches of Patagonia. The evidences of this so-called civilization are strewn and dumped higgledy-piggledy wherever the long, slimy tentacles reach out.’ But this global system as the finished product of liberal-bourgeois civilization finishes by compromising itself, by divulging its actual redundancy: ‘Nobody is being civilized, nothing is being altered in any real sense’ (Miller 1982: 129–30, 146). But Valéry’s observations in Regards sur le monde actuel expose most clearly the implications of a historicized world. They produce two basic concepts: ‘le monde fini’ – the historically finite or “finished” world; and (associated with it) ‘un monde transformé par l’esprit’: the already historicized world, the world history has finished with, is a product of human intellection. The inception of the ‘age of the finished world’ [‘le temps du monde fini commence’] is ‘in his eyes the dominant fact of our century’ [à mes yeux, le fait dominant du siècle] (Valéry 1960c: 923; 1957b: 1131). It is marked by an

36 The situation of historical knowledge unprecedented coincidence: the concurrent unreliability of historical knowledge (i.e. the pre-emptive occlusion of foresight by history’s chronological symmetry, mentioned earlier), the globalization of political and economic systems, and the decadence of European civilization. The world is “finite”, “finished”, due to a ‘fact of the first magnitude’ that ‘in its magnitude, its selfevidence, its novelty, or rather its essential singularity’ no-one had actually noticed. No-one had realized that all the inhabitable parts of the earth had been surveyed, improved, and parcelled out between the nations. No-one had realized that the era of unrestricted expansion is over, that no longer is there any unclaimed territory beyond the rule of law. Hence, ‘no longer is there any tribe, however remote, whose activities are not held on file and, through the maleficence of writing, do not depend on diverse humanists far away in their offices’ [plus une tribu dont les affaires n’engendrent quelque dossier et ne dépendent, par les maléfices de l’écriture, de divers humanistes lointains dans leurs bureaux] – a scathing observation that stresses the collusion between liberal-humanist culture, technologies of bureaucratic regulation, and capitalist-imperialist exploitation (Valéry 1960c: 923). This finite world of globalized political and commercial systems poses a problem for history as a form of knowledge. Certainly Valéry is writing from the perspective of European history as the history of European global expansion. But he recognizes that the whole history of Europe (as mentioned above, but particularly after 1918) has receded into history and that European culture has become a thing of “the Past” like the lost civilizations of Elam, Nineveh or Babylon (Valéry 1957b: 988). History – specifically European history and all the cultural values it sustained – has historicized itself. Further, Valéry too is aware that this ‘finite’, ‘finished’ world – sustained by global communications systems, by a global economic organization, by global bureaucratic organization – is an achievement of the mind. It is a rational rearrangement of the world, a testimony to the capacities of the human intellect. In this conception of historical progress he seems to be following historicism – as defined (e.g.) by Hegel – only to reveal that their rational-teleological agenda produces not absolute knowledge, but absurd fatality (Valéry 1960c: 923, 1059). The concept of the ‘finished world’ dispels the illusion of sufficiently rationalized comprehension, the administrative technology projected by historical scholarship. The concept of the ‘world transformed by the mind’ challenges the transcendental posture of comprehensive rationalizing practices that insist on their cognitive value yet claim to transcend the fatal implications of their instrumentalization. History (the professionally disciplined social function of the historian) certainly claims to diagnose flaws in cultural performance, to say what has been wrong with the world, by means of a historicizing perspective. But its diagnosis also discounts both historical scholarship as an inherently flawed cognitive performance, and historicization, with its deference to past precedents, pre-empting foresight with its occlusive symmetries, as itself a liability for intellectual self-orientation.

The situation of historical knowledge 37 The world that is ‘finished’, fini, that has a historical ‘finish’ to it, is by definition totally historicized. On the one hand, it contains a vast ballast of accumulated historical scholarship; on the other, it makes history – what happened to make things the way they were – obsolete, a thing of “the Past”. Still, as a habit reinforced over millennia, since the beginning of clerical, bureaucratic, and commercial institutions, the mind – with its own inertial movement – still relies for its own self-comprehension on continuities and their coordinated categories. The historicized mind, hyper-conscious of its history, deludes itself into seeing in its own self-historicization, in its disconnection from its precedents, history only re-affirming itself, becoming even more like itself, still offering itself as some form of self-pacification, as something familiar, the same old thing. In this self-delusion it recognizes Jünger’s conclusion but only in the “negative”: that what happens must be history – there can, after all, be nothing else – so its sense must have changed. And evidence for its change it sees in the multiplication of historical sub-disciplines and the concomitant amplification of historical scholarship. Moreover, the social need for history, society’s narcotic dependency on “the Past”, is intentionally met by the main instrumental indices of a “‘finished world” – capitalism, technology, and demography (this latter the unprecedented increase of the global population). They define the historicized situation in which history works. (c) Capitalism – understood by Marcuse as ‘totalitarian capitalism’ and by Guattari as ‘integrated global capitalism’ – particularly encodes its constant redefinitions of behaviour and reality, its unprecedented social scope and penetration as historical phenomena, as replacements of and updates for the same old thing (Marcuse 1986: 3, 18, 33, 61; Guattari 2009: 131). Thus understood, it ensures that the world historicizes itself compulsively. It asserts a pre-emptive claim on the world as it might yet be in order to reconfigure it as a projection of the way it already is. Its intention to produce a new structure of historical comprehension historicizes history, consigns it as it used to be to the historiographical waste-land. It replaces it with its own self-determined world-historical development, its own global hegemony. Dependent on technological capacity and producing surplus values, capitalism drives the human intention not just to make history, but – by constantly rearranging the world according to its interests – to make the history it itself wants. Ultimately capitalism’s specific role is to produce more history, ever more history, and nothing else. Capitalism is thus the historicizing principle of an already historicized world. Crucially it constantly affirms the necessary, indispensable relationship between time and value, as in the following paradigmatic case. As The Guardian reported (in November 2013), an ivory carving of the Madonna was dismissed as Victorian or a fake until the carvings expert at Sotheby’s discovered it was a thirteenth-century work of art. Thus the erstwhile fake object, now precious art-work, connects history and capital. The expert tracing its history spent a year examining the surviving records of the order of

38 The situation of historical knowledge the Bridgettine nuns. Historical time is an index of value: this order was dissolved 600 years ago and this art-work it produced is now worth £1.2m; the carving had been bought in London in 1949 for £80. The market connects material-commercial and spiritual-ethical significance, as the expert confirms: the art-work is both ‘one of the best Gothic ivories [carbon-dated to 1230] to come to the market in decades’ and ‘has an extraordinarily human quality [what else?], and a very powerful presence’; historicizing technology (the carbon dating) and historical recognition generate commercial value (Kennedy 2013: 9). Generally, then, historical time is savings-bank time, the time-structure in which mortgages are paid off, life-insurance policies mature, and investments grow in value. Time thus generates interest: the return on capital investment as much as the maturing historical value of symbolic capital. Further, however time and value are related, capitalism and history identify with each other. If capitalism amplifies its activity, it also amplifies history through constantly increasing the tempo of historicization. Simultaneously, it de-synchronizes the historicized world since its constituent elements have their own accelerating dynamic, their own internal logic of innovation, their own propensity for self-ephemeralization. Hence, “revolutionary”, the erstwhile definition of relatively rare, historically transformative events, has become routine. Indifferently it describes anything from the latest electronic gadget to a breakthrough in medical knowledge or new data from the exploration of Mars. Hence also “innovation” that designates the production of coercive new ideas, new strategies, new hitherto undiscovered needs, that can be transformed into new commodities and new sources of profitability. Hence too “modernization”, a euphemism for negating traditional practices for the sake of structural reorganization supposed to make productivity more efficient, more competitive, more performative, more profitable. The result is the production of ever latest things – the latest styles, the latest fashions, the latest films, the latest software – that makes their precedents look dated. The more “innovative” the latest thing, the more obsolete its precedent, the more history is generated. If capitalism thus ephemeralizes its products, it ephemeralizes history too. So, in the remorselessly self-modernizing capitalist world, history, the preoccupation of the way things used to be, seems all the more to dominate the way things are. And it does so because it is atomized, because it is diversified into all kinds of media, non-special work-practices, and leisure activities, because in these forms it dissolves all the more effectively into the social atmosphere – as confirmed by the frequency of ‘history’, ‘historical’, or ‘historic’ in public discourse. The historical precedent [§3.1] here would be Nazi propaganda: as Viktor Klemperer in his devastating analysis of it remarks, the word ‘historic’ constantly figured in Hitler’s speeches, in sports commentaries, in public ceremonies so that everything the ordinary person touched or heard would come with historic significance (Klemperer 2009: 64). The same jargon expresses something just as ruthless: the self-historicization of the world driven by capitalism. Through ‘words

The situation of historical knowledge 39 of command’ historicization permeates the media, advertisements, political and economic statements, the entire cultural sphere. “Historic” keeps recurring, as in such formulae as “historic underinvestment”, “historic crimes” (i.e. crimes committed decades ago), “historic achievements”. News programmes tell us (in autumn 2013) that ‘savings are being depleted at a historic rate’, or ‘cyber-Monday’ (2nd December 2013) was ‘the busiest online shopping-day in history’; a TV advertisement illustrating Longines’ long association with tennis tournaments claims that its watches do not just tell time: ‘they tell history’ (summer 2014). Comprehensive history and global capitalism are thus mutually selfaffirming. In the historicized world history as the common currency of social cognition coincides with capital as the common currency of social behaviour. Equivalent to each other, history and capital establish the equivalence of all things, of the way they were and the way they are. Hence even the least special thing has some historicized value: in an already historicized world, history need not be anything special, need never be in short supply. Capitalism in its self-transformations keeps historicizing everything – everything except its self-determining history-focussed behaviour, its capacity for superseding history, making ever more of it for itself. The time–value nexus integral to capitalism is, however, problematic. The historical world, the world constructed by historical scholarship, structures its comprehension on the historical location of the historian’s own biologically defined existence in the stream [§2.1] of history. The convergence of his or her life with its historical epoch [§1.1] – through the figure of metonymy – not only models the relation of historical actors at other times [§1.1] to their times [§1.1], but also takes this convergence as typical of the whole historical process [§2.1] itself. But to a finite world that has superseded its history, that has historicized itself, and through the production of latest things keeps on historicizing itself, the historicist pace of world development is too measured. Moreover, to the thus self-historicizing world the long-term temporal phases conjectured by historical comprehension only bring out the biological restrictions on the individual’s life-span and cognitive scope at any given historical moment. The historicized world, a world in which history has superseded itself, therefore grows impatient with the natural pace of historical time and the biologically determined inadequacies of human historical comprehension. A sense of ontological frustration, a frustration in humans with the human species itself, becomes intense and with it further temporal disarticulation and inevitably, deliberately, a further ruination of history. (d) Technology is the answer to this impatience (Blumenberg 1974: 263). Technologically driven progress, ‘progress-accelerated progress’ (selfhistoricizing modernization) ‘makes good the shortage of time’, makes up for otherwise immutable species-biological restrictions (Wulf 1989: 53). Human beings have always had an inherent technological capacity (as evinced in the use of fire, the making of tools, the working of metals).

40 The situation of historical knowledge Offering mediation between human beings and nature, technology compensates for the natural vulnerability of human life (Ellul 2004: 45–6). Further, its cognitive potential suggests that it could meet the human species’ essential needs much faster than nature could, to a time-scale human beings could manage for themselves. However, the most “primitive” technological capacity as an extension of human capabilities is qualitatively different from the currently prevailing technological environment, an artificial human biosphere innumerable cadres of technical experts keep maintained (Ellul 2004: 58–9). This qualitative difference itself testifies to temporal disarticulation, to the disintegration of the historical synchronicity between time passing and human action. Technology keeps time disarticulated: it perpetuates historicization. It makes history, the management system of the historicized world, a technology of technologies. The historicized world is driven by technology that facilitates the total mobilization of the state’s resources: it affirms its comprehensive coordination of socio-economic behaviour. Technocracy, the belief in not just the socio-economic, but also now the ontological priority of technology, is inevitably predisposed to comprehensive, socio-economic integration because it can only be ‘truly efficient and scientific if it absorbs an enormous quantity of phenomena and can juggle with the maximum amount of data’ (Ellul 2008: 114). The technological system (to which the history technology is assimilated) thereby ‘weaves the social fabric’: it offers an enveloping, comprehensive element within which society develops. Engaged in its ‘self-totalization’, in its assimilation of society to its function of producing and consuming technologies, it inevitably ‘elaborates a social-political, totalitarian organization’. With its comprehensive efficiency it coerces people to sustain it, to act in procedural accordance so that everyone is integrated into it, the ‘individual and everyone else thereby identifying with each other’ [Le Tous et la Personne s’identifient] (Ellul 2004: 127, 168, 210, 217). It reinforces its comprehensive control of the social imagination through its efficiency, through its capacity to abbreviate or short-cut traditional (historical) processes not just to save time, but to make time more productive, more historically productive. Technology disarticulates time when it reaches a critical point – when it exceeds compensating for natural human vulnerability and becomes an end in itself, when it harnesses sufficient energy and capital to transform the social environment into a vast machine with its own logic, with its own temporal dynamic (Marx 2005: 377). At this point disarticulated time historicizes history. Technocracy (as Spengler points out) overcomes the humanity’s frustration with nature by releasing it from ‘constraints of the species’ [aus dem Zwang der Gattung] imposed on it by nature, so that now – apprehensively enough – for good or for ill, it has become ‘the creator of its own tactics for its survival’ [Der Mensch ist Schöpfer seiner Lebenstaktik geworden]. The species’ natural but impatient symbiosis with the resources of the planet (he adds) mutates into an anthropic culture parasitic on the planet as a resource

The situation of historical knowledge 41 in itself and exploited by technological expertise. Where Prometheus once stole fire for the sake of humanity, humanity itself has looted the world for the secret of its power and built it into its technological culture [die Welt selbst wird mit dem Geheimnis ihrer Kraft als Beute davongeschleppt, hinein in den Bau dieser Kultur] (Spengler 1931: 25, 68–69 (emphasis in original)). This is the historicized world. This is where history – now a thing of “the Past”, now historicized, now a technology of technologies affirming the socio-economic authority of technocracy – is finally free to offer itself as an effective, flexible instrument of technological-managerial control. Here, enforced by political or economic policy and enhanced by the latest technology, consistent human behaviour really can create on demand the historical facts and, consequently, the affirmative narratives socially dominant interests need in order to dominate. At the same time, this technologically historicized world that humanity has made for itself is treacherous. Self-empowered to exceed cultural parameters as they existed hitherto, but totally comprehensive, the sum total of all reality, it becomes entirely self-referential, perpetually self-identical. Particularly if history signified progress in civilization, its relegation to a thing of “the Past”, the fact (as Jünger remarked) ‘that it no longer happens’ leaves the historicized world demoralized, exposed to regressive, barbaric convulsions. ‘The type of man dominant today is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world,’ says Ortega y Gasset, alarmed by the manifestation of totalitarianism and its atavistic motivation. He adds: ‘The actual mass-man is, in fact, a primitive who has slipped through the wings onto the age-old stage of civilisation.’ Symptomatic of this regression is not just the technical knowledge produced by narrow-minded, intellectually mediocre experts, nor even solely the self-satisfaction disguising public ignorance, but also the violence endemic in populistic politics, endemic in the way political leaders project back on to the populace the resentments – economic, xenophobic – they arouse in it (Ortega y Gasset 1993: 82, 90–1, 110ff., 116–7). Furthermore, energized by technology and capital, the historicized world becomes incalculable. Technical rationality may well create a world in the image of the human mind, in which information circulates at the speed of thought. But the world it creates becomes unpredictable. Human behaviour has for guidance relied on what are now obsolete precedents, anachronistic analogies. More seriously, the mind cannot anticipate the future crises its own technical expertise may generate. It cannot leap ahead of its own now global dynamic. The result is a self-defeating, fatally solipsistic world situation with a propensity for ‘crises of the unforeseeable’, a further source of apprehension, a further facet of the psychopathology of this late culture (Valéry 1960b: 1059–60, 1065–7). Certainly this ‘crisis of the unforeseeable’ defines the fatality of solipsism typical of totalitarianism (as a self-appointed instrument of historicization) and its history-management

42 The situation of historical knowledge technology: the German Democratic Republic celebrating its fortieth anniversary only months before its demise; Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic after six decades the second largest (capitalist) economy in the world; a new populist future anticipated in Russia in 1917 producing before the century is out a powerful oligarchy; most conspicuously, most grotesquely, a self-styled thousand-year Reich lasting barely more than a decade. The collapse or mutation of these political structures is not just another event within history. They came with both a historicizing legacy that would disarticulate time hitherto and a historicizing agenda that would re-function history in their own self-image. Their collapsing (or their mutation) ruptures history itself and is temporally disarticulating. It historicizes not just their own past (consigning it to “the Past”), but the historical structure they themselves inaugurated (consigning that too to “the Past”). Consequently, confronting the sheer historical scale of the disaster inflicted by the Nazi state and the pervasive nihilism it implies, Alfred Weber recognizes that history as it has evolved over the last two millennia has finally played itself out. His only recourse is to postulate a new form of politics, a new sense of moral elevation drawing on spiritual resources buried in the ‘deep strata’ of human existence transcending history (Weber 1946: 18, 218–9, 227–8, 234–5, 250–1). (e) But in an already historicized world history finds itself superseded by the internal corrosion of its basic cognitive structure, when the temporal context [§3.1] suddenly shatters or historical agency [§1.3] keeps expanding. The implosion of the Communist bloc that ended the Cold War brings with it a ‘thawing out’ of freedoms the West has long since taken for granted (Baudrillard argues). The result is a scrambled, second-hand re-run of all the positive and negative signs of modernity, such as human rights or criminality, the discovery of pornography and of UFOs. And this represents a disarticulation in time – not just a “recourse” of history, a historical return to “the Past”, or a ‘turning back’ of the cosmos (as in Vico’s and Plato’s definitions), but its ‘systematic erasing’ (Vico 1984: 397ff. §§1046ff.; Plato 2001: 51–67, 269D–274E). All the signs of the twentieth century (e.g. the Cold War, the Reunification of Germany, the Second World War) being rubbed out, bleached, as if twentieth-century history were an inescapable imbroglio and disentangling the historical events that had led to it the only way out. Moreover, this revisionism of history itself seems limitless, as if with the coming twenty-first century it implied a return to a zero point. With its unstoppable momentum, it represents not reconstruction but ‘a massive deconstruction of history on a quasi viral or epidemic scale’ (Baudrillard 1992: 53–5). Ultimately historicization keeps superseding itself. Finally, a further historicizing determinant of the historicized situation in which history works is demographic: the self-amplification of the human species, the exponential increase in the global population. Here too, in ruining the human habitat – the planet itself – through unprecedented

The situation of historical knowledge 43 overcrowding and the struggle for resources, history ruins itself. Historicist conjectures of humanity’s historical development tend to discount the tendency of the global population to keep increasing. Could the same old historical-cognitive structure that manages, for example, a world of a billion people circa 1800 (as, for example, in a history of the Napoleonic era) still cope with a world with the current population of around nine billion along with its continuing, exponential increase? It, therefore, seems inconceivable that historical comprehension – professionally disciplined, but ultimately non-special administrative and management procedures – could cope with a massive (quantitative) amplification and atomization of human agency presented by more people, by more historical actors. It would mean breaking the mental historicizing habit (a dependency few can envisage relinquishing) to entertain such scepticism, such reservation. No wonder, then, that Schopenhauer broaches the idea of the catastrophic overloading of the history management technology as its scope attempts to expand. Arguing that no science can claim to be comprehensive, he insists that once the history of China and of India with its infinite source materials is opened up, the basic flaw [das Verfehlte] of historical scholarship, its tendency simply to accumulate innumerable, unending amounts of facts, will become self-evident (Schopenhauer 1977d: 526, §233). He, like Nietzsche, dissents from the civilizing “finish” history is supposed to apply to the globe. For him the planet spinning in infinite space is covered with a frozen, cold crust: on it ‘a covering of mould has produced living and conscious beings’ [auf der ein Schimmelüberzug lebende und erkennende Wesen erzeugt hat]. Nietzsche adopts the same image and stresses its pathogenic implication: ‘the Earth [. . .] has a skin; and this skin has illnesses. One of these illnesses is, for example, called: “Man”’ [Die Erde [. . .] hat eine Haut; und diese Haut hat Krankheiten. Eine dieser Krankheiten heisst zum Beispiel: “Mensch”] (Schopenhauer 1977a: II, 11; Nietzsche 1988b: 168). Given, then, the situation of history in an already historicized world, in a world in which history keeps superseding itself, it seems absurd to claim that ‘history is the foundation of our humanity’. Apparently, ‘it transmits from generation [§2.1] to generation [§2.1] our heritage [§3.2] of beauty and horror, wisdom and insanity [. . .]’ [L’histoire fonde notre humanité. Elle transmet de génération en génération notre patrimoine de beauté et d’horreur, de sagesse et de déraison [. . .]] (Laurentin 2010: 143). Surely the sentiment expressed here suggests that historians are – as historians – disconnected from their own self-defined (historical) situation. Certainly here too the usual reliance on categorical coordinators ensures its self-referential sense, its self-evident tautological structure. This becomes intelligible only if it is construed as symptomatic of a world in which history has historicized itself. History, it seems, needs to be amplified by such an exorbitant ethical claim so as to compensate for its demise, to outweigh its existential irrelevance.

44 The situation of historical knowledge

Notes 1 The italicized words followed by numbers in square brackets refer to the scheme of categorical coordinators in the first section of Chapter 4. 2 cf. ‘Ten Facts about Nuclear Weapons’ at http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/ 2007/10/facts_myths.pdf (accessed 24.02.2011). 3 ‘Ten Facts about Nuclear Weapons’.

2

The technology of historical knowledge Management systems

Books about history, about what history is, or in defence of history presuppose it is a natural activity. Because there are “serious academics” currently engaged in historical research, history seems a specific, distinctive occupation in its own right, with its own disciplinary procedures. But this assumption begs the question. It blocks any account of how history works. It puts it as a social-cognitive practice beyond criticism. That it implicitly structures the conventional student-guides to history is a professional deception. It deceives anyone who does wish to know how and why historical knowledge is acquired. The discipline itself is averse to radical self-analytical reflection. Ensconced in its dogmatic obscurantism, the history discipline doles out conventional responses. The outcome conspires against Enlightenment. In their own area of specialized expertise historians are adept at the close reading of their sources, at constructing – by means of categorical coordinators – contexts [§3.1] for their object of study, and frameworks [§3.1] for their accounts.1 And yet their professional formation precludes testing with this acumen their disciplinary premises. Historians claim they are preoccupied with their own, already arduous interests. Still, any knowledgestructure is only as reliable as its basis. So what explains this aversion to methodological self-reflection? It suggests something repressive, something numinous, a taboo. Axiomatically history arises only once the way the world as it used to be has been lost: historical knowledge consolidates itself only afterwards. Phrases such as ‘the world as it used to be’, ‘the way things were the way they were’, obviate recourse to “the Past”. In historical and historicizing discourse “the Past” is imbued with numinous significance. It is the oracular source of history’s and historians’ authority. However, history (and historians) can be authoritative only through representing the “the Past”, through standing in for it. In thus taking over from “the Past” the power it needs for its existence, it must negate “the Past’s” exploitation by non-disciplinary interests. Hence historians’ disapproval when “the Past” – as a freely available, social and cultural resource – lends itself ideologically or commercially to interests that do not meet academically approved criteria of veracity. History substitutes itself for “the Past” for the sake of its own historicist designs. It owes

46 The technology of historical knowledge its existence to “the Past” it has to confiscate for its own ends. Hence its necessary, self-incriminating subterfuge: that to all intents and purposes history is “the Past”; that “the Past” must be accessed only through history. Hence the taboo on testing the procedures through which it opens up “the Past”, through which it instrumentalizes it in its own self-interest. But this explanation of the aversion to methodological reflection is too complicated. Historians might retort that they are in any case self-reflective when they review the existing varieties of historical scholarship, when they delineate the “differences of approach” between the different disciplines and sub-disciplines history comprehends: clearly, oral history or film history, economic history or ancient history all work differently. But this response still takes history for granted as something natural sui generis. But then, in the end, historians adhere to the ‘natural attitude’ because history works only on that basis. Through being natural the natural attitude in itself deters critical dissent. Hence, the following analysis of history’s and historians’ authority: to see why historical knowledge, secured by its self-determined authority, can be persuasive, even though its actual intellectual hold on the world is insecure, and its own results provisional. It involves recognizing that the historical attitude is far from natural. Instead it leaves historical knowledge as a technological management system: as a technology of technologies. Confirming the view that historians distinctively perform essentially history-focussed administrative procedures and social activities already pervasive in the capitalist socio-economic system that enfolds it, it defines their social function – along with the logic, the organization, and the purpose it sustains – as technocratic-managerial. However, history’s authority is ultimately confirmed by what this technocratic-managerial system produces, by its performativity: its indispensable capacity for making sense, its capacity for producing sense from utter senselessness. Analysing the social and cognitive authority of history, therefore, involves: describing the constitution of academic disciplines; defining the academic standpoint; and elucidating the technics of sense-production.

The constitution of academic disciplines Knowledge – ideas, conceptualizations, information, strategies, capacities – is produced and disseminated by disciplines. Or rather disciplines produce and disseminate instrumental knowledge – knowledge that works, knowledge that is meant to be socially enlightening or useful, to be effective for realizing objectives. Knowledge is first and foremost a social product. It is produced through the self-definition of social groups (e.g. professional or commercial associations). It is the preoccupation of influential social interests in their own interest: religious institutions (the preservation of essential doctrines); the state (particularly its foundation on bureaucratic and clerical regulation); industry (particularly its technological and

The technology of historical knowledge 47 commercial exploitation of knowledge). Disciplines are a further variant of this social-group self-identification. Academic organization and its cognitive procedures – exemplified by the case of history – are thus typical of generally pervasive, non-special social-cognitive practices. As a social matrix of knowledge the discipline is further defined by its institutionalization, its socialization, in universities. That is what universities are for, even if their academic representatives fail to see it (cf. Chapter 5, below). The university itself is a hybrid institution. It is partly an instrument of the state akin to a bureaucratic civil service, a repository for the stock of knowledge it requires to pursue its social, cultural, and economic agendas. Partly too it is a commercial concern (an educational business) flogging courses aimed at promoting the individual’s efficiency in a knowledge economy, but also submitting competitive bids to state and private organizations for their financial investment in its research projects. The discipline is the central device for these operations. Certainly, the “academic department”, “school”, or “centre” is the administrative context of the discipline. It may comprise several disciplines and sub-disciplines; and the same interests can be shared by disciplines in a number of different departments. Historicized thinking supports the human sciences as a whole. History informs a wide range of different academic disciplines. It offers an easily available means of vindicating any argument in any context: a couple of historical precedents will justify anything. It facilitates the popularization of knowledge, as in Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which makes cosmological theories socially accessible. Knowledge has credibility not primarily because of its intrinsic properties such as logical coherence, conceptual clarity, a sound evidential basis, or fidelity to disciplinary procedures, as expert opinion insists. (These properties can in any case never be binding: they are not what they appear to be.) Rather, driven by their social function those groups involved in knowledgeproduction enforce them to assure its veracity. The credibility of knowledge is, therefore, social as much as intellectual. The social basis of knowledge production lends its own immediately available stability and coherence to the structure of academic arguments, particularly where a logical basis or a justifiable cognitive motive are not recognizable. Habitually, the cognitive justification for a research programme derives from a social absence, lack, neglect, or “need” identified by the disciplinary community concerned, as in the following comment: ‘Although both historians and philosophers have emphasized the important role played by catastrophic events [. . .] in breaking up time, the effects of these “transformative events” on notions of temporality have hardly been studied in comparative perspective’ (Lorenz and Bevernage 2013: 11). The social basis of cognitive stability and coherence is itself backed up by the social agenda or self-conceived traditions of the social group, the discipline, the academic department, the institution concerned, that lend it its own sense of comprehensive identity and purpose. The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, as a state-sponsored institution, ‘uses public funding of approximately £98m per annum to fund research

48 The technology of historical knowledge among one quarter of the United Kingdom’s research population’.2 It can thus dictate its own cognitive norms and premises. A case in point is its current (at the time of writing) theme for research funding, ‘Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past’, that affirms certainly a conventional, even apparently “natural”, but ultimately erroneous temporal symmetry. This theme (it claims) ‘affords an opportunity for researchers in the arts and humanities to generate new novel [sic] understandings of the relationship between the past and the future, and the challenges and opportunities of the present through a temporally-inflected lens.’3 Further, its own cognitive authority, its affirmation of conventional categories of conceptualization, claims its own social validity, its ultimate, unchallengeable validity, by playing ‘a vital role in the well-being of our economy’. That its function is socially indispensable, is axiomatic: ‘With few major corporations or multinational companies supporting research in this area, the funding the AHRC provides is essential if we are, as a nation, to develop our understanding of [. . .] creative industries and their significance in today’s society.’4 The social conditioning of knowledge – operating with the invariable, same old subjects and multiple, variable predicates – is bound to be conventional, to be accepted as a natural mental tendency (Bergson 2006b: 73–4).5 Inevitably it precludes intellectual deviance. Or rather the thought-styles that its cognitive conventions, its institutional agenda or its coordinating tradition [§3.1] exclude will be defined as deviant. Certainly, alternative means of publishing deviant knowledge are available. Still, the internal social cohesion of the discipline, enforced by its regulative academic procedures and institutionalized practices, easily blocks its influence. But the social conditioning of knowledge is also deceitful. As such it works against the interest of knowledge itself, against its categorical obligation to be reserved – to be reserved towards what socially prevails, towards the current organization of society that predisposes people towards it by means of the ideas and modes of behaviour it instils in them (Horkheimer 2009b: 344). The academic historian is also a member of society, not least a member of academic society. Recourse to dominant social practices also legitimizes his or her cognitive practices. But these cannot in their turn be anything but socially affirmative, which explains why academic knowledge never changes anything whatever changes it itself undergoes. Above all, the social conditioning of knowledge blocks any critique of itself. In purely socio-economic terms the financial resources of the researchfunding institutions, the universities’ dependence on state and private investment in their research projects, already deter unorthodox thought. But the effectiveness of this deterrent is guaranteed in cognitive terms by its focus on history – on historical topics be it (in the case of the AHRC) the same old thing (heritage) or the ever latest, “innovative” thing (video games); but also on historical methods, the precedents already recognized by historicized thought. The cognitive virtue of history is that it is already socially pervasive. It relies on the distinctive performance of essentially routine social-cognitive

The technology of historical knowledge 49 procedures that regulate a wide range of social activities and organizations. History also accounts for change; and even if history changes – i.e. the variable predicates applied to it keep altering – these changes too contribute to the historiography of history. They make history (historical comprehension) even more like itself. Consequently, because history is socially pervasive, any critique of the social conditioning of knowledge will tend to justify itself by recourse to it and its methods. But with this recourse this critique automatically neutralizes itself: it cannot help thereby affirming the very methods this social conditioning depends on. Therefore, on the one hand, with its heterogeneity of subject matter and its non-special, socially routine procedures, history becomes a social facilitator of knowledge. A glance at the TV schedule for any week reveals a plethora of documentaries and dramas that rely on historical themes and settings; virtually all the books discussed or advertised in literary magazines such as the London Review of Books or The Times Literary Supplement on whatever topic are histories of some sort, testimonies of historicized thought. History, therefore, represents knowledge that can be socially facilitated. On the other, if affirmative and dissident thought alike resorts to history, if there is no other cognitively legitimate methodology for change but history, arguing for change is self-defeating. History thus proves indispensable as the common currency of thought. At any time it indifferently converts dissident and affirmative values into its own so as to go with whatever is going. Certainly knowledge could not be socially conditioned if this conditioning itself were not socially entrenched, if distinctively performed academic disciplinary procedures were not integral to social-cognitive procedures in general, and if social, cultural, political, and commercial institutions did not themselves employ and affirm these procedures. Certainly, too, history sustains this conditioning. The events and issues it narrates demonstrate in its own terms (and by means of categorical coordinators) how political or cultural processes [§2.1] and forces [§2.1] have a conditioning effect – in its terms shape [§1.4] a community, people or institution and make [§1.4] it what it is. The disciplinary procedures it employs convert values that are socially disparate into those socially and methodologically affirmative of its own. Precisely because it is sustained by powerful socio-economic interests, because it manifests itself in a socially pervasive cognitive practice, because it therefore appears to be integral to the way the world is arranged, the historical thought-style seems incontrovertible. Nothing bars the academic discipline from sealing its incontrovertibility in ideological terms: from presuming to endow itself with unimpeachable ethical value ‘as a profession on which the health of our civilization largely depends’ (McCullagh 2013: 170). Through its professed ethical value history makes itself indispensable for arranging the world. But dominant and socially pervasive the historical thought-style may be, it has its own fatal weakness. Knowledge cannot be socially conditioned. It will not let itself be socially determined. Its intention

50 The technology of historical knowledge is to liberate, not to reiterate the same old thing. Faced with the Inquisition Galileo could recant his cosmic theory not just because he knew it was correct, but because he knew its being correct did not depend on him personally, and even less on church dogma. Conversely, knowledge that can be instrumentalized, that can be subordinated to heteronomous ends, is little more than intellectual dressage. What a humanities inter-disciplinary research group perceives as the autonomous, collective pursuit of its members’ specialized interests depends on cognitive procedures already remote-choreographed by the officials, often their own peers, involved with the institution funding their research project. In any case, knowledge is not just the product of a species that, naturally endowed with reason, has a species-essential need to exercise it (as Kant argued). Rationality is a too narrow conception of knowledge. Rather to know is a drive as fundamental as to desire sexually. Both are vital. Knowing is a synonym for sexual intercourse; sexual intercourse a means of knowing. Just as with knowledge, so with sexuality: social institutions attempt to regulate it, categorize it (if not suppress it), or exploit it commercially. Just as with sexuality, so with knowledge: the repressed desire reappears in a displaced or sublimated form, as personally fatal non-conformity or as ostensibly incomprehensible intellectuality. Vital interests are, therefore, far more diverse, far more changeable, than any conceptual structure for capturing them – as Nietzsche realized in regarding the conceptual-logical distinction between truth and falsehood as secondary to any proposition that would affirm or enhance one’s own existence (Nietzsche 1988d: 18, §4). They are far more diverse than any historical structure claiming to account for them, even despite history’s (apparently) comprehensive heterogeneity. Analysing how history works reveals the unstable foundations supporting socially conditioned knowledge. Its imposing edifice constructed by converging political, commercial and academic interests rests on shifting sand. Given this instability, it is indispensable to know how history works, how it arranges the world, why its world-arrangement would anyway be structurally compromised. Consequently, the critical analysis of the cognitive procedures of the discipline, of its conception of knowledge, is ipso facto a dismantling of its world-arrangements. In terms of not just the theory but also the politics of knowledge and in view of the entrenched political hegemony of socially conditioned knowledge, this dismantling is inevitably disruptive. But then, as Nietzsche remarked, to disrupt the mindless affirmation of social convention ‘small acts of deviant behaviour are indispensable’ [kleine abweichende Handlungen thun noth] (Nietzsche 1988e: 141–2, §149). The fatal instability of the historically arranged world reveals a basic speciesexistential choice, dependent on cognitive behaviour. Is the self-perpetuating, barbarous struggle – both nationally and internationally – for supremacy between different types of historicized, socio-economic world-arrangements really the only practical political agenda? It is apparently the only political agenda the historicized world permits, dependent on it as it evidently is for the

The technology of historical knowledge 51 political catastrophes its repetitive-compulsive self-historicization necessarily induces. Or is there another political project predicated on species-existential requirements that forsakes any historical or historicized world-arrangement? It would envisage a world that would finally have found a prophylactic against the absurd historicist vindication of the species’ self-inflicted suffering in the name of moral progress (cf. Kant 1977b: 42, §7; Droysen 1977: 339). It would, therefore, be a world that would have superseded history as the story of the human species’ self-incrimination. This supersession would represent not (as hitherto) a traumatizing effect of historicization, but an act of human self-overcoming, a mutation in the species for the sake of its survival, albeit over a time-span neither individual consciousness nor historiography itself could ever register. Long since irrelevant as a guide to life, a discredited history would at last decline into obsolescence. Already hypothetical, such a prospect seems utopian. However, that the history discipline is structurally flawed makes it plausible. As a structure of comprehension, as a comprehensive structure, history might well claim to arrange the world. It might well pretend to order the way things are as the result of them having been the way they were. But as a necessary environment for the existence of the human species the world does not in itself function on historical terms. Its arrangement is not in itself historical. That history still extracts historical sense from it proves nothing to the contrary. History is a cognitive procedure, a technology, that can extract sense from anything. That is its disciplinary fault – what the deconstruction of the discipline reveals. Analysing the relationship between disciplinary procedures and the issues they manage reveals the uncertainty underlying the knowledge cultural, political, and commercial institutions rely on. The very purpose of affirmative knowledge, institutionalized knowledge that endorses the world as it is historically arranged, is designed to conceal from those who politically and academically maintain it or depend on it any awareness of the actual reality it produces (Lukács 1976: 148–9). Thus socially conditioned knowledge and thinking orientated by its own cognitive integrity diverge. As already mentioned, by recourse to history the social authority of conventionally institutionalized disciplinary procedures can persuasively establish an apparently reliable, social basis for knowledge, even if that knowledge does not grasp what is actually happening. That history drapes its own occlusive veil over immediate social reality makes the search for a valid basis of knowledge urgent. Hence, the critique of disciplinary knowledge, of the history discipline in particular, is imperative. The sophistical character of socially conditioned thinking needs exposing, and then the socially critical potential of knowledge that instead orientates itself needs emphasizing. It means focussing on the internal structure of academic disciplines and on how disciplines work. Disciplines principally exist to obviate thinking, let alone aesthetic sensitivity or intuition. To this end they offer their members sets of ready-made resources. These include recognized types of source-material that define the

52 The technology of historical knowledge discipline’s jurisdiction (a political historian will principally consult archives of the state officials; a literary historian an author’s novels, plays, earlier drafts, diaries, correspondence, etc.) as well as an accumulating stock of largely agreed knowledge that vindicates their authority. This material predetermines what preoccupies researchers’ minds. These resources also include a recognized structure of concepts, a shared discourse for discussing its issues, a lexicon of technical terms, specific to the discipline for managing the source-material it identifies with, for reinforcing its conceptual consistency as a discipline. These largely precondition how researchers examine what is on their mind, how they express their results. Further, they also include a pantheon of recognized authorities that historiographically have constructed or are still constructing the topical trends within the discipline. These, therefore, predetermine where researchers’ already preconditioned mental preoccupations will lead them. Disciplines are, therefore, primarily self-referential. As such they both set boundaries for collaboration with other disciplines and ward off unrecognized external interference. And as such, they a priori vindicate their procedural and structural capacity for producing truth, truth that they alone are entitled to recognize, to institutionalize. Certainly the disciplinary knowledge structure is effective and efficient, but only because it is an abstraction from reality. Or rather, given its reliance on the principles of causality, sufficient reason, and identity reinforced by categorical coordinators, it is an abstract arrangement of an abstraction. To see this, to see institutionalized knowledge pre-emptively occluding its social situation and its ramifications, requires a pragmatic perspective. This shows that reality is not immediately experienced in terms of the preconceived contexts [§3.1] and frameworks [§3.1] of institutionalized, socially conditioned knowledge. The ‘collateral contemporaneity’ of the world, the innumerable multifarious events that happen concurrently at any given moment – that historically happened at any given moment in “the Past”– is inconceivable. As James argues, ‘The world’s events are given to each of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we can hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is like.’ Faced with this chaos the mind can only resort to ‘selecting items which concern us’, to connecting them with others that apparently ‘belong’ with them, thus producing ‘definite threads of sequence and tendency’. Reality becomes manageable only through being broken up in this way: ‘we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break it into sciences; and then we begin to feel at home’. Furthermore, ‘relations that were never given to sense at all’ provide essential coherence and purpose to these abstract conceptualizations. James cites ‘mathematical relations, tangents, squares and roots and logarithmic functions’; and (as Chapter 4 shows) in historical accounts categorical coordinators function similarly (James 1956: 118–9). The resulting ‘stable scheme of concepts, stably related with one another’ makes experience and knowledge manageable. Moreover, this disciplinary-managerial scheme is self-perpetuating: ‘What does not of itself stand out, we learn to cut out;

The technology of historical knowledge 53 so the system grows completer, and new reality, as it comes, gets named after and conceptually strung upon this or that element of it which we have already established.’ The discipline is thus self-affirmative: this already disposes it to be socially affirmative within an academic “society” of disciplines, hence also affirmative of the society disciplinary knowledge sustains. In being self-affirmative, it is immune to criticism – as James explains: ‘The immutability of such an abstract system is its great practical merit: the same identical terms and relations in it can always be recovered and referred to – change itself is just such an unalterable concept’ (James 1996: 235). History is the epitome of such institutionalized cognitive immutability, the institutionalized pre-emptive occlusion of reality. Change, however much it occurs in the historicized world, however much it occurs within history with the development of new sub-disciplines, only confirms its essential property, only makes it more like itself, reaffirms itself, which is to account for change, to account for itself. Academic disciplines – including the history discipline, however theoretically sophisticated it might be – are gross simplifications, caricatures of the reality falling within their jurisdiction. As James remarks, their ‘abstract concepts are but as flowers gathered, they are only moments dipped out from the stream of time, snapshots taken, as by a kinetoscopic camera, at a life that in its original coming is continuous’ (James 1996: 235). Productive they can certainly be: but of products produced by inert and spurious gravity, remote from immediate experience, out of touch with sensation [aesthesis], the original and basic stimuli galvanizing cognition that socially conditioned knowledge is intent on anaesthetizing. Incorporated in the academic discipline, socially conditioned knowledge is operational knowledge, knowledge that works. It is meant to demonstrate its effectivity in terms of demonstrable results: as in terms of students’ academic success, or of external cash investments in its research projects, or of its public recognition outside the academic institution. In this respect too an academic discipline as fundamental as history demonstrates non-special, cognitive procedures that are socially pervasive. Knowledge that is socially conditioned is conditioned to work socially, to work as society works. In other words, like other academic disciplines, history works, because work is the constitutive form of human existence in capitalist society. Its motivation has much less to do with what is human, with the “humanities”, than with impersonal technical criteria and commercial objectives. How history works is how society works. Work becomes the dominant mode of existence once it does more than just provide basic necessities: if it aimed solely to provide sustenance, shelter, and culture, it would occupy only a few days each week, particularly if supported by technology. But once capital drives the economy, dominates basic necessities, and reproduces society in general, it becomes the dominant mode of existence. Work becomes a commodity in its own right separate from the worker who produces it: it becomes the means by which the individual is

54 The technology of historical knowledge integrated into and made totally dependent on the socio-economic system. Through the categorical imperatives of economic reason, through its scientific organization, through its social pervasiveness it becomes the ‘motor of history’ [le moteur de l’histoire], the premise of a self-historicizing world (Gorz 2010: 34ff., 41). How to use the increased leisure time it promised was the initial response to the introduction of automation and information technology in the workplace. But this promise was negated by the demands of capitalism itself, such as competition between enterprises especially in a global market; economic competitiveness, requiring ever more adaptive skills and keener motivation of the work force; reducing costs of production; achieving performance targets, and calculating future growth potential. The means by which everyone becomes an agent of historicization, work thus facilitates the total mobilization of social behaviour for economic purposes: a phrase of totalitarian provenance that fits perfectly the comprehensive system of totalitarian capitalism.6 Certainly, this total mobilization defines some distinctive features of work, of how work works, in a historicized world. The prospect of leisure, due to the need for less work, does not vanish entirely: it re-emerges as unemployment, as currently superfluous, unusable, or reserve sectors of the otherwise collective social workforce. Though work is constitutive of human existence in this totalitarian economic system, the system itself generates an acute sense of precarity, not just economic but also existential. It ensures its dependency not on what individual workers control, on their capacities or conscientiousness that orientate his or her immediate work experience, but on what is beyond workers’ control, the performativity of the system and its constituent elements as a whole, its strategic technocratic-managerial direction. Through work immediate experience is governed by the abstract system that organizes and arranges it, both the cognitive behaviour induced by the scientifically structured economic system, and the world-arrangement rationally structured to be the way it is by historical scholarship (Gorz 1983: 85; 2010: 182–3). For the worker the work situation – both socio-economic and socio-historical – imposes itself, therefore, with the imperiousness both of a scientific law and of historical rationale, when in fact it arises from technocratic-managerial élites and academic élites alike determining the way things have got to be the way they are. Further, the total mobilization of socio-economic resources terminates the distinction between intellectual and manual work. Rather it distributes work just as it distributes wealth. It replaces it with the distinction between work that is personally and financially rewarding as well as relatively secure and work that is monotonous, personally impoverishing, and underpaid, as well as precarious (Gorz 1983: 78, 99). Academics are directly conditioned by these socio-economic and sociohistoric circumstances. They would retain the social credit that accrues to them as intellectual workers supported by their discipline, while endorsing the radical commodification of higher education that overlays disciplinary

The technology of historical knowledge 55 practice with the managerial procedures – and self-serving, commercial opportunities – driving education provision and research production. Hence, like the quality signified by the fetishism of the brand, the academic reputation vouches for the operational value of the socially conditioned knowledge its social institution produces and disseminates. Academics’ achievement in the discipline calibrates the real social-cognitive conformity their managerialbureaucratic procedures enforce. This situation arises because all work tends towards intellectual work. Principally technical, work depends on enhanced cognitive skills. It requires workers’ integration into an increasingly developed, socially conditioned ‘general intellect’. Knowledge itself is both a productive force, as the originator of the technology, the machines, the ‘fixed capital’ that makes production possible, and an economic value, as the result, for example, of market research that leads to the creation of new products, to attracting new consumers, to inducing new needs (Marx undated: 594). Further still, the total mobilization that governs social existence also reveals work’s disciplinary character, ‘redolent more of a totalitarian society led by a technocracy with a quasi-military hierarchy than of bourgeois capitalist society’ (Gorz 1983: 85–6). As Nietzsche remarks, work proves to be the best form of social policing: it exhausts the potentiality of the individual as worker such that the individual has little capacity for undertaking anything for him- or herself (Nietzsche 1988e: 154, §173). Similarly, academic disciplines work as social controls of intellectual practices. That academics are open to evidence-based, reasoned arguments is an unwarranted belief: the discipline itself pre-empts what counts as evidence and preconceives the rationale it might permit. The academic functions as a gate-keeper to disciplinary work. How history works is how society works. As a discipline it is perfectly attuned to the disciplinary character of socio-economic existence in the capitalist system, the division of labour technical expertise requires. This is after all the fundamental principle of the constantly developing system, along with its cultural ramifications, that it represents, that it accounts for. It demonstrates that the way it is, is the way it has got to be. It thus affirms its categorical affinity with the system it describes. But this affirmation further explains why historical scholarship excludes methodological self-reflection. Its exclusion only confirms the discipline’s political-ideological stance. It can offer no diagnostic insights, it cannot be anything different. By definition it can offer only historical insights, insights that by definition will become historical, applicable to the way things were, eventually obsolete recurrences of the same old thing, the ever latest thing.

The academic standpoint The constitution of academic disciplines determines the academic standpoint. These disciplines are integrated into a capitalist socio-economic system that transforms society into a ‘vast machine’, an enormous ‘apparatus’ (Marx

56 The technology of historical knowledge 2005: 377, 441ff., 656; Heidegger 1967a: 19ff.). They define and produce the technocratic-managerial functions – the technicians, the specialists, the managers – that keep it maintained, that keep it self-modernizing, selfhistoricizing. They thus arrange the way things generally are since the dominant socio-economic system they sustain demands the comprehensive involvement of the workforce, the total mobilization of social behaviour for economic and, therefore, self-historicizing ends. The condition of disciplinary knowledge is, therefore, social: all knowledge is socially conditioned. Disciplines work as society works. Work is the dominant form of socialcognitive behaviour: the cognitive behaviour that dominates is work that must work, that affirms the dominant socio-economic values whatever they may be. In this way history, in particular, is socially conditioned. Historicization results from work as the dominant form of social cognitive behaviour. History, in particular, does work as the world works. Historical scholarship is represented by a professional discipline dedicated to practising the technical expertise capable of producing world-arrangements, of stipulating how and why things were the way they were, so that they now are the way they are. Thus history, in particular, in the work it does, occupies the dominant comprehensive standpoint for representing the self-modernizing, self-historicizing work of the dominant socio-economic system. In terms of its logical procedures, its administrative self-regulation, and its comprehensive overview, the historian’s disciplinary standpoint exemplifies what, in his essay ‘Culture and Administration’, Adorno terms the ‘administrative gaze’ [der administrative Blick]. What defines culture also defines history: they endorse each other. They both adopt a superior standpoint that, as Adorno says (about culture), coordinates ‘such disparate entities as philosophy and religion, science and art, ways of living and social customs, the objective mind of an age’; their gaze is such that it ‘gathers all this together, classifies it, assesses it, organizes it’ (Adorno 1979b: 122). Here the academic procedure of comprehension as knowledge management converges with bureaucratic organization as social management. Moreover, precisely this standpoint, this convergence, is advocated by historians themselves, as when Michelet describes the historian ‘as the administrator of the effects of the deceased’ [l’administrateur des biens des décédés]; or as when Droysen asserts that ‘historical method ought to become the basis for training administrators’ [so wird die historische Methode die Grundlage der Verwaltungsstudien werden müssen]; but also as when for Spengler the ‘historical gaze’ signifies ‘being an authority, a superior, certain, cold authority’ [Der historische Blick [. . .] bedeutet Kenner sein, überlegener, sicherer, kalter Kenner] (Barthes 1975: 91; Droysen 1977: 273; Spengler 1951: 72). The complexities of a technologically driven socio-economic system require specialization, technicians with specific expertise, those who have of things as they are what Lukács calls ‘the monographic view’ (Lukács 1976: 89). Just as the socially conditioned knowledge produced by institutionalized disciplines is totally integrated into this system, so academics find themselves

The technology of historical knowledge 57 both completely assimilated to this technocracy and affirming its domination. Indeed, their endorsement of technical forms of socio-economic domination only bolsters their self-indulgent sense of professional prestige – or rather denies their de facto commonplace adherence to a multitudinous, global class of machine-operators, the ‘cognitariat’ (Jencks 1989: 44). ‘Academic’ has, therefore, become an obsolete, virtually irrelevant term for defining the production, management, and retailing of knowledge. The social-cognitive function it designates has been variously re-encoded in the following ways: • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

as the pedantic ‘philosophical worker’ [der philosophischer Arbeiter], the self-abnegating ‘objective man’ [der objektive Mensch] (Nietzsche 1988d: 144, §211; 135–6, §207); as ‘not [. . .] intellectually much higher than an artisan’ (Peirce 1992: 212); as the ‘mindless academic specialist’ (Lukács 1976: 105–6, 198); as the ‘humanist bureaucrat’ (Valéry 1960c: 923); as the ‘trained and specialized bureaucratic official’ (Weber 1980: 835); as the ‘treacherous cleric’ (Benda 1977: 64ff.); as the ‘sullen, condescending specialist with his sterile knowledge’ [La spécialité, qui rend le savant maussade, rend la science stérile] (Bergson 2011: 41); as the ‘technician’ (Ortega y Gasset 1993: 108); as the ‘highly gifted technician of method’ [ein höchst genialer Techniker der Methode] (Husserl 2012b: 61); as the ‘resources manager’ [Besteller des Bestandes] (Heidegger 1967a: 25–7); as the ‘organizing man’ [l’homme de rangement] (Baudrillard 1968: 27); as the ‘technician of practical knowledge’ [le technicien du savoir pratique] (Sartre 1972: 25ff.); as ‘engineers or architects, reconstructors of a past, gardeners of history’ (Cohen 1988: 67); as the ‘information engineer’ (Toulmin 1992: 104).

The academic standpoint with its administrative gaze and its monographic view is, therefore, duplicitous. On the one hand, it projects history as a natural form of enquiry, as a universal form of knowledge – as the exclusive, solely legitimate mode of cognitive practice, of comprehension. And this seems convincing, if only because the socio-economic, capitalist system sees itself as universal (or at least global) and history itself – with its historicist momentum – works towards a self-vindicating globally civilized “finish” (Droysen 1977: 15, 55, 61, 369). On the other, it in practice represents a distinctive thought-style preconditioned by its professional practitioners’ situation in the socio-economic system. Its mode of operation, the way historical scholarship works, is preconditioned as technocratic-managerial competence. However, the academic standpoint is almost designed to conceal this situational duplicitousness from itself (as the discussion of the comprehensive

58 The technology of historical knowledge purpose of history in Chapter 5 will demonstrate). Instead, it tends to vindicate itself either by analogy to natural science by claiming to establish objective truth by attempting to solve historical problems, or by analogy with art or literature, by claiming to represent the historical object truthfully in terms of pictorial design or narrative form. But neither analogy works. Scientifically speaking, history cannot produce predictive laws or generally applicable concepts. Aesthetically speaking, the analogy only works (if it works at all) with conventional representational, realistic, or figurative for ms of art, rather than with abstract, performance, or installation art with its metaphorical relationship to its subject matter. So there remains techne, meaning ‘generally a way or means of gaining something’, as a regular mode of operation, as defining procedures that work. So that if technology enables human beings to construct a habitable world for themselves, history is an indispensable means of monitoring, evaluating, and reporting on that endeavour, on that technological performance. It necessarily accompanies human beings’ technological self-projection. In particular, it puts its own gloss on a world-arrangement specifically preconditioned by the socioeconomic system of capitalism because the way history works involves reckoning with world-arrangements. As the distinction between intellectual and manual work fades the technological historicization of society also transforms those involved in it into technicians. By dignifying their work as a science or an art, academics surely nostalgically cling to the remains of their former social distinction. But precisely when insisting on their specialized knowledge to differentiate themselves from the non-specialist public, they simply appear as one cadre of mysterious experts addressing other, miscellaneous, diverse cadres of mysterious expertise. In fact, precisely in defining their work as universal and impartial, academic technicians – historians included – inevitably, automatically, take the side of capital: ‘universal’ and ‘impartial’ are attributes of the symbolic capital they manage. These attributes orientate the work on the symbolic capital that preoccupies them, that they themselves represent. They themselves manage the socially dominant cultural values that regularly – as in the auction of a work of art, or the fortuitous discovery of a rare unrecognized art object – are converted into commercial values (Gorz 2003: 42). Historians exemplify the socially conditioned, technocratic-managerial function of the academic, just as historical scholarship exemplifies the socially instrumentalized, technocratic knowledge they produce. History is not just a (disciplinary) technology, but (in disciplinary terms) a technology of technologies. A technology in itself, it also has a transcendental position in respect of other technologies. Technocratic disciplines in the human sciences orientate themselves by historical methods. History is the unique technocratic discipline that in its turn embraces them all, as in (e.g.) A Social History of Knowledge (Burke 2012).7 Thus it produces the self-serving illusion that the entirety of knowledge – (but in reality only) the entirety of socially conditioned, instrumental, affirmative knowledge – vindicates its disciplinary entitlement to its

The technology of historical knowledge 59 administrative overview of the world as it itself comprehensively arranges it. History is, therefore, paradigmatic of disciplinary functions. It enables historians to project themselves variously as the guardians of socially authorized knowledge, the arbiters of the social reality principle, and the guarantors of the truth of society’s self-knowledge. As an essential component of the general intellect, historical knowledge is widely socially disseminated, even if at a basic level. Historians, therefore, have immediate social influence, particularly if – often through the mass media – their field of specialization connects with issues of public interest. Their specialized knowledge is multifunctional. It can routinely enlighten the public by providing a historical context [§3.1] for matters of current concern (as in news and current affairs programmes) or by means of documentaries and dramas with a historical subject. But it can also offer a disciplinary corrective to popular misunderstandings. It thus demonstrates an academic conceit that expects expert erudition as the indispensable qualification for personal, cognitive, and ethical self-orientation. Anyone lacking it, by definition anyone who is not a professional historian, automatically betrays a need for its tutelage, for being taught to appreciate its world-arrangement, an affirmation of the world-arrangement of capitalism, and their place, their common place, in it. Here too specialized academic knowledge – and history in particular – works, to obscure the cognitive situation, to pre-empt and occlude the immediate circumstances of the individual’s existence. Further, as the unique means of arranging the world, of showing how things being the way they were determine how they have become, how they have, therefore, got to be, history defines the social reality principle. As the “natural” default form of society’s knowledge of itself, as the socially “normal” science, historical knowledge defines – i.e. contextualizes [§3.1], frames [§3.1] – normal cognitive and social behaviour. History projects normal authority because, in a historicized world – a world that is historically hyperconscious of itself, conscious of its own historical consciousness – history takes precedence, thereby setting precedents, social precedents. The Arts and Humanities Research Council research programme ‘Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past’ (mentioned earlier) offers a striking example of both the automatic assertion of historical precedence, the institutionalization of the precedent priority of “the Past”, and the assertion of this precedence as a socio-economic normality. Thus historical scholarship, conditioned to be socially affirmative, defines the reality principle not just by asserting the precedence of “the Past”, but also by pre-empting the future, as here in construing “the Past” as the gateway to the future, as the way “forward”. Defining reality by pre-empting the future is the most inhuman aspect of historical scholarship and the history discipline. In the Arts and Humanities Research Council the humanities finally, therefore, reach their nadir. Subjectively the future is experienced immediately as a horizon of possibility, expectation, as the front-line of hope. Anticipatory consciousness, its inherent sense-projecting intentionality, motivates the human psyche

60 The technology of historical knowledge (cf. Bloch 1979: 49ff.; Husserl 2003: 36, §3ff.; 184, §36; 196, §38; 208–9, §42). In relation to the future, it offers as a species-essential necessity the conjecture that one day things might be different, might be better. As Sartre points out, the ‘past might well connect us with universal temporality, but the present – as pure nothingness [pur néant], simply itself [rien de plus que l’être] – and the future offer an escape from it’ [C’est par le passé que j’appartiens à la temporalité universelle, c’est par le présent et le futur que j’y échappe] (Sartre 2010: 245). According precedence to “the Past” – says Levinas apprehensively envisaging the rise of Nazism – ‘reduces the universality of pure being to a civilization already encased in faits accomplis no-one can escape from’ (Lévinas 1982: 99). It negates indispensable, life-enhancing possibilities, denies human self-differentiation. In a historicized world whatever will be comes only from “the Past”, reiterates nothing other than the same old thing, as the cognitive contortions pre-requisite for ‘caring for the future’ by ‘thinking forward through the past’ confirm. This historicized thinking typifies institutionalized, socially conditioned knowledge. It makes knowledge in the human sciences redundant. For all its disciplinary industry, for all its research outcomes, it ensures nothing really changes in the already historicized, pre-empted conditions of change. Finally, disciplined historical scholarship acts as a guarantor of the truth of society’s self-knowledge. This cannot mean that a society’s knowledge of itself is truthful, that a society knows the truth about itself. That knowledge is formally, logically unachievable: the terms self and society are amorphous like their referents themselves. In any case, that a society could have knowledge of itself is illusory. Essentially the fact-based, specialized knowledge the socio-economic system of capitalism produces is intended to conceal from itself, let alone those it totally mobilizes, the real-life consequences of its situation (Lukács 1976: 148–149). Furthermore, the disciplinary knowledge that affirms it is itself a simplified abstraction from the collateral contemporaneity apprehended by immediate experience that it subsequently blocks and anaesthetizes. Consequently the truth disciplinary knowledge elaborates derives from the efficient working of its technology. It results automatically from the dedicated sense-making capacity of its socially affirmative logic, its coordinated discursive organization, and its comprehensive purpose. The truth these technical sense-making procedures disclose results from the cognitive situation fabricated by their disciplinary structure. It focusses on the researchers with their specialized, technical expertise. The disciplinary structure projects them as already holding a socially recognized position of truth: it invests them from the outset with the capacity to know what it is. Their technocratic function as ‘resource administrators’, as ‘information engineers’, curating the stock of knowledge that steadily keeps accumulating, keeps historicizing itself, affirms their “truth position”. Moreover, as an abstraction from its immediate apprehension, disciplinary knowledge ipso facto pretends to universal validity. As the truthful outcome of recognized, impersonal disciplinary procedures, produced from a socially recognized

The technology of historical knowledge 61 truth position, this knowledge is automatically credited with universal validity. This universal accreditation is still just about sustained by a Platonic idealism that once recognized knowledge as true because it was eternal, unchanging. Now so depleted, this has come down to approving knowledge as true only because it actually changes nothing. Ultimately, though, the truths of disciplinary knowledge in the human sciences are mundane, technical. As a component of social self-knowledge indispensable for society to work, the general intellect converges with the sphere of generalized, impersonal opinion. Being comprehensive, history demonstrates this convergence best. It can comprise anything from the technical analysis of the “deep history” of contemporary political problems to the purely personal interest in one’s own family tree. Irrespective of it being accepted or denied, historical truth can, therefore, reckon with a readily receptive forum of social opinion operating with socially conventional thought-habits it formally endorses. Further (as theorists of mass social-psychology have argued), specialized experts are not distinguished by their eccentric intellectual or moral calibre, but by their opportunism, the alacrity with which they go with whatever socially, politically, commercially is going. In this respect, as Benda pointed out, ‘the [academic] clerisy has become just as laic as the [non-academic] laity itself’ [La vérité, c’est que les clercs sont devenus aussi laïcs que les laïcs] (Benda 1977: 282). And that, in a self-historicizing, technologically driven world, is inevitable. It is a world that requires technical functionability for its socio-economic system to work. Historical truth works because it demonstrates both in its disciplinary procedures and in the knowledge they produce the technocratic-managerial capacities – the functionability – that ensure the world works.

Preconditions for the production of historical sense Before proceeding to an analysis of the constitution of historical scholarship, the social-cognitive preconditions that sustain it need summarizing. That its essential function of producing sense whatever happens does not derive from a natural, common-sense attitude – albeit clarified by disciplinarity – needs to be stressed. The structure-logic determined by causality, sufficient reason and identity (cf. Chapter 3), the discourse-logic assured by a self-referential system of categorical coordinators (cf. Chapter 4), and the self-amplifying comprehension (cf. Chapter 5) they afford, all depend on a specific, socioeconomic world-arrangement and on the technocratic-managerial mentality it demands and affirms. These preconditions can be enumerated as follows. Situation Historical knowledge is already socially situated. It is situated not only in schools and universities where it becomes institutionalized, socialized, as usual knowledge. It is situated in terms of the world history (as knowledge

62 The technology of historical knowledge and as events) has arranged for itself – a historicized world. Already shaped [§1.4] by history, constantly historically superseding itself, driven automatically by its self-modernizing compulsion to keep historicizing itself, it would seem to disrupt all continuity, to make history (after all: the method of establishing continuities) obsolete. In fact, in a historicized world history thrives: it thrives precisely because it is challenged to make its historicized situation, the world in its self-historicized arrangement, make sense. It is propelled by the ever-onward inertial, but now useless, force of its sense-making habit, a left-over from its momentum gathered in the world prior to its total historicization. It thrives too because a world with an exponentially increasing population automatically produces an exponentially increasing number of historical agents. The increasingly more that happens as a result provides, by means of pragmatic abstraction, more data for its structural, discursive, and comprehending procedures to process, with more history as the outcome. Further, this increase in historical data only vindicates the comprehensive scope of history’s world-arrangement as it transcends and organizes according to its own designs the multifarious incidents that issue from the everyday world of personal, subjective experience it claims to represent or revive. In a historicized world, therefore, history becomes autonomous, selfperpetuating, a transcendent cognitive system sui generis, as remote from the world events it claims to analyse as from the subjective consciousness it is meant to inform. Social authority If history were just this cognitive remoteness from ordinary experience, if it just facilitated retreats into other times, it would merely gratify curiosity. It would have to be veracious, but not necessarily authoritative. But it is not surprising if, in a historicized world, history denotes a universally recognized authority. Its authority derives less from its cognitive reliability (since that is constantly undergoing historiographical readjustment) than from its disciplinary institutionalization. It comes as a recognized, paradigmatic technocratic-managerial vocation already integrated into a socio-economic system reliant on technocratic-managerial functions. Certainly the discipline exists to vouch for the veracity and integrity of the social historian-function, of its historical practices. Certainly too the academic standpoint vindicates the technocratic-managerial superiority of the view that produces the monograph, the typical cornerstone of historical knowledge and of academic practice. But neither disciplinary regulation nor the monographic view would have any credence if it were not socially affirmed. Or, rather, if history really dissented from capitalism’s world-arrangement, if it refused to make up for it with its own “universal human values” (as it does), it would be discounted. But here too history’s institutionalization is crucial. The university in particular offers a neutral space where the élites converge. Universities train people to be familiar with the dominant discourse, precisely because the

The technology of historical knowledge 63 dominant discourse of politics and economics is modelled on the practices, academic methods, and attitudes fostered by these institutions. As ‘neutral spaces’ or ‘common places’, universities produce an ‘objectivity effect’: positions adopted within the dominant (i.e. comprehensive) discourse ensure that its version of the world is presented as the objective way of the world, as the way things will inevitably turn out. Thus the dominant discourse pre-empts any future change that is not consonant with the technocratic-managerial change it is offering, which preserves the current self-interests of the socially dominant institutions (Bourdieu and Boltanski 2009: 98–9, 121–4). So the socio-economic affirmation of history is far from disinterested. Rather, since those in technocratic-managerial positions are the decisionmakers, they themselves are in a position to make calculated socio-economic changes which, by definition, are historicizing changes. The historian naturally complements their work by administering the changes they require in the overall world-arrangement under his or her specialized competency. Historical scholarship has, therefore, a crucial social function in defining and projecting what is worthy of public recognition. It is, therefore, recognized for its cognitive authority since it determines what cultures, what values, a society will recognize. History as a resource In the historicized world, history becomes not just an account of what happened, of how things were, but also a resource for determining what will happen, what might be. Historical knowledge can be instrumentalized with the intention of enforcing and directing history’s own self-historicization. It can take different forms (as the examples below demonstrate); but they all share the re-functioning of the ‘monographic view’ as a motivation for political or socio-economic action. Genocide, the attempt more or less comprehensively to diminish a people’s geo-political claims or to erase a social group from the historical record, has apparently become a fairly routine strategic option in numerous ongoing conflicts in the world. It entails not just the elimination of populations, but also the confiscation or destruction of the material basis of their historical culture (e.g. places of worship, sacred texts, libraries, monuments). With its technocratic-managerial organization and its systematic execution, the Jewish Holocaust organized by the Nazi regime is paradigmatic. It intended a “rebalancing” of European culture. It meant excising the “degenerate” Judaic strand from its symbiotic relationship with Classical Greek and Roman culture to replace it with a new, technologically enhanced, “biologically vital” Germanic component. The historicization the extermination programme implemented was meant to reconfigure the world as though the Jews had never existed, to ensure their total historical occlusion. It presents a new aspect of the truism that human beings make history. It demonstrates what has to happen, what a historicized world with its panoply of precedents permits, if human beings

64 The technology of historical knowledge decide to test its literal truth – to make not just history, but the history they (their social or ethnic group, their political leaders) want. History, then, is an instrument for reconfiguring the world, for rehistoricizing an already historicized world, in line with interests intent on domination. Further, it also has the capacity to amplify these interests, to make more of them, to make them justifiable. Vindicated by their constantly self-renewing, historical pedigree, a wide range of social and political values also comes with significant commercial-economic values: e.g. heritage, tradition, cultural and national identity, tourism, commodity fetishism. But the most egregious political example of history’s capacity for self-amplification is totalitarianism (cf. Schmitt 1996: 78–9). In this case, historical comprehension works less as a technical, monographic means of managing the way things used to be, than as an accelerator that galvanizes its current operation. Totalitarianism here amplifies it by reconceptualizing it as preparatory for the way things will be, as the hitherto unprecedented attempt to erect a new structure of historical comprehension, a deliberate act of historicization. But precisely this future-driven amplification is pre-emptively occlusive: the hitherto open world, a world yet to be, is requisitioned by the way it already is, let alone by the historicizations that have already preceded it. Its disaster is incurred through sacrificing the way things hopefully might yet be to the way they are currently presupposed they will be, will have to be. Certainly, there is nothing worse than expunging an ethnic group or political opposition from the historical record. But just as disastrous is the ongoing historicizing agenda as mapped out in any target-driven, global economic planning that demands the erasure of any dissent from its own self-interested self-projection – that has thereby already foreclosed on vital, social-existential alternatives for the immediate future and beyond. That history can be withheld from some peoples or amplified for the sake of dominant political and commercial interests, goes with a world, an already historicized world, in which the metaphysical principles supposed to guarantee the integrity of historical comprehension – the principles of causality, sufficient reason, identity – have lost credibility. Hence history proves to be a most adaptable, pliable technology, a technology of technologies. Consequently, it is inevitable that the historicization effected by information technology should, for the sake of information, have infiltrated historical work, become symbiotic with it. Technological reason surely has hijacked Hegel’s metaphysical ‘historical reason’ as the driving force of history (Berardi 2009: 71, 73; cf. Chapter 3 below). Moreover, the technical facilities provided by – amongst others – Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and the internet as a whole, now determine the function, capacity, and circulation of historical comprehension. History itself has become dependent on a historicizing – a permanently self-historicizing – technology that it cannot control, that it cannot pre-empt. In a self-historicizing world history has “gone viral”: henceforth it works and moves in this viral form, epidemiologically.

The technology of historical knowledge 65 Subjective experience marginalized Those who experience a catastrophic public event or a national celebration might well say they have “experienced history”, that they have experienced it for themselves, not indirectly (e.g. from a book). But this description is not an immediate sensation. It contains the self-distanciated reflection that “what is happening now is so significant that it will be recognized as historical”. In these cases, “historical” simply is an epithet for “significant” and so, in that sentence, is redundant. Conversely, as vindicated by social and economic historians’ interest in past ways of life, the current routine world of work, what happens every day, is also by definition historical: in multitudinous ways it keeps the world, hence its history, going. Nevertheless, for its historical value to be recognized reflective self-detachment is still required. Life in the mining communities in South Wales (e.g.) – impoverished and dangerous as the work that supported it was – becomes historically, culturally significant (e.g. as a heritage [§3.2]) only when that whole industrial enterprise, that whole system of work (not to mention) exploitation, has come to an end. Hence, history – unlike any systematic science – seems to possess a unique cognitive advantage. Apparently, it informs, and is informed by, ordinary everyday life. At the same time, it produces, and is produced by, an administrative gaze predicated on distanciated reflection that categorizes and evaluates its data through a comprehensive system of coordination. In the historicized world, though, the administrative gaze, the basis of history’s technocratic-managerial procedures of comprehension, predominates. Moreover, these comprehensive procedures, being organized in terms of specialized expertise, abstract their data from ordinary experience where subjectively it makes existential sense in order to distil from it a subjecttranscendent, comprehensive historical sense. Though derived from the everyday world, history as a science – albeit a human science – like other sciences, particularly the natural sciences, has developed such that it now determines the world of immediately lived experience on which it is ultimately founded, not least the world as ordinarily experienced by historians and scientists themselves. This capacity of both the human and natural sciences to predetermine immediate experience and the subjective consciousness that supports it constitutes (as Husserl argued) the crisis of European science: the tendency for science to form a self-referential, autonomous cognitive system remote from and occluding the human sphere that alone makes it make sense. Certainly history claims to represent the world of immediate experience. Its identitary logic aims to describe what things, being the way they were, were like. But its comprehensive scope, driven by its technocratic-managerial capacity, has the reverse effect. Automatically (as James suggested) it integrates ordinary experience into its abstract disciplinary, categorically coordinated designs. Thus from the marginalization of subjectivity, from

66 The technology of historical knowledge the neutralization of human self-determination, historical comprehension ensures subjectivity, personal consciousness, will be re-functioned into historicized consciousness, a historical hyper-consciousness. Certainly, history – at the same time – can offer some compensation. It can claim to be “bringing the past back to life”, it can acknowledge “nostalgia” for the way things used to be. But this compensatory-effect is self-induced. It would be unnecessary if ordinary personal experience integrated into history’s comprehensive designs, however veracious, did not appear subjectively inauthentic, either sorted into impersonal categories of comprehension (e.g. statistics, trends, patterns) or depicted in terms of typical cases, of exemplary illustrations, if it had not already become dependent on history’s narcotics of yesteryear. Here too history works the way the world works. The comprehensive integration of subjective experience into the world arranged by the technocratic-managerial procedures of disciplinary history is homologous with the comprehensive integration of the worker, the “cognitariat”, into the megamachine of the all-pervasive capitalist economy, it too directed by homologous technocratic-managerial strategies. Hence, the specific psychopathology that afflicts the thus historicized life of the individual, his or her historicized consciousness. The cognitive reflex in subjective consciousness that accords history precedence automatically prioritizes the technocratic-managerial procedures that assimilate that subjectivity to their own socio-economic world-arrangement. History’s comprehensive self-determination Assimilating all values, objects, and issues to history’s world-arrangement, the historicized world, comprehension is self-determined to make them all the same, all equivalent, all interchangeable, all alike. It promotes the specialized expertise needed to maintain its technological infrastructure, its administrative organization. It produces a resource of values, styles, images, analogies, that can be exploited by political and commercial interests promoting their own self-affirmation through “heritage”, tradition, tourism, fashion, design, and community “identities”. And for its resources historical comprehension relies on already existing administrative orders such as libraries, museums, and archives; for its interests it accounts for social institutions (as already bureaucratic organizations) and their technocratic management. At the same time, by this means it refines and extends its own information-management system – a veritable technology of technologies – its own comprehensive disciplinary organization represents. As history shows, disciplinary knowledge works as the socio-economic system works: the reason inherent in the rationality that articulates ‘reasoned argument’ also drives the logic inherent in technical, bureaucratic and economic systems. History thus produces the same, and for several mutually self-reinforcing reasons. Operating through its own self-justifying logic, by means of its own system organization, for the sake of its comprehensive

The technology of historical knowledge 67 purpose, it determines itself. Further, its academic system offers nothing different from other bureaucratic or technocratic systems. Then, given that history is whatever happens, history – whatever happens – due to its constitutive structure-logic and discursive logic can be nothing different, just history all the same. Finally, irrespective of an author’s particular personal or subjective interests, the cognitive intention of history’s logic, organization, and comprehensive purpose is automatically socially affirmative. In thus constantly reproducing the same, in predetermining itself as sameness, history deters any of its professional practitioners from reassessing its premises or intentions. It justifies historians’ reluctance to apply their critical capacities to a critical evaluation of the cognitive validity of their own work. It demonstrates why, for the ultimate self-vindication of the cognitive value of history, historians default to “humanity”, the ideal category of sameness, of comprehensive historical identity. History, therefore, typifies technical, specialized knowledge – knowledge that works, that directs and (in historical terms) evaluates the socio-economic system – as ‘knowledge that does not know itself’ – knowledge abstracted and remote from ordinary experience that intentionally conceals from itself its real social-psychological consequences and ramifications (Gorz 1983: 237). As the dominant technocratic-managerial form of knowledge, it cannot permit itself to recognize any other foundational cognitive practice that might enlighten it.

Notes 1 The italicized words and numbers in square brackets refer to the scheme of categorical coordinators in the first section of Chapter 4. 2 http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/What-We-Do/Pages/What-we-do.aspx (accessed 13.12.2013). 3 http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/funding-opportunities/research-funding/themes/care-forthe-future/Pages/Care-for-the-Future.aspx (accessed 13.12.2013). What exactly is ‘a temporally-inflected lens’? 4 http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funded-Research/Pages/Funded-Research.aspx (accessed 13.12.2013). 5 For example: one historical subject (e.g. history of England) can assume many different predicates (e.g. a social history, economic history, political history, etc., and within different time periods). 6 ‘By the post-recession 1990s there could be no outsider position any more, no opposition to the market; again the reserve army was called up and everyone’s presence was required in the big corporate hospitality tent [. . .]. Even those who did not particularly want to live the aspirational dream were forced to go with the flow’ (Southwood 2011: 45). For a different but comparable take on total integration, see Jünger 1982: 103ff., 150ff., 302. 7 For a more detailed critique, see Davies 2012.

3

The logic of historical knowledge Causality, rationality, identity

That it makes sense makes history work. This is the basic conviction of historical scholarship, the article of faith of a historicized world fixated on historical precedent. It generates the momentum for a self-historicizing world to produce itself through the historical precedents it creates, through the historical precedents it has a compulsive need to create. This conviction has two implications: (a) that history works because it makes sense; (b) that in making sense history works. Proposition (a) implies there is a logic to human intentions as they manifest themselves in the course of time. So history works. In discerning this logic, history has meaning, direction, and purpose. It can, therefore, be an effective resource, a cognitive and ethical resource for humanity as a whole, offering lessons from “the Past” that need learning or suggesting guidance for “the Future”. This proposition also vindicates the effort of historical scholarship that reconstitutes these erstwhile intentions and affirms their precedence. It thus demonstrates how historical work works. Proposition (b) redefines the situation described in the final section of the preceding chapter. To satisfy the species-existential reassurance that there is meaning, direction, and purpose in human action as a whole history has to make sense. So, to make sense of it, history must be put to work. History (or more precisely historical scholarship) is itself, like technical science in principle, also ‘evidently a proven, very useful and, therefore, reliable machine that anyone can learn to operate properly’ [ein offenbar sehr Nützliches leistenden und darin verläßlichen Maschine, die jedermann lernen kann, richtig zu handhaben] (Husserl 2012b: 56). As argued in the preceding chapter, history is a technology developed for the express purpose of making sense, producing coherence on its own technical terms whether or not it actually exists. These two propositions reveal a fault-line that defines historical cognition. In books about what history is or in defence of history it runs through the conventional, habitual argument. To simplify for the sake of brevity, it goes like this. On the one hand, history has to be “objective” to disclose the truth of what actually happened because what actually happened evinces meaning, direction, and purpose. “Objective” history is

The logic of historical knowledge 69 “good” history. That historians have to square up to this challenging task, to achieve their necessarily comprehensive, meta-historical viewpoint – their “administrative gaze”, their “monographic view” – vindicates their professional authority, their ethical probity, their social credibility. On the other, historical scholarship that produces meaning, direction, and purpose irrespective of their actual existence is definitely “subjective”, possibly “biased”, ultimately “ideological”. “Subjective” history is, therefore, “bad” history. It is a form of illusion, a form of self-delusion. But precisely here convention gets fuzzy. “Subjective” history does still serve a purpose. It leads historians regretfully to admit that they cannot dissociate themselves completely from their own, time-bound, place-specific perspective. At the same time, because of this admission, applying disciplinary correction to “subjective”, “biased”, or “ideological” history serves only to embellish their professional credibility and reinforce the “objective historical truth” it discloses. Socially conditioned by capitalist economics, this argument goes nowhere, changes nothing. It seems designed to go nowhere – unless to affirm as natural the institutionalized character of historical scholarship. In the given terms of the argument, the “objective”/“subjective” antithesis is by definition irreconcilable, a recipe for redundancy. It is a further example of how knowledge produced under capitalist social conditions conceals – not least from itself – the very conditions that produce it. Analysing the logical validity of historical knowledge will show the “objective”/“subjective” antithesis is irrelevant. Because their combination produces redundancy, the two propositions that describe how history works give rise to further questions about just how it works. History is supposed to be a convenient machine for producing sense (irrespective of its “objective” existence). But how do we know it is in neutral, disengaged (impartial) as it should be if historical scholarship discovers a valuable cognitive and ethical resource in the actual sense of the way things were the way they were? The fact is: there is no way of knowing. Further still, why would historians – as specialized technical experts relying on all kinds of machines in their work (e.g. databases, online resources, catalogues, archives, computers, word-processing programmes, etc.) – wish, where the history machine is concerned, to deprive themselves of additional, highly effective technological assistance? This predicament affects primarily “objective” history, history as a supposedly reliable cognitive and ethical resource. It generates an existential apprehension: if history works, how hard should it work? If history makes “objective” sense, how much sense should it make? Technologically boosted, how much sense could it make? And who decides how hard and how much? This generates a further apprehension: perhaps history does not produce enough sense? (Press the question really hard: what sense is discerned in the neat, massive graveyards distributed across northeastern France? What does the gigantic Ossuaire at Verdun really mean?) Hence, even “objective” history comes to rely on history’s own technological

70 The logic of historical knowledge capacity not just for producing sense, but for comprehensively amplifying its sense-productivity. Here, though, caution is necessary. The argument is moving ahead of itself. The history ‘machine’ seems to be taking over, its calculations outpacing reflection. Talking about meaning, direction, and purpose in history might imply that they really do exist in and for themselves, even if elucidating them might be problematic. But is there an autochthonous sense in history? Why even make that assumption, just because it seems natural? “Natural” here is just a synonym for a mental reflex – inadequate for explaining anything. Rather the evidence suggests something different: that whatever meaning, direction, and purpose can be elicited from history, from the way things were, is already invested in it by the interpretative procedures – the ‘thought acts’ (Husserl 1986a: 75), the ‘psychic additions’ – conditioned by the history discipline itself. The history machine is, therefore, never disengaged, can never function in neutral. It always does generate sense whether or not it exists in and for itself (cf. proposition (b) above). Even if historical events were completely senseless the way they were, the disciplinary technology would still produce meaning, direction, and purpose on their behalf. The history technology employed by disciplinary scholarship resorts to two types of logic in order to generate and amplify historical sense: (i) Discourse-logic (to be analysed in Chapter 4) relies on categorial coordinators. These semantic devices – figures of speech and thought, ‘thought acts’ to constitute its object, ‘psychic additions’ to interpret its sourcematerial – enable the historical account syntactically, in its discursive self-articulation, to project the image of an “objective”, “external” referent. (ii) Structure-logic, the topic to be analysed here, underpins these discursive categorical coordinators. It projects the image of comprehensive sensestructures to provide a rationale for the “objective”, “external” referents they identify. Its comprehensive rationale includes evolution [§2.1], generation [§2.1], process [§2.1], progress [§2.1], origins [§3.1], tradition [§3.1] already functioning as categories coordinating historical data.1 The sense of history is thus further vindicated. The “objective” referents identified by means of categorical coordinators lock seamlessly into these comprehensive (administrative, monographic) frameworks [§3.1]. And this structure-logic claims to be absolutely authoritative. It presupposes three categorical premises: (a) the historical world evinces ‘universal idealized causality’, so everything that happens has a cause (or causes) that explains it; (b) causality as a means of explanation confirms that history in itself possesses sufficient reason for it to make sense; (c) the mind discerns in history causality and reason in and for itself through the fundamental identity of world and self, reality and thought, through the principle of identity (Husserl 2012b: 42).

The logic of historical knowledge 71

‘Universal idealized causality’ History works by being interrogative. It is orientated by causality. It attempts to answer simple questions: What? Why? How? In addressing them, history mobilizes its panoply of coordinators to lend coherence to its self-articulation, such as factors [§1.2] and forces [§2.1], catalysts [§2.2] and turning points [§2.2]. It constructs a comprehensive framework [§3.1] to contextualize them, such as evolution [§2.1], historical process [§2.1], a transition [§2.1], a period [§1.1]. Moreover, the quest for a cause seems nothing special, in fact quite natural. It regularly orientates behaviour natural in the world of everyday life. (Why did the car not start? Why did she return so late? What happened to the money left on the table?) History would constitute meaning through causality not least because that habitually, naturally, happens in routine behaviour in ordinary experience. However usual interrogative procedures might be (particularly in ordinary life), causality cannot be taken at face value. Certainly, it seems to work in ordinary experience. The heat “explains” why an ice-cube melts in a small bowl of warm water. Subjectively, though, the cognitive situation is more complicated. You say “the ice-cube has melted”: your co-observer subsequently sees only water in a bowl. What happened to the cube? What happens when it “melts”? The “objectively” simple event is perceptually (subjectively) complex. It requires cognitive input by the observer that transcends the particular event: memory (of the cube before), geometry (cube), narrative structure (“melt” referring conventionally to the dissolving molecular structure), but also the underlying continuity of personal (subjective) time-consciousness to follow the transformative sequence, to sustain the idea of identity between (visible) ice-cube (frozen) and (now invisible) ice-cube (melted). But even objectively the cognitive situation is not simple. Does this phenomenon occur under these identical conditions with other solids? If not, why not, etc.? Further, causality itself is an imprecise concept. In natural science it discloses predictable regularities in physical processes that can be replicated and verified. In history human agents, their intentions, and their situations have in any case an inherently unpredictable, social-psychological dimension. The specific chain of events causality identifies cannot be replicated. Moreover, the construction of causality may imply multiple different, specific chains of events. So instead historians look out for “likenesses”: for “analogies”, “parallels”, “equivalences”, but above all “precedents”. Further, as a means of comprehension in itself, causality is not selfsufficient. It relies totally on a transcendental metaphysical principle, concisely defined by St Augustine addressing God in his Confessions: ‘Does anything exist by any other cause than that you exist?’ (Augustine 1966: 257; XI. 4). The very notion of a ‘universal idealized causality’ derives from the rationalist systems of philosophy later formulated by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz (amongst others). That it works still affirms the necessary postulate that the ultimate cause of everything that exists is God Himself – that

72 The logic of historical knowledge it works because the world God created works (Leibniz 1969a: 87). The world, natural and human, discloses its sense through the principle of causality because it is founded ultimately on the divine logos that originally caused it. The world as it presents itself is the extensive material facet of the mind of God. As Spinoza points out in his Ethics: ‘The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.’ The reason is: ‘the idea of each thing caused depends on a knowledge of the cause whereof it is the effect’. Additionally ‘God’s power of thinking is equal to his power of acting. That is, whatever follows formally from God’s infinite nature follows objectively in God from his ideas of the same order and with the same connection.’ Since the material and intellectual worlds, despite their different attributes, are essentially ‘the same substance’, it follows that they will evince ‘one and the same order, or one and the same connection of causes, that is, that the same things follow one another’ (Spinoza 1996; 35; P7). The historical world ultimately depends on a transcendental or pantheistic structure to vindicate the eidetic legitimacy of causality that sustains both the way it works and the way its history works. This is, though, the world that has been historicized, has become a thing of “the Past” – and with it the metaphysical structure that made it make sense. Rationalist metaphysics might seem far removed from the (redundant) question of “objective historical truth”. But (as Husserl argues in The Crisis in the European Sciences) this rationalism did crucially contribute to the modern conception of science, a conception of object-orientated science that still persists, though more recent theories have long since surpassed its explanatory power. As rationalist metaphysics supposes, God creating a logically ordered world would be meaningless unless human beings could appreciate it. (As Leibniz argued, the failure to appreciate this world as the ‘best possible’ results from human beings’ innate incapacity to view it from God’s metaphysical viewpoint.) Therefore, the divine logos that produced the world had also to be invested in the human mind. Its logical operation would thus be automatically aligned with the logical operation of the world. Further, as Galileo, Kepler, and Newton (amongst others) demonstrated, the means of access to the mind of God, of comprehending the universal, constituent chains of causality, was mathematics. And in fact, the success of mathematics to understand nature confirmed itself as the definitive model of objective science, an effective means of extending knowledge. Certainly, Kant’s critical deconstruction of pure reason demonstrates that, because it is impossible to exceed the anthropic limits of human consciousness, ‘the ultimate presuppositions of the possibility and reality of objective knowledge cannot be objectively known’ (Husserl 2012b: 103). Nevertheless, in elucidating by means of the natural scientific method the rational laws and procedures of human understanding itself, Kant’s critique of pure reason still vindicates knowledge that, independently of God, whether or not His existence could be proved, works objectively within the horizons of the human mind, within the scope of anthropic reality. Kant, therefore, evinces a “proto-technological”

The logic of historical knowledge 73 concept of specialized, operative knowledge. Mathematical and geometrical rules set up for understanding the objective world together with a subjective mind operating with the same rules to orientate itself in it define a cognitive practice designed to produce sense within its own rational limits.2 This technological structure in natural science (and endorsed by philosophy, particularly in epistemology) automatically extends itself to the human sciences. How else could they be “sciences”, unless they conformed to the dominant, technological model, as an ‘ideal complex of meanings’ [eine ideale Komplexion von Bedeutungen] (Husserl 2009: II. 1, 100)? Certainly, disciplines such as history, sociology, politics, economics, psychology, linguistics do operate with quantifiable data such as statistics, laws, regularities, trends, processes, syndromes, complexes. But these disciplines then confront a paradox: the very sciences that deal with human concerns do not relate to ordinary, immediate human experience, to the everyday world of human existence with its ‘collateral contemporaneity’. As soon as they make contact with it, for the sake of “objectivity” and to make it meaningful they have to break it up and rearrange it according to their preformed administrative, monographic categories, to their corrective, disciplinary procedures. Furthermore, unlike scientific laws this data has little predictive value: its interrogations are retrospective. Nevertheless, these disciplines designate this practice as conducive to “objectivity”. In reality, though, the persistent technological model of (natural) science essentially offers the human sciences a plausible scientific thought-style. As noted earlier, this includes: • • •

sets of discursive and conceptual rules, discipline-specific technical terms (illustrated by categorical coordinators); permissible disciplinary perspectives, approaches, and authorities; already recognized problems that project logical meaning and purpose.

The “objectivity” professed by the human sciences not just to validate their technical knowledge, but also to block the extraneous intuitions of immediate experience, is nothing but the vacant sign of an illusory aspiration. History – specifically – is the one human science that apparently avoids this disciplinary self-delusion. It offers a short-cut through the logic of causality. It foregoes negotiating epistemological calculations that align human reason with an apparently objective, metaphysical order. Instead, it elaborates a cognitive strategy with this issue already resolved. This strategy is formulated (for example) by Ortega y Gasset in ‘History as a System’. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘has no nature; what he has is . . . history. Expressed differently: ‘what nature is to things, history, res gestae, is to man’. Citing St Augustine to suggest ‘the possible application of theological concepts to human reality’ he concludes that, like God, ‘man finds that he has no nature other than what he has done’ (Ortega y Gasset 1962: 217). History is thus the constant self-production of human nature. As God stands in relation to the nature He created, so human beings stand in relationship to history: history is the

74 The logic of historical knowledge nature human beings create. Faith in a metaphysical design yields to credence for a historical project of human self-determination. The causality in history is already supplied by human beings: the human mind recognizes it because it itself has already supplied it. The protracted elaboration of this strategy, however, is contemporaneous with the reformation of rationalist philosophy. It required what Vico called A New Science – history – that would chart the development of the human species as a whole (just as the Bible narrated Jewish history). The first principle of this science is ‘that this world of nations has certainly been made of men, and its guise must therefore be found within the modifications of our own human mind. And history cannot be more certain than when he who creates the things also narrates them’ (Vico 1984: 104; §349). Here Spinoza’s theory is automatically, empirically realized: here the ‘connection of ideas’ will necessarily be the same as the ‘order and connection of things’; the ‘world of extension’ will be congruent with the ‘world of thought’. This strategy by-passes the rationalist-metaphysical discussion about the relationship between mind and nature. History (disciplined historical science), therefore, pretends to avoid disciplinary self-delusion over its objective truth claims. It combines the metaphysical-rational ethos of natural science with the metaphysical-religious ethos of transcendental design. Both are affirmed by what Husserl calls ‘universal inductivity’, the discovery in ordinary experience of isolated facts that, taken together, suggest the presence of a scientific law or a transcendental design (Husserl 2012b: 41). Since pantheism is a specific example of this inductivity, it might be called the ‘pantheistic principle’. From the contemplation of objects and creatures in nature it infers the existence of God because (as Spinoza argues) ‘particular things are nothing but affections of God’s attributes or modes by which God’s attributes are expressed in a certain and determinate way’ (Spinoza 1996: 19, I, P25, Cor.). This principle operates in historical science by proposing analogies between events and their intentions to disclose a pattern of sense in the human world, an ideal, transcendental dynamic that produces it, but above all the thrilling, numinous experience of history itself (Mannheim 1984: 150–1). Trading on its rational, objective credibility produced by a cognitive attitude that infers a comprehensive, transcendental design from heterogeneous data it already defines as historical, the formidable authority of history seems beyond doubt. Nevertheless, that it offers itself as a ‘natural attitude’ is anything but natural. History could not work at all without its ideal, rational-metaphysical armature and its self-affirming inductive procedures. That this technical apparatus seems natural comes really from the force of cognitive habit, from a set of routine, repetitive reflexes that persist as though they had the force of an objective law, that through their persistence acquire the force of an objective law (Peirce 1992: 327ff.). Certainly, the postmodernist critique of history – not to mention a dissenting tendency in philosophical thought represented inter alia by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Valéry – shows that this rational-metaphysical background and the

The logic of historical knowledge 75 inductive procedures it legitimizes have long since ceased to be automatically defensible in their original form. In fact, for Whitehead, induction, ‘the process of reasoning from the sample to the whole species’, is ‘the despair of philosophy’, even if ‘all our activities are based upon it’. All anyone observes is samples (i.e. items of heterogeneous data), though it is never clear just how anyone could conclude ‘that the abstract conditions, which hold for the samples, also hold for all other entities which, for some reason or other, appear to us to be of the same sort’ (Whitehead 1967: 23). But history keeps functioning in its own way undeterred. History works as society works: it works with society, habitually, “naturally”. And society operates with the unstable synchronous co-existence [Gleichzeitigkeit] of asynchronous, often regressive, recalcitrant elements [Ungleichzeitigkeit] (Bloch 1977: 104ff., 111ff., 213ff.). Ensconced in our living rooms at the beginning of the twenty-first century we can watch indifferently on infotainment 24/7 news programmes sequences of images now relating to the future possibility of routine sub-orbital space-flights, now displaying scenes emanating from the Middle-East and Central Africa of medieval barbarity. Orientated by “the Past”, history is just one, albeit dominant, type of intellectual and ethical regression, itself facilitated by the very latest technology. It comes always ready to impose on its heterogeneous matter already recognized precedents [§3.1], traditions [§3.1], and customs [§3.1] – its own inertia precluding any possible deviation towards change. However, history’s unique strategy apparently offering a short-cut to “objectivity”, hence to “objective truth”, succumbs to disciplinary self-delusion. What it projects as natural and constructive is delivered ultimately by a metaphysical rationalism with a socially and intellectually regressive bent. But besides this, the discussion so far may have given the impression that, even though swathed in rational-scientific and metaphysical-theological complexities, causality might still justify history’s interrogative procedures. But this impression would be false. The principle of causality is itself deceptive, both in a metaphysical sense and in terms of human intention. According to rationalist premise and theological principle, God is the first cause: the divine logos first created everything. Ideally, therefore, reason – hence too the cause – always takes precedence, always comes first. By analogy, therefore, for historical cognition “the Past” – as the “cause” of the present – also always takes precedence, always comes first. Determining the cause, elucidating how things were the way they were, is already an historical, interrogative procedure. However, in immediate experience and in history (on the plane of events, of res gestae) what happens first, what first comes into consciousness, is the effect: it precedes any cause necessarily supposed after the event. This reservation towards the principle of causality is integral to philosophical scepticism. In his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus exposes its circular logic to show that the apparently incontrovertible, eidetic connection between events in sequence is illusory. To know a cause means knowing its effect really is its effect; but to know the effect of a cause as its effect

76 The logic of historical knowledge means knowing that this cause did have this particular effect. In other words, ‘to conceive the Cause we must first know the effect, while in order to know the effect we must [. . .] have previous knowledge of the Cause’. With this ‘circular mode of reasoning’ causes and effects fall apart: ‘since each of them needs the evidence of the other, we shall not be able to say which conception is to have the precedence’ (Sextus Empiricus 2000: 338–9; III, 20–2). Conversely, if a cause cannot be inferred just from the effect as an incident in itself, a pattern of accompanying phenomena attendant also on previous similar incidents may reveal it. Here too, though, the evidence of ‘pattern’ and ‘similarity’ are subjective cognitive judgements predicated on identity. Further, as mentioned in connection with the example of the ice-cube melting, though the warmth of the water “explains” the ice dissolving, the mind must still retain the identity of the cube in its frozen and melted state that is the basis of the explanation. Causality as a mental act thus places a conceptual scheme over a puzzling reality to rationalize it – in the case of history to make it make historical sense. It must first invest the profusion of data, its heterogeneous samples, with rational coherence in order to produce from them a comprehensive, explanatory design. For example: extreme weather events have this year (2014) occurred across the planet – the melting of the Arctic ice-cap, the inundation of New York, the typhoon in the Philippines, the Polar Vortex producing catastrophic snow-falls and low temperatures across the USA, almost unprecedented high temperatures in Australia. But scientists are reluctant to regard them as the indubitable effects of global warming, i.e. to infer by induction from these particular events a comprehensive, transcendental explanatory design. Certainly, global temperatures are rising, which seems to be the effect of greenhouse gases produced by industrialization. However, weather itself can also produce extraordinary fluctuations. There appear to be too many variables to construct a categorical cause–effect identity. The question, though, remains: what would have to happen for a single catastrophic weather event to be the certain, experienced effect of the abstract conceptual cause, irreversible climate change? Conversely, if a car fails to start the cause can usually easily be found and remedied (e.g. no petrol, a flat battery) because the engine is a priori designed by human ingenuity with limited variables both for its basic repetitive, regular function and for the attendant symptoms of malfunction. Still, to diagnose the cause of the failure, the driver needs to know how the engine works. In both cases, between cause and effect there is no natural, self-evident connection: a purely mental, analytical, or diagnostic act must still align them. In fact the principle of causality raises a whole new set of questions. What defines its dynamics? Do momentous events have momentous causes and commonplace events commonplace causes? Or do major effects result from minor causes or minor effects from major causes? Or is there any law necessarily coordinating or varying the apparent relationship between “momentous” and “commonplace”, “major” and “minor”? In any case, who

The logic of historical knowledge 77 or what evaluates with authority their respective significance? The evidence suggests that the history disciplinary technology, specifically here the principle of causality and the historicized world with which it is concerned, the historicized world that is concerned with it, are in themselves disconnected. It seems rather that ‘all final causes are nothing but human fictions’ (Spinoza 1996: 27; I, P36, Appendix).

The insufficiency of reason History is a sense-making technology, a technology designed to make sense whether or not it “objectively” exists – to make sense whatever happened, whatever happens. The technology generates historical reason. Hopefully it generates sufficient reason, as Vico and Ortega y Gasset assume it does, so that a pattern of causality can be inferred from human intention, from the way the world has got to be. Hopefully the technology is adequate for its task: it seems doubtful. To make it make sense, philosophers and historians have programmed it deliberately. Hence, history can demonstrate multiple historicist agendas, each with its own origin and goal: • • • • • • • • • • •

as the trajectory of divine providence; as the path of human moral and intellectual progress; as an organic body that develops through successive stages of development and decline; as the ultimate self-fulfilment of the world-spirit; as an instrument for the economic and moral reconfiguration of the world; as the ideological affirmation of bourgeois culture and its imperialist ambitions; as the culmination of the neo-liberal combination of democracy, consumerism, and the commercialization of all values; as the affirmation of national identity; as the instrument of racial superiority; as the record of human self-determination; but perhaps not least, as the common memory of common humanity.

These conceptions of history persist, serving various political and social purposes. Their current validity depends on whether or not those who endorse any particular one deny its complicity with the human disasters, with the culture of the death drive, with the irreversible ideological contamination of the world of ordinary experience – with the persisting historicizing ethos. Equally, from the historical viewpoint, if history evinced no meaning, if it could not depend on historicism in some form or other, everyone would be apprehensive. Except for orthodox religious observance (which can work without history even if founded on past events), history is the last, the final

78 The logic of historical knowledge structure of metaphysical meaning, of a sense exceeding but also augmenting immediate experience in the everyday world everyone routinely inhabits. If it did not evince a transcendental metaphysical, historicist design, history would amount to nothing but the intolerable, desolate ‘regime of blind indeterminacy’ [Regierung des blinden Ungefährs] (Kant 1977b: 35, 43; §1, §7). Hence, when an event marking the passing of a phase (cf. epoch, period [§1.1]) in world history – e.g. the death of Nelson Mandela – occurs, it is experienced as an epiphany, as the momentary revelation of the historical dimension within the everyday world that, always comprehended by it, still in its ordinary business finds its grand designs barely legible. Hence the apprehension in a totally historicized world: if history does not ultimately make sense, what sense remains in anything? Precisely this question motivates this analysis of this human science. This question cannot be averted. If there is no sense in history, there is no point in the ‘history technology’, in the historian-function, fabricating some kind of sense, any kind of sense, just because the reality of senselessness, the encounter with nihilism, is too awful to contemplate. In a purely ethical sense, the point of ‘too awful to contemplate’ has long since been passed: the prevailing culture of the death drive has been an all-pervasive form of intellectual and moral de-sensitization. Hence, the need here for a reductive method: to see how history works, to establish whether or not its work is redundant. On the one hand, as suggested above, its self-determined historicist designs overall produce indeterminacy. They conflict with and negate each other: their plurality cancels their individual sense-potential. Their sense-potential must, in any case, have been inadequate: its incontrovertible realization is in the senseless violence it legitimized, in the desolation and aggression that is death-drive culture. On the other hand, if it is to make any sense, history cannot renounce historicism entirely. Consequently, these grand, deterministic schemes come down to figures of historical discourse, to ‘thought acts’ and ‘psychic additions’, that structure categorical coordinators (cf. Chapter 4). But much more common is history’s reliance on conventional logic habits. Abandoning the remorseless dialectical legitimation of conflict, it relies on the apparently more routine principles of causality, sufficient reason, and identity. After all, if they are routine, if they orientate habitual, conventional cognitive behaviour in the everyday world, historical scholarship, itself a nonspecial activity in this world, can count on them. However, as the analysis of causality implies, the basic principles may also be inadequate instruments for the work history’s work requires them to perform. Here, “objective science” founders on its own self-contradiction. It does connect with the world of ordinary experience in its collateral contemporaneity, but only to break it up into its preconceived categories of comprehension as defined by its own ‘monographic perspective’. Consequently, it cannot then for the sake of its own self-orientation return to this now re-functioned, preconceptualized, no longer immediate reality for a principle it has not already compromised.

The logic of historical knowledge 79 Implicit in the validity of comprehensive historicist designs or the basic principle of causality is, therefore, a critical question: can reason (let alone dialectical historical reason) ever suffice for historical sense to be credible? The principle of sufficient reason states that for anything to exist there must be a sufficient reason for its existence. It is a deterministic principle that excludes chance and arbitrariness (Prigogine and Stengers 1992: 176). It determines that what exists is meant to exist, the very objective character of existing objects. Like the principle of causality, it is underpinned by the divine logos: the existence of God offers sufficient reason for the existence of the world and for what happens in it. In a purely rationalist sense it provides the basis for accounting for what happens: an explanation is satisfactory when it is backed up by sufficient analysis and evidence. But in this sense its axiomatic basis shifts from something transcendental (i.e. God, logos) to something arbitrary, subjective. (What seems sufficiently rational to one person may seem deficient to someone else from a different perspective, through a different interpretative strategy.) The sense of parity signified by Vico or Ortega y Gasset between human action and the human rational understanding of it, of the intentions and motives that caused it, collapses. Where, boosted by technology – including historical scholarship, the technology of technologies – and reliant on disciplinary, accountable regulation, reality created by human beings exceeds anything anyone normally understands. So the question of rational sufficiency becomes central but also indeterminate (Heidegger 1997: 194ff.). The issue is basic: how much reason explains what happens? How do we know if the reason it requires is sufficient, is adequate for the explanatory task? And – even if it were conventionally, habitually supposed to be sufficient – how would anyone know whether or not it really is? After all, that history works as it works does not mean it is adequate to its self-imposed task. Nothing assesses how efficiently, how effectively, it actually works. But suppose that reality were inherently unstable, suppose that what had happened, that what has always happened, conflicted with this cognitive ideal (Prigogine and Stengers 1992: 176–7). Then the history disciplinary technology, specifically here the principles of causality and of sufficient reason, would not be unambiguously connected to the historicized world it refers to. If it is accepted, Ortega y Gasset’s argument, synthesizing liberal-humanism and existentialism, does imply that history will always produce reason sufficient to make itself make sense. History (as events, res gestae) as the creation of a uniquely human sphere, a dimension of nature that human beings have created for themselves, for their own purposes, implies that historical scholarship (as a comprehensive human science) can adequately manage it. But this perspective also implies that whatever human beings historically produce will always make sense because it will be humanly natural, because it will reveal a naturally human course. This premise, however, is flawed. It fails to recognize that human intentions have the capacity unintentionally to produce situations that exceed the scope of historical comprehension,

80 The logic of historical knowledge that – to use Günther Anders’s phrase – ‘the human species nowadays can produce immeasurably more than can be imagined’ [daß wir Heutigen fähig sind, ungleich mehr herzustellen als vorzustellen] (Anders 1994: 62). It fails to allow for the historical unconscious that shadows all historical action in a historicized world. It fails to anticipate any unintended results intended outcomes themselves produce as they reckon with prevailing conditions. Enlarging or subverting the original strategy, these unintended results arise from conditions subsequently occasioned by the original action the agent could not have envisaged. Just how much reason suffices to constitute a rationale for accounting for historical events is problematic because of the historicized circumstances, the historicized world, in which historical comprehension takes place. Historiography has been totally re-functioned by historicization. In the historicized world, history itself is a thing of “the Past”: it is the history that has been. “The Past” has already been consigned to “the Past”, which vindicates both its taking precedence and its cognitive redundancy. A historicized world, therefore, subverts the writing of history: events change faster than they can be analysed or evaluated; historical comprehension in its technically specialized, atomized form is generated faster than it itself can be analysed or evaluated. Conversely, more frequently, in a historicized world the analysis and evaluations that have currency apply to a history that has become obsolete, nothing but a thing of “the Past”. The historicized world thus corrodes the very infrastructure, the eidetic premises, of historiographical strategies for making sense of the world, the world that now can be nothing other than historicized. History though continues to turn out sense regardlessly: it thereby lends the inert weight of scholarship to the ongoing historicization of life. As a technology of technologies dependent on socially pervasive, nonspecial technical and bureaucratic procedures, history is implicit in and conducive to the specifically technological developments that produce historicization. Historical reason blends smoothly into technological reason. If historical reason never seemed to suffice, it can now draw on technological reason, nothing if not superabundant. But this involvement occurs at the cost of history’s ‘liberal-humanistic’ ethos. It negates the ‘human nature’ human beings are supposed uniquely to generate in history. It removes the ethical intention – the civilizing “finish” to the world – that provides it with coherent, historicist meaning. This dependence on technological reason also re-functions the nature of historiography: amplifying but thereby only postponing ultimate comprehension; enlarging the scope of academic expertise but thereby only atomizing its relevance (as will be demonstrated in Chapter 5). This historiographical re-function is evinced in these particular aspects of historicization (which extends the discussion of historicization in Chapter 1): (a) the enhancement of the performance of historical reason [cognitio rerum gestarum] through technological rationalization; (b) the accelerating pace of historical change [res gestae]: how much “change” should occur within a

The logic of historical knowledge 81 particular time period [§1.1] or framework [§3.1] for it to make optimum sense? (c) the demographic enlargement of the scope of history: in an increasingly populous world, who qualifies as a historical actor? (d) the emergent “extra-terrestrial” consciousness that transcends the purely planetary scope of historical activity. (a) Technology (as already mentioned in Chapter 1) is by definition a means of compensating for the mental and physical limitations of human capacities (Blumenberg 1974: 263). For this reason the historical course of human political, social, and cultural development always has moved with technological momentum, from the earliest stone implements, metalwork, and wheels, to industrialization with mechanized manufacturing, as well as to information technology. For the longest period of human development technology was a means for human beings to create an environment conducive to their survival, a unique technical biosphere – the “civilized” world – within the natural world. But due to ‘a massive inflation of information harvesting’ this history belongs to “the Past” (Lovelock 2014: xv). The reliance on information to keep this civilization running, the technology this information requires to be socially and, therefore, commercially disseminated, comes to dominate. That is to say: it sets its own agenda. It becomes an end in itself: it assimilates to itself all other teleological projects, including history and its historicist intention. A case in point is the notion of the ‘world-spirit’. Precisely with its scope and rapidity information technology makes this Hegelian notion – the notion that history is generated through the self-articulation of the worldspirit – seem plausible. The digitalization of the world closely resembles ‘Hegelian panlogism in a non-dialectical, disempowered and pacified version’. The absolute knowledge it intends ‘is materialized in the universe of intelligent machines [. . .], the virtual assemblage of the interconnections preprogrammed and predetermined by the universe of intelligent machines’. In other words, ‘Hegelian logic has thus been made true by computers’ (Berardi 2009: 71, 73). Though invented by human beings as an existential necessity, the technological transformation of the world into a vast communications network shatters history’s humanistic paradigm. “Humanism” is just one particle of information amongst innumerable, heterogeneous others. (b) Technology, therefore, enables humanity to surpass itself – and so by implication to supersede its history, the story of its self-realization. So in accelerating human thought and action, the transmission of information, the transport of people and goods, in saving time and collapsing distance, technology keeps shifting the a priori coordinates of historical reality. The planet thus becomes (what Paul Virilio calls) ‘dromospheric’, totally organized for speed conducive to global homogeneity and contracting time-consciousness to the 24/7 presence of ‘real-time’. Thus the concomitant ‘immediacy, simultaneity, instantaneousness or ubiquity, so many attributes of divinity [. . .] permit the evasion of the historical conditions of humanity’ [Immédiateté, simultanéité, instantanéité ou ubiquité, autant d’attributs de la divinité qui font échapper, chacun, aux conditions historiques de l’humanité]. Inexorably

82 The logic of historical knowledge the planet, the very site of human history, is becoming too small, diminished by the inexhaustible potential for human technological development, by the human capacity for rationalization, by their ever accelerating pace (Virilio 2009: 72, 73). Thus, too, the instrumental reason of technological science erases reflective thought, as the growing awareness of the ‘economics of attention’ indicates. It is concerned with the neurophysiological limitations of the human attention span, with how it evaluates and selects, with how it can be induced to evaluate and select, the information it uses (cf. Lanham 2007). It definitively erases even the hypothetical possibility that the ‘connection of ideas’ might ever adequately comprehend the ‘order and connection of things’. With rationality invested in the world, be it in the form of technological hardware, be it in the form of management procedures, with reality shifting at the pace of thought itself, the world slips away from historical comprehension. The human brain developed on the basis of a fairly stable, traditional world: it is, so far, neurophysiologically maladapted to operating in an unprecedented, technologically constituted environment. Further, thought in any case cannot anticipate its future states. It cannot know now what it will come to realize only in a few years’ or decades’ time. Actual life will always have something of yesterday in it, something of “the Past”, since it is bound to lag behind the future ramifications of its technological application (Valéry 1960b: 1059ff., 1066). Paradoxically, the technological enhancement of historical reality, the technical triumph of instrumental reason, discloses an untapped reservoir of instinctive compulsion. This situation subverts intelligence but galvanizes the subconscious, now liberated from ethical reflection, to explore its most licentious projects (Halévy 2001: 168). Thus the augmentation of (technological) reason, far from being conducive through historical development to the maturity of the human species (as Kant envisaged), promotes its infantilization, the regressive de-sublimation of human behaviour (as Virilio and Marcuse have argued).3 The technological management of reality occupies in the mind a site of objective, strategic calculation distant from the psychological core of subjective personality, partly as a form of self-protective armour-plating [Panzerung], partly as a means of self-exculpation (Reich 2006: 200ff.; Simmel 1989: VII, 117). Styling themselves as superior to the everyday world, the specialized, rational-technological procedures of objective, disciplinary knowledge (as in the case of history) suffuse it with menace, with a climate of apprehension. (c) That historical reality amplifies itself through population growth results from medical-technological advances. An exponential increase in the world population of rational human beings also represents an increasing investment of rationality in history (both on the level of historical events, res gestae, and on the level of historical comprehension, cognitio rerum gestarum). This itself stands to reason. For most of the world’s history probably only ever about ten million people inhabited it. So to study the history taking place

The logic of historical knowledge 83 in a world defined by a fraction of its current demographic density would produce a stabilized, recognized “object of knowledge”. However, that these stabilized reconstructions persist in a world becoming increasingly dynamic, ‘dromospheric’, with a population of one billion (1804), or of two billion (1927), or three billion (1960) or six billion (in 1999), and soon on the way to ten billion, projects a sense of rational order just when it is collapsing, just when it is becoming a thing of “the Past”, just when it is being historicized (cf. Davies 2010: 159–63). At the same time, in terms of demography history does generate more rationality for itself. Exponentially it produces more rational human beings, more people with their own rationalized projects. Thus it intensifies itself, amplifies itself. Here too historical comprehension based on the traditional norms of disciplinary convention collapses, faces redundancy. In the demographic context of the nineteenth century Schopenhauer was already sceptical of the cognitive value of history if it generated only an infinite, hence unmanageable, amount of purely factual material (Schopenhauer 1977d: 526, §233). With this situation now superseded, it becomes clear that historical scholarship comprehends the amplification of historical events through increasingly specialized, disciplinary atomization. Conversely, however, it is unclear how far history is amplified by means of the demographic augmentation of historical rationality. Particularly in terms of ‘commodity thinking’, in terms of a crude, economic supply-and-demand relationship, the swelling human population might well indicate a concomitant loss in the value of human life, the ultimate foundation – in liberal-existential terms – of historical knowledge. Schopenhauer – only too aware of the inherent desolation of human life resulting from individuals’ conflicting, historically articulated intentions [Wille] – laments ‘the countless millions of human beings tumbling in hordes into the wide-open maw of the monster that awaits them, oblivion’ [zahllose Millionen von Individuen [. . .], welche scharenweise in den stets weitgeöffneten Rachen des sie erwartenden Ungeheuers, der Vergessenheit, stürzen], despite history’s valorous attempt to retrieve something of their life (Schopenhauer 1977a: II, 462, Bk. 2, Chap. 28; 1977d: 526, §233). And the last century or so with its world-wide wars, civil wars, genocides, and mass-murders has confirmed this senseless squandering of human existential potential – the irrational manifestation of augmented rationality, the nihilistic counterpoint to the self-amplifying human historical presence. In the end, the technological re-functioning of history – itself a technology of technologies – driven by (technological or instrumentalized) reason, by thereby increased rationality, by pervasive rationalization, does not advance comprehension. Rather than confirming that a reassuring sufficiency of reason accounts for what happens, the historicized world driven by technological momentum becomes persistently apprehensive. It is haunted by the misgiving that with their ‘dromospheric’ tempo significant events or issues embroiled in the collateral contemporaneity of immediate experience

84 The logic of historical knowledge inevitably fail to register historically. In making sense of a historicized world, in making sense of history in a historicized world, history tends to be disorientating. Evidently, more happens, more has happened, for good or evil, than anyone can ever know. History has long since become an existential liability. (d) If the investment of technological rationality compromises historical comprehension, historical events [res gestae] themselves also render the human world incomprehensible. Boosted by prosthetic capacities, exceeding the capacity of historical rationality, they entail unintended ramifications of historical intentions. They make history redundant, superfluous. From the historical point of view, the crucial events crystallize into “macro-historical” occurrences, historicizing events that rupture the historically synthetic (causal) relationship between the way things were and the way they have now got to be, events that historicize history itself. They produce circumstances that compromise both the scene of history, the planet itself, and its indispensable agent, human beings. Such circumstances coalesce as apprehensive realizations: • • • • •

the mutation of a world of World Wars into a “war world”, the scene of innumerable vicious local conflicts, inflamed by terrorism, with inevitable global ramifications (often with the United Nations’ supervision); the de-territorializing, historicizing effect of capitalism constantly in pursuit of the latest things; the inevitability of the extinction of natural species essential to the planetary ecology, of environmental pollution, and climate change which will make at least parts of the world increasingly uninhabitable; the ‘dromospheric’ enhancement of human activity and its concomitant frustration with planetary contraction; the genetic, behavioural, or pharmacological modification of human mind and body to extend their attentiveness, to counteract their need for recuperation, to alter their mental disposition, to enhance their robotic efficiency and productivity (Crary 2013: 13ff.).

These phenomena are familiar, but taken together they represent a major ontological displacement, a major temporal transmutation, beyond history. In particular two macro-historical events impose themselves: the view of the Earth from space (from the Moon, from the International Space Station); and the development of nuclear power, particularly nuclear weapons. They reveal a fundamentally transformed perspective not just of the planet, or of the human existence it supports, but also of the scene of history and the human projects enacted on it hitherto. Contrary to the historicist agenda that charges mankind with the cosmic task of civilizing the planet, they both suggest instead the very fragility of the human world and the inscrutability of its planetary support. The planet Earth viewed from its Moon, approximates its appearance sub specie aeternitatis. As defined by Spinoza, the perspective of eternity – the

The logic of historical knowledge 85 divine standpoint – offered adequate knowledge within the capacity of human reason. (Since ‘eternity is the very essence of God’, then ‘to conceive things under a species of eternity, is to conceive things insofar as they are conceived through God’s essence, as real beings’. So the mind conceiving itself and the body under a species of eternity ‘necessarily has knowledge of God’ (Spinoza 1996: 174, P30).) Certainly, reason – specifically technological reason – has facilitated with the Moon landing and the International Space Station a semblance of that perspective. But this quasi-divine (technological) capacity offered no semblance of its concomitant omniscience, no incontrovertible truth. Instead, disclosing this small planet to itself, it revealed only the vulnerability of the world from which it had been derived. It confirmed that instrumental knowledge exceeds and diverges from the natural, Earth-bound condition of the world human beings make for themselves with each other. It showed that human technological potential with its planet-shrinking ‘dromospheric’ effects already hijacks history for its own self-interest, diverting it from the realm of political negotiation (Arendt 1974: 3). That it is possible to see the human world from an extra-terrestrial standpoint is a historically unprecedented, historicizing event. It offers a view of the historical scene that supersedes its self-definition hitherto. It also historicizes the traditional scope of its own self-comprehension, its human self-regard. It consigns them irrevocably to history: how things are now can never again be the way they were. As argued earlier (Chapter 1) the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki mark a different historicizing rupture. They demonstrate that human beings can produce for themselves the apocalyptic foreclosure of their own existence. They graphically indicate that today’s historical protagonists, are (as Anders says) ‘the first generation of the last human beings’. Through nuclear apprehension the human situation is transformed: human agency in history becomes precarious. The planet might well survive: nothing indicates that the human species is indispensable for its future ecology. Here, threatened by nothing other than historical action, what emerges is the reverse aspect of the planet’s cosmic vulnerability the human species depends on: the planet’s chill cosmic indifference that it takes its historicization to disclose. The premise of intelligibility – the precondition for truth – is the adequation of the mind and its object; is the mind’s recognition of itself in its object. And yet the argument has shown that there is little correspondence between the history that happens and the history that attempts to make sense of what happened. The analysis of causality demonstrates that the mind has to intervene to coordinate the concatenation of events. The discussion of the sufficiency of reason suggests not just that that sufficiency is impossible to ascertain, but also that attempts to amplify history’s comprehensive rationale or to augment the force of human action are catastrophically self-defeating, whether in terms of comprehension or of human agency. It seems then that Vico’s conviction needs rephrasing: history may well be produced by the human mind; but the human mind tends subsequently not to recognize what the mind in history has produced for itself through history. As the discussion

86 The logic of historical knowledge of categorical coordinators will confirm, history (historical scholarship) nevertheless “works” because it has a conceptual and discursive structure that orders and filters its fortuitous data into an intelligible pattern. Not least then, historical scholarship re-enacts the redundant rationalizations inherent in historical events and historical intentions themselves: history (historical scholarship) produces truth through doing what it does, through doing what it is programmed to do.

Identitary thinking4 Implicit in both causality and in the principle of sufficient reason is the principle of identity. It can be summarized as a tautological formula: A = A. This logical premise has great authority as the central principle of thought and reality, as the fundamental eidetic assumption that makes the world intelligible. As with God’s self-affirmation in Exodus (3.14), ‘I am that I am’, it is an act of thought that constitutes oneself subjectively both for oneself and for others. At the same time, as with Parmenides’ assertion that ‘the same thing can be thought as can be’, that ‘the same thing exists for thinking and for being’, it constitutes complicity between the mind that thinks and what is (Kirk and Raven 1969: 269). This principle informs both Spinoza’s pantheism (that the material world is the obverse side of God’s thinking) and Vico’s historicism (that the meaning of human history is to be found in the mind of the human beings making it). It produces also in Descartes’ assertion cogito ergo sum, the individual mind as the radical source of knowledge, as the adjudicator of reality. As in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, the critique of Descartes produces phenomenology, a theory of subjective consciousness predicated on ‘a universal apodictic experiential structure of the self’ [eine universale apodiktische Erfahrungsstruktur des Ich] (as evinced in the temporal form taken by the stream of experience). It discerns in consciousness itself its a priori intention of constituting reality from the incessant flux of what it experiences. In other words, it refutes as the ‘worst conceptual falsification philosophy has ever known’ the conventional, simplistic view that defines what has been experienced as the contents of the mental images [Vorstellungen] it generates (Husserl 2012a: 29, §12; 2009: II, 1, 170; §23). But, as in Heidegger’s interpretation of Parmenides’ formulation, the identity principle also becomes a radical means of subverting both the metaphysical character of Western thought and the instrumentalized, calculating technical science it supports (Heidegger 2002: 65). That ‘the same thing exists for thinking and for being’ implies (for Heidegger) that thinking and being share a common ontological matrix, Being [Sein] itself. His argument diverges from the hitherto conventional premise of Western-European thought: that ‘the unity of identity is a basic feature in things being the way they are’ [Die Einheit der Identität bildet einen Grundzug im Sein des Seienden] (Heidegger 2002: 13). Thus the identity principle becomes a means of reorientating, of re-authenticating human existential priorities.

The logic of historical knowledge 87 It is necessary to stress the scope and force of the identity principle, since its logical and ontological authority underpins its function in historical comprehension, its function as a structural principle reinforced as a categorical coordinator ensuring a stabilizing relationship between “past” and “present” (identity [§3.2]). The identity principle reveals itself in theory as either established by, or establishing, a stable, abstract logical and metaphysical context. In the unstable political and social context of human activity its stabilizing capacity is, therefore, indispensable. Unfolding in the social and political dimension, human existence – with its inevitable ethical choices, intentions, tastes, motives, commitments, excuses, deceptions – lacks logical consistency. In these circumstances the identity principle, so adaptable as it is, lends itself to functioning as a managerial resource – to give it sense, to make it coherent. The precise, theoretical formulation, A = A, enables identity [§3.2] to produce whenever required ‘the necessary connection between one thing and another’ [die notwendige Verknüpfung des einen mit dem anderen] so as to ensure that they belong together, as in the following typical cases (Heidegger 2002: 16): • •

•

• •

creating order, establishing criteria of recognition, of belonging, but also, therefore, of exclusion (defining historical common places, legitimizing community values, constituting cultural heritage); vindicating things being as they are, since they were the way they were (thus ensuring the continuing consistency of the historical account, the self-sameness [Selbigkeit] of the object of its disciplinary preoccupations, the pursuance of the same old thing) (Heidegger 2002: 13); for determining – in historical comprehension – likenesses, analogies, or equivalences (what things are “like” now, what things were “like” then; what incident in “the Past” is “like”, or equivalent to, another earlier or later incident in “the Past”); for affirming existing values and the social institutions that promote them (what one identifies with, what one “likes”); for oneself defining one’s own personal subjectivity or for having one’s own subjectivity defined for oneself (what the world “out there” – cultural values, socio-economic categories, political-ideological constructs, etc. – either way defines one as being).

For the intelligibility of history, for historical scholarship, the identity principle (identity [§3.2]) is, therefore, indispensable. (As the next chapter shows, it implicitly coordinates history’s conceptual categories.) It is at the disposition of anyone to determine. Philosophically (with Vico or Ortega y Gasset) it does vindicate the assertion that the human mind produces history (A [mind] = A [history]) or that history articulates human nature (A [history] = A [human nature]). Politically, though, its use can be treacherous. Certainly, identity politics adopted by marginalized social or ethnic groups can raise their self-consciousness and promote social or political equality. But adopted by

88 The logic of historical knowledge dominant power structures, it becomes a potent instrument of discrimination. In this case, it decrees (e.g.) that refugees, economic migrants, social benefits scroungers, ethnic outsiders are not “like” us; that they and their history are not recognized by us; that they are not those with whom we – with our own history and traditions that identify us – can identify. Instrumentalized thus to promote the solidarity of groups of self-regarding group members to exclude strangers, the identity principle has been complicit in the conflicts and catastrophes that have condensed into this prevailing culture of the death drive. In this political sense it has been self-defeating: it testifies to its own bankruptcy. It has helped produce a world that in human terms has become unrecognizable, un-“like” anything that could have been imagined. Further, the identity principle ensures that though things do not remain the way they are, they do not really change: it ensures that only the same old things keeps reproducing themselves. Hence, social institutions perpetuate and affirm themselves through their own comprehensive identitary logic so that their historical development only vindicates their continuing dominant presence. Mercedes-Benz, for example (in a TV advert), states that ‘even more than [by] its meticulous engineering’ it defines itself ‘by its continuous innovation’. With a historical time-line as illustration, it claims that ‘since inventing the car in 1886, we’ve simply never stopped reinventing it’.5 The brand asserts its identity, that it is what it is (A = A), through its constant self-differentiation. Thus its history (how it was) serves only to vindicate the way it is. Thanks to the identity principle, to the brand being what it is, the very latest car is still “like” the same old car. Backed thus by capital and commodity fetishism, the identity principle seems invincible. But the world has changed. Due to its self-created ‘dromospheric pressures’, it has historicized itself: its history is the history that has been. The first generation of the last human beings has been pitched into an epoch no future epochs will succeed. Moreover, the system of global capitalism, with its ever-changing, self-perpetuating sense of persistent self-identity, infiltrates and assimilates the identity of those who work in it. Human beings thus find themselves in a world with which they cannot identify. They have created for themselves a world that does nothing but produce their own alienation. Here they confront the question of how to make sense of it, how to construct for themselves something meaningful. Here though, the principle of identity exerts a fatal distraction. If the world (as Foucault says) is ‘not complicit with our knowledge’ [le monde [. . .] n’est pas complice de notre connaissance], if the investment of rationality to ensure the sufficiency of reason has proved disastrous, then any cognitive intrusion into history has little purpose (Foucault 1971: 55). If history really does articulate human nature, then not intervening is the best attitude to take. It is enough to just wait and see how things turn out, to remain a disinterested, “objective” observer, to adopt the stance of the impartial academic historian. This involves not just studying history, but also accepting that whatever comes must betray human nature: after all, history is the trace left by human endeavour.

The logic of historical knowledge 89 Historical scholarship counts on this reactive–passive situation. For its own self-interest and from its own administrative perspective, its specialized, technical expertise can deploy without restriction its principles of causality, sufficient reason, and identity. By their means it both organizes according to technical disciplinary criteria the heterogeneous data of human existence and customizes the ordinary world that routinely supports human existence so as to reflect its own self-referential designs. (Working thus it affirms intellectually the practice of capitalism – itself a historicizing agency – that in its own interests too arranges the world by means of the latest commodities it designs and induces people in their routine existence to depend on.) History thus becomes a process [§2.1] that shapes [§1.4] individual and collective life, that makes [§1.4] a person, a society, a nation [§1.3] “what it is”. It offers people substitute, synthetic identities to sustain the capitalist system of fabrication that erodes them. It offers them (like the clothing section of a department store or a fancy-dress bazaar) all kinds of identities to try on (or as try-ons) – to see what fits, what can be squeezed into, what needs to be taken in. Here, in affirming a passive, ludic attitude, the identity principle becomes existentially enervating, incapacitating. Looking to history, to historical identities – historical commodities fabricated by the history technology for personal consumption – to “tell us who we are” is symptomatic of a bankruptcy of the available cognitive resources, of a depletion of vital energy (Bergson 2006a: 123ff.). Thus this historical anaesthetization of thought and behaviour defines death-drive culture: the last human species – Zarathustra’s ‘last human beings’ – disguising their own self-effacement with a fitting historical likeness (Nietzsche 1988b: 18–21).

Notes 1 On the significance of the figures within square brackets see the schematic representation of categorical coordinators in the first section of Chapter 4. 2 See Kant’s description of the geographical, mathematical and logical self-orientation of mind and behaviour (Kant 1977a: 269–70). 3 Contrast reason as an indicator of human progress (Kant 1977c: 51, 54–5) with science and infantile regression (Virilio 2002: 11–2) and rational domination enforcing the de-sublimation of desire (Marcuse 1986: 71). 4 The argument here complements the exposition of identitary thinking as symbolic and physical compliance in Imprisoned by History (Davies 2010: 59–73). 5 http://www.mbusa.com/mercedes/benz/innovation (accessed 22.01.2014).

4

The organization of historical knowledge Categorical coordinators; rhetorical strategy

To work, history (historical scholarship) depends on the structure-logic inherent in its axiomatic principles: causality, sufficient rationality, and identity. With them it determines meaning under any circumstances. They ensure history (what happened) makes sense; that whatever happened, it makes sense. They guarantee that whatever happened will bear within it a meaningpotential that can always be determined. Nevertheless, the resulting account must persuade the reader that its subsequent determination is valid. And this act of persuasion is essential to history, not least because how much reason is sufficient for its determinations cannot be determined. History writing is an exercise in rhetoric. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Its jurisdiction is not the logical rigour of syllogistic deductions or the truth-criteria of basic, constantly valid, simply declarative ‘protocol-sentences’ [Protokollsätze] (cf. von Mises 1990: 163ff.). Its function is not concerned with assessing the veracity of propositions, testing the falsifiability of theories, or replicating experimental results. Its aim is not to be objective: not to see itself as a subject that aims to define an object external to it (e.g. constructing “the Past” from the present standpoint). As the Classical handbooks of rhetoric by Aristotle and Quintilian presume, the human social environment – the author and his or her readers, the lawyer and the jury in the courtroom, the politician and the assembly – already exists as a rhetorical situation. Narration (narratio) may well set out the facts in the case and identify the issues at stake. But this occurs within a field of social relationships and institutional and procedural regulations: for the academic author the procedures of the discipline, for the lawyer the legal system, for the politician the state’s constitution. Further, this social sphere is dynamic, intentional: the poet or novelist seeks to impart a vision of the world to a wider public; the technical expert clarifies issues of public concern; the lawyer on the basis of the available evidence presses for conviction or exoneration; the politician disguises his or her ideological programme by encoding it for his or her unsuspecting audience as natural common-sense. Like knowledge-managers, resource administrators, technical experts generally, historians are assimilated not just to the social sphere, but also to its fundamentally rhetorical mode of communication and regulation – a mode

The organization of historical knowledge 91 that in its most populistic forms and with its ‘hidden persuaders’ drives public-relations and commercial advertising. That historical scholarship, in particular, is a rhetorical exercise is confirmed by its variety of forms, approaches, and perspectives. Evidently, if “the Past” (whatever this amorphous term signifies) did yield historical “Truth”, there could only ever be one definitive representation of it. All historians – all historical experts in a given discipline – would be writing the same book. This appears impossible. Multiple, perpetually shifting standpoints endlessly redefine, recontextualize, reinterpret the same facts or events. Consequently, keen to preserve the notion of “Truth”, historians resort to universal inductivity, to the ‘pantheistic principle’: all these versions of “the Past” are means of “approaching” the Truth; they all indicate a numinous reality greater than their constitutive parts. But this manoeuvre implies the historian knows already what the “Truth”, what the “greater reality”, is. (How else would she or he be able to gauge just how much more comprehensive its already comprehensive knowledge would become?) It leads to self-contradiction. However, the historiographical viewpoint (the viewpoint of the history of writing the history of a given issue) suggests the impossible does occur – that all historians do collectively write just one book on their topic of expertise, a multi-authored, multi-volume work slowly accumulating over years, over decades, over centuries, as a vast, unfolding mosaic with elements of all shapes and sizes, textures and colours, beckoned ever onward by a transcendental principle of determined meaning (i.e. “Truth”), but with its inception long since superseded by the futile aspiration to reach a comprehensive completion constantly deferred. Whichever the case (and there is no way of determining it), the sheer variety of historical discourse consumed by society – from advertising traditional foods, docu-dramas, historical films, and news programmes to history-themed magazines, historical monographs, and highly specialized articles in academic journals – needs not a metaphysical (pantheistic) but a discourse-centric principle of coherence applicable to all its motley manifestations. The rhetorical strategies employed in historical discourse depend on the discourse-logic categorical coordinators provide. They are in evidence across the diversity of history-writing. They guarantee the internal coherence of what has become an amplified, atomized, form of knowledge, inevitably ephemeral. Rhetoric confirms that consciousness is intentional (not a blank slate [tabula rasa], a mirror, or a neutral optic). Human relationships – as historical or social-psychological accounts show – are by definition relationships of purpose, of intention, of motivation: these help produce the world we ordinarily live in [Lebenswelt] (Husserl 2012b: 264, 275–7; §71). Understanding what happened to other people long ago is not different from understanding what is happening to other people now: by empathy other people – both present and long since absent – are already programmed into one’s personal consciousness. Just the type of evidential basis changes, but not necessarily greatly.

92 The organization of historical knowledge Letters, diaries, artefacts define an eighteenth-century doctor; a different set of letters and artefacts define a lost acquaintance or a dear, deceased relative. Moreover, understanding others occurs in the present, be it to produce a definitive monograph for the sake of a personal professorial chair, be it to make a case for the inclusion of colonized and brutalized peoples into the mainstream history of European imperialism. Historians, therefore, are always making a case: their audience infers the “Truth” from evidence persuasively presented. What holds together so many different genres of historical discourse, what makes so many different types of rationalization convincing, are not just generic tropes (such as their different modes of emplotment) or figures of speech (such as synecdoche or amplification). For history to make sense, to have a determined meaning, requires a type of discourse that is more structurally consistent, ostensibly more rationally determined than “normal speech” and yet as comprehensive, as polyvalent as the material it organizes is heterogeneous. This is the discourse-logic, the forms of discursive determination that categorical coordinators provide. But this, their historiographical function, is perhaps not their most important. Categorical coordinators are invested in historical discourse whenever history is being made by historians, whenever they – as “resources managers” – rearrange and re-present the current stock of historical knowledge in their field of expertise. They are applied, things being what they are, to organize for now the way things were the way they were. Hence, they ensure that their arrangement of things as they were informs the way things are now. History arranges the world to suit itself. In arranging the world the way it used to be, history – the social history-function – consequently presents the world as it is now as already arranged, as already historically arranged. The world cannot be recognized except in historical terms, in the terms provided by categorical coordinators that preconceive the world as a historical arrangement, as already historicized. That categorical coordinators work in historical discourse also legitimizes their use in making sense of the world as it is in ordinary speech, in everyday experience. History itself is also largely preoccupied with how ordinary things used to be in relation to how they are now. Thus the social historyfunction – historians making history now – ensures that the individual in his or her cognitive situation has immediate recourse to categorical coordinators. It thereby also ensures that for the individual, at the moment of apprehending the world, history always intervenes, history always takes precedence. Resorting by default to categorical coordinators, ordinary language, everyday experience, automatically construes itself in historicized terms. Historicized thinking, the most conspicuous psychopathological symptom of life in an already historicized world, persistently reaffirms itself. Categorical coordinators are essential to historical discourse. It just does not work without them. In one sense, they are ‘knowledge acts’ [Erkenntnisakte] or ‘thought acts’ [Denkakte] that actually constitute their object (in this case

The organization of historical knowledge 93 history). They are thus meant to overcome the problem of the relationship between the object and the knowledge about the object gained from it by induction since they supersede this distinction (Husserl 1986a: 75, 80–2). At the same time, as ‘psychic additions’, they are symptomatic of the bifurcation of experience historicist comprehension itself perpetrates by induction based on the belief that ‘more can be found in nature than that which is observed at first sight’. They thus ‘shirk the problem of natural philosophy’: just how to ‘discuss the relations inter se of things known, abstracted from the bare fact that they are known’ (Whitehead 1920: 29–30). Categorical coordinators, therefore, determine the arrangement of issues formulated in the historical text, typically as sustaining the premises of the argument, as means of accounting, as summaries of outcomes. They also implicitly determine the structure of the historical topic, the scope of the historian’s administrative or monographic perspective, the way the historical topic is a priori constituted, the type of ‘psychic additions’ he or she a priori provides. In this sense they typically occur in the introduction or conclusion of the work, or in it whenever the historian reflects on the structure of the historical topic, on its motivating agency (i.e. on what it is “about”). They inform historical discourse, therefore, in the following ways: (1) they provide structures of coherence; (2) they identify dynamic forces inherent in it; (3) they furnish it with stabilizing components. Certainly this classification is not rigid. Coordinators can appear in more than one category depending on their discursive or structural function. They also operate most effectively in combination. Moreover, this classification is not exhaustive or comprehensive. Their purpose here is principally to focus attention on a characteristic feature of historicized thinking and its procedures for affirming the historicization of world experience. A schematic presentation of categorical coordinators provides an initial survey of their nature and scope: 1.0

Structures of coherence 1.1 The coherence of historical time indicated, e.g. by: age; century; epoch; era; period; time(s), of, behind, or ahead of. 1.2 Historical sense indicated, e.g. by: cause (remote, immediate); factor(s) (long-term, short-term). 1.3 Transcendental principle, agency (i.e. what the history is about, its subject, its topic), e.g.: Man, Society, Nation, etc. 1.4 Causal/correlating verbs, e.g.: decline; emerge; give way to; make; shape.

2.0

Dynamic forces 2.1 Dynamic forces (1) – fluid entity, e.g.: course (of history, as in changing the); development; evolution; (historical) forces; generation; process (as in historical); stream (of history); trajectory; transition; trend.

94 The organization of historical knowledge 2.2

3.0

Dynamic forces (2) – the types and pace of change, e.g.: catalyst; change; impact; pivotal point; prelude (to); run-up (to); tippingpoint; turning-point; watershed.

Stabilizing components 3.1 History stabilizers, e.g.: beginnings; (historical) context; continuity; custom; framework; origins; place (firm, proper, or common; or as a verb); precedent; product; roots (deeply rooted); set (as a verb, cf. place); tradition (invariably long). 3.2 “Past” and “Present” in relationship, e.g.: beneficiary; heritage; identity; legacy, precursor.

Set out schematically, categorical coordinators suggest a dialectical structure. But this structure does not imply a logical, let alone a remorseless, teleological momentum that generates historical events. Rather the coordinators are on the historian’s part investments of rationalizing determinism – ‘psychic additions’ or ‘thought-acts’ – indispensable for producing a more comprehensive meaning from whatever happened. They are dialectical in the sense that, as classified, they present themselves not just as antithetical, specifically the antithesis between coherence and dynamic change, nor as resolved by a higher, subsequent synthesis, but as counterbalanced by elements of comprehensive stabilization. The logical coherence of history (§1.1–§1.4) encounters disruptive dynamics (§2.1–§2.2) checked by conceptual stabilizers (§3.1–§3.2), often in the same sentence, the same utterance. They thus assert a model of reality that, appearing dynamic, runs on inertia. It ensures that whatever happens nothing really changes: categorical coordinators account for it and manage it in the same old way, essential as they are to the inert character of a historicized world. Further, that historical discourse relies on categorical coordinators means reconceiving the notion of historical “Truth”. Conventionally this notion signifies the accuracy of the account, the adequacy of explanation, the veracity of the representation, the authenticity of its replication of the way things used to be. It generates the debate on whether or not history evinces predictive laws governing its development. It assesses in relation to their external referents the possible corresponding truth-content of sentences conveying historical information. But the indispensable reliance on categorical coordinators indicates that whatever has happened has to be arranged historically. Categorical coordinators have to produce a pattern of historical meanings to start with: without it the question of their historical “Truth” makes no sense at all. Rather they demonstrate that the question of history’s “Truth” itself becomes a thing of “the Past”. They render the question of whether the historical account represents a former reality or is, for all its veracity, a form of fiction historical, obsolete. Without categorical coordinators, without their discourse-logic, without their a priori fabrication of the historical text, there would be no historical account to which “Truth”, ‘realistic representation’ or ‘veracious fiction’ could apply – there would be no discursive basis this

The organization of historical knowledge 95 debate could refer to. In this context, the fixation on historical “Truth” as both a cognitive ideal and a badge of professional disciplinary integrity only distracts attention from the increasing apprehension of historical senselessness that defines the ethos of a historicized world. Categorical coordinators thus demonstrate that the historical account in the very act of its construction compromises the idea of historical “Truth” even before its particular truth-content can be verified. Reconciling dynamic forces with coherent structures by means of stabilizing components, historical discourse will make sense of anything, whatever happened. It will always mean something to someone, it will always be true for someone. These coordinators demonstrate that, beyond the verifiable information – statistics, specific dates, source materials – the historical account contains, the account itself relies on them to underpin its self-determining task of setting out the case to be proved in the most persuasive way. Categorical coordinators are figurative tropes, the fundamental rhetorical strategy articulating historical discourse. Given that, in a historicized world, history is so much the case there is no case it could exclude, only categorical coordinators remain – by virtue of their categorical, categorizing function – to ensure the consistency of historical thinking, of historical scholarship itself. Categorical coordinators crucially enable history to produce sense in multiple different ways. In a totally historicized world, the rationalizing determinism invested through them into fabricating history only vindicates the diversity of its social functions, its multi-purpose instrumentalization. Finally (and most importantly), in making history make sense whatever happens categorical coordinators are the last – illusory – defence against the senselessness of history, the last remedy for the apprehension induced by the intuition of the senselessness of the world. Anaesthetizing apprehension by means of the mirage of universal coordination, they represent the ultimate obstacle to the world finally realizing its own senselessness. They prevent it from realizing the final senselessness of the mega-structures (including history) meant by homo sapiens to amplify human existence, but in fact ephemeralizing it – trivializing it, blowing it away. Explanation automatically has recourse to them. This suggests categorical coordinators result from an ingrained reflex of comprehension, symptomatic of the psychopathology of historicized life, to guarantee existential self-assurance by means of its comprehensive historicization. But thereby this reflex also suggests a psychotic schism in human self-consciousness. It would rather mesmerize itself with its species-narcissistic illusions than confront an anthropic world-situation indifferent to it. Reviewing and commenting on several examples of each basic type of categorical coordinators shows how they work.1

Structures of coherence The coherence afforded by categorical coordinators produces the bureaucratic, managerial procedures dependent on the “administrative gaze”, the

96 The organization of historical knowledge “monographic view” that sustains the historical account. The terms that indicate temporal duration, overall sense, transcendental agency delivered through active verbs that imply passivity (§1.1–§1.4), particularly suggest a loose, stabilizing framework [§3.1] for initially organizing the ways things used to be at the behest of history’s own self-interest, hence at the behest of current socio-economic interests. Further, the recourse to temporal categories (§1.1) is indispensable since nothing else proposes any coordination between the way things used to be and the way they are now, the coordination history is meant to provide, the sense it is meant to establish. They provide a primary segmentation of time: segmentation being a mental, eidetic procedure that in itself institutes sense in the otherwise indiscriminate, indifferent flux. Crucially, temporal coordinators (§1.1) have a transparent, reflective property (like the surface of water). An age or an era can be as significant (or as insignificant) as any historian would want it to be; but also (at the same time) imbued with essential characteristics that apparently automatically define the parameters of the historical account that refers or confines itself to them. In themselves temporal coordinators are not anything; but they can be invested with anything, determined by anything, according to the requirements of the history being constructed. Hence such formulations as The Age of the Masses or The Age of Austerity, or The Age of Extremes (not to mention The Age of Revolution 1789–1848; The Age of Capital 1848–1875; or The Age of Empire 1875–1914) (Cf. Biddiss 1977; Hobsbawm 1995, 1962, 1975, 1987; Sissons and French 1964).2 In each case, age is positioned to vindicate the transcendental agency or principle that characterizes it (the industrialized, urban population of the late nineteenth century in Europe; the United Kingdom immediately after the Second World War; the conflict-torn twentieth century (cf. §1.3)). However, without the transcendental agency or principle to define itself by temporal segmentation, there would be no age to vindicate it. Here, on the basic level of defining the parameters of a historical project, history is nothing but self-referential. In each case too the duration of an age is arbitrary, whatever the historian wants it to be, from just a few years to a century or more: the period [§1.1] defined as The Age of Extremes lasted for seventy-seven years (1914–1991); The Age of the Masses (published in 1977), subtitled Ideas and Society Since 1870, identifies a hundred years or so; The Age of Austerity (published in 1963) was barely six years long (1945–1951). Century too is similarly arbitrary. By means of the trope of catachresis [abusio], an abuse of language that qualifies a noun with an inappropriate epithet, phrase or another noun, this purely chronological measure (a hundred years) is conceptually, figuratively curtailed or extended (Quintilian 2001: III, 444–7; 8.6.34–6). This identifies, for example, The Age of Extremes as The Short Twentieth Century (1914–1991) (i.e. 77 years); A History of Germany, 1780–1918 as The Long Nineteenth Century (i.e. 138 years); or Europe 1688–1815 as The Eighteenth Century (127 years) (Blackbourn 1998; Blanning 2000). In contexts such as these, century (like other temporal

The organization of historical knowledge 97 categories) reveals its multi-purpose function. Taken figuratively in these titles, it highlights the chronometrical precision that by contrast reveals that its use is figurative. Simultaneously, taken literally in chronometrical terms, it distinguishes the conceptual structure of the historical account from the passage of time it refers to. It vindicates the priority of the transcendental agent [§1.3] – here Europe, Germany – as the principle managing the historical information presented in it. The authoritative assertion of historical precision relies on figurative indeterminacy. In a historicized world affirmed by historicized thinking, century and period, like age and era, come already conceptually endowed with arbitrary attributes historians, like other managers and administrators, take for essential properties. Political discourse conventionally produces such formulations as ‘fit for the twenty-first century’ to justify the modernization (or privatization) of public services, as though this century, by virtue of being the twenty-first, were in itself an index of progress. (Though this tactic diminishes as the century continues to age, to compromise its millennial promise, to historicize itself, to fall in with the centuries preceding it.) Certainly, though, period is an authoritative all-purpose coordinator: e.g. “Elizabethan period”, “Victorian period”, “Medieval period”, “Romantic period”, “Modernism”, “Postmodernism”. In not suggesting a specific chronological measure it establishes itself as an authentic, inherently meaningful structure. The period and its outlook on the world [Weltanschauung] are based on (what Mannheim calls) the ‘documentary meaning’ of a wide range of cultural artefacts. This means that the period (along with its constituent outlook) is derived from the search ‘for an identical, homologous pattern underlying a vast variety of totally different realizations of meaning’. This pattern then implies ‘the existence of something identical pervading an entire range of differences’. Its formation depends (as has already been shown) on a ‘universal induction’; it evinces the ‘pantheistic principle’. The identitary scheme implicit in the extensive differences it informs in the given historical time-segment, in the period, is also evident as an ‘ideal essence’ epitomized by the culturally prominent figures of that time (as historically transcendental agents, e.g. Shakespeare or Goethe [cf. §1.3]). Period is evidently an administrative entity, formed from an attitude of managerial assessment rather than immediate engagement. The ‘documentary meaning’ sustaining it derives from ‘a scientific, systematic analysis’ that proceeds ‘by detaching certain elements of meaning from their concrete setting and fusing them into validly ascertainable objects of higher generality by using appropriate categories and conceptualizations’. Hence period works as a trope, as a form of synecdoche, since (as with synecdoche) ‘we understand the whole from the part, and the part from the whole’. The ‘spirit of the epoch’ that period defines comes ‘from its individual documentary manifestions’ – and (Mannheim adds) ‘we interpret the individual documentary manifestations on the basis of what we know about the spirit of the epoch’, since ‘in the cultural sciences the part

98 The organization of historical knowledge and the whole are given simultaneously’ (Mannheim 2000: 57, 59, 73, 74; Quintilian 2001: III, 434–7; 8.6.19–22). Period thus seems indispensable for coherent, comprehensive historical understanding. It is, though, fundamentally flawed and the claim that in the cultural sciences part and whole occur simultaneously spurious. (Here, in conceptual terms, their operation is no different from the natural sciences.) This coordinating category of ideal coherence predicated on an identity principle formulated as a ‘higher generality’ is a striking example of (what Whitehead calls) the ‘vicious bifurcation of nature’ that splits knowledge into “merely” apparent, individual sense-perceptions and abstract conceptual entities (abstracted from them) that are meant to explain them. For Whitehead, nature – the impressions, the data (cultural as well as natural) that continuously pass through consciousness – is ‘one complex fact for knowledge’. He rejects the ‘psychic additions’ – the categorical coordination – which stress abstraction and conceptualization at the expense of immediate aesthetic sensation. He dismisses what defines the cognitive value of period: there is ‘no fundamental distinction between our ways of knowing about the two parts of nature as thus partitioned’ (Whitehead 1920: 43, 44, 45). Already a brief analysis of these categorizations of coherence suggests that time itself is a resource, rather than a given – or rather it is a resource projected by the historical account so that it is perceived as a given. Historians define themselves as experts of a given topic in a given period (e.g. a historian of the English Middle Ages, a historian of the politics of the Victorian Era), as though the time period, however chronologically extended or contracted it might be, defined a clear temporal “space” for them to work in. But because age, epoch, era, or period can be extended or contracted arbitrarily they cease being an object of knowledge in themselves. Instead, they become part of the conceptual technology that produces knowledge of historical objects arranged according to their coordinates. Times illustrates this point precisely. To avoid what historians call “presentism”, they stipulate that each person or issue must be placed [§3.1] or rooted [§3.1] – usually firmly, in their times if they are to be understood properly: they must not be evaluated from the better vision afforded by historical hindsight apparently available now in the present. Equally, though, an influential figure – e.g. a brilliant scientist, a gifted artist, an inspired political reformer – can be defined legitimately as “ahead of his or her times” – just as a reactionary political or moral attitude can be deemed to be “behind the times”. Historical coherence thus actually comes apart: either historical agents are “of their times”, but time itself – as age, epoch, era, period – contains all kinds of asynchronous elements; or times as a coordinator has an inherent essence that gauges the performance of the historical agents within the unique scope it defines. But unless historical scholarship clearly discriminates between these senses, historical sense itself collapses. For the sake of

The organization of historical knowledge 99 coherence the same historical discourse – historical discourse in general – might well employ these coordinators. But blind to a usage that relies on them being internally self-contradictory, it renders itself meaningless. Hence, the coherence of historical discourse is fundamentally technical, formal, and self-referential. The topic it describes simply describes historical discourse, historicized thinking, itself, as in these examples: (a) ‘To return to the main theme of this article, it seems to me that, at different periods [§1.1] in our history, different factors [§1.2] have been in play that have ensured that Oxford flourishes’; (b) ‘Paradoxically, one of the factors [§1.2] which facilitated the growth of internal trade in England, namely its lack of tolls and customs, has prevented the historian from knowing much about it’; (c) ‘The era [§1.1] of revolutionary Europe had been one in which older forms of social [. . .] organization had been declining [. . .] and newer ones had been emerging [§1.4] to take their place. A not very productive agrarianartisan economy had been giving way to [§1.4] a [. . .] more productive [. . .] industrialized one’ (Noble 2014: 8; Coward 2003: 11; Sperber 2000: 431). In these examples categorical coordinators, not just periods and an era with essential qualities, but also verbs in the passive voice [§1.4], hence without subjective agency, project a sense of self-determining process [cf. §2.1]. But in fact they are simply ‘psychic additions’ invested in the historical account so that it can present itself as rationally self-determined. In each example the unexceptionable conclusion gauges their lack of sense.

Dynamic forces Certainly temporal and causal coordinators (such as century, era, period; or causes and factors (§1.1–§1.2)) along with active verbs that imply impersonal or passive correlation (such as decline, emerge, make, or shape (§1.4)) ensure the topical and temporal coherence of the historical account. However, history describes – as the saying goes – “change over time”. Once it is conceived a priori as a fluid entity, as a stream, as possessing a dynamic course that changes through development; evolution; forces; generation; process; once it effects or evinces a trajectory, a transition, or a trend (§2.1), its coherence automatically appears precarious. Precisely here categorical coordinators guarantee the overall sense of a perpetually self-disrupting worldarrangement. History produces and registers change. It demonstrates that whatever it achieves in its course is undone – as Plato noticed – by it turning back on itself, by it historicizing itself (be it in the rise and fall of Empires, be it in the unprecedented establishment of a system of social welfare and then its subsequent avaricious retrenchment) (Plato 2001: 50–5; 269D–270D). In the historical account of remorseless change categorical coordinators guarantee that the available types and paces of change remain by convention constant and familiar – as in its invariable reliance on catalyst; change; impact; pivotal point; prelude; run-up; tipping-point; turning-point; watershed

100 The organization of historical knowledge [§2.2]. Whatever historical change brought may have been inscrutable, but the type of change and the symptoms of the crucial reorientation of events are subsequently reassuringly identifiable. And this same model still interprets the dynamics of the present, the ongoing rearrangements of an already historicized world. Course and stream frequently categorize the dynamics of history and coordinate its effects. For example: (a) ‘the First World War [. . .] is rightly seen as one of the major events [. . .] which shaped [§1.4] the subsequent course [§2.1] of the 20th century [§1.1]’ (Henig 2002: xi). The ‘psychic addition’ here furnished by the coordinator presupposes that there already was a “direction” in the century that was deflected and that, therefore, a set of different consequences necessarily followed. Thus the dynamics of historicity are affirmed at the expense of freedom and future possibilities. Or take this further illustration: (b) ‘The stream of history [. . .] tends to sift out in the long run those contents, patterns, and modes of experience that are of the greatest pragmatic value’ (Mannheim 2000: 226). Here Mannheim’s historicist ‘psychic addition’ makes history axiomatically a stream, its whole conceptual apparatus riding on metaphor. In these further examples, these coordinators are extended by means of terms from the same field of reference, i.e. currents and drift: (c) ‘What seemed to contemporaries to be momentous issues may come to seem [. . .] trivial [i.e. to a ‘distant future’] [. . .]. But the currents [§2.1] that cause historical drift [§2.1] will carry a certain meaning since they will partly shape [§1.4] what is to come.’ For the author these coordinators support a conclusive administrative overview of his history of the Cold War. Hence, (d) ‘the historical currents [§2.1] that produced this outcome [i.e. war as an anachronism] are not difficult to discern’; hence, too, (e) ‘the historical currents [§2.1] during the second half of the 20th century [§1.1] turned decisively against communism’ (Gaddis 2007: 260, 262, 263). Because the categorical coordinators are a priori investments of rational meaning into the evidence to make whatever happened make sense, the account itself, the world-arrangement it produces with “Cold War” as its nominal transcendental principle [§1.3], in fact comes down to studying its own ‘psychic additions’. Evolution – in historians’ parlance – is far removed from its specific sense of biological adaptation to the environment for the sake of survival. Rather, synonymous with a sense of “necessary” (quasi-biological) development [§2.1], it has an affinity with generation and process [§2.1]. These examples are typical: (a) ‘There has been a tendency to attribute [Prussia’s] evolution [§2.1] to a fortuitous sequence of astute, able-bodied rulers [. . .] who understood [. . .] power politics’; (b) ‘The evolution [§2.1] from Nordic tree worship through the Christian iconography of the Tree of Life and the wooden cross to images like Caspar David Friedrich’s explicit association between the evergreen fir and the architecture of resurrection may seem esoteric’ (Shennan 1995: 1; Schama 1996: 14–5). In (a) evolution functions

The organization of historical knowledge 101 synonymously with “sequential development”, rather than “mutation”. In (b) the items evolution coordinates in historical succession are simply various, not mutually exclusive expressions of a ‘powerful yearning [. . .] a consolation for our mortality’ – an existential rather than a historical reality. In both cases it confirms and amplifies the historical, the historicizing preconception. Force too gives a sense of the inherent energy conducive to historical change, as in these examples: (a) ‘Nationalism had shown itself to be a powerful political force [§2.1] that could attract popular loyalties. In the first half of the nineteenth century [§1.1] nationalism had largely been an oppositional force [§2.1], one used against the existing states. In the two decades after mid-century [§1.1], European statesmen would seek [. . .] to make it a force [§2.1] for the regime [. . .]’; (b) ‘In the chapters that follow, the forces [§2.1] making for continuity [§3.1] have been given as much attention as those generating more glamorous change [§2.2]. In the conclusion, stock will be taken [. . .]’ (Sperber 2000: 430; Blanning 2000: 10). Force makes abstract agencies (here ‘nationalism’ or ‘continuity’) material. That it fuels historical change makes it irresistible, super-human, hence attractive or worth being ‘harnessed’. But that its energy derives from human thought and behaviour, from other powerful people, in the first place, the coordinator suppresses so that the historical account being constructed seems more objective and better amplified. Generation is itself a historicizing category: the “lost generation” defines those killed in the First World War or whose lives were dislocated by it; the “baby boomers” those born immediately after the Second World War who to the envy of subsequent generations have, it seems, effortlessly reaped the harvest of economic prosperity. Further it coordinates the written history with the ongoing course of events or with current trends by figuratively embedding them in a common biological substratum, as in these examples: (a) ‘Thus a general aim of this book is to celebrate the rich diversity and endless fascination of history, and to stimulate a new generation [§2.1] of young people to study past events and think about the ways in which they have shaped [§1.4] the present and may guide the future’; (b) ‘like its predecessor, A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot, the present volume forms part of a trend [§2.1]. I hope that the next generation [§2.1] will take the investigation further’ (Henig 2002: xiii; Burke 2012: 275). As Mannheim demonstrates, generation coordinates a number of history functions. Its significance itself is also structured by categorical coordinators, which only confirms their indispensable armature sustaining historical conceptualization, as when he concludes: (c) ‘The phenomenon of generations [§2.1] is one of the basic factors [§1.2] contributing to the genesis [§3.1 cf. beginnings] of the dynamic [§2.] of historical development [§2.1]. The analysis of the interaction of forces [§2.1] in this connection is a large task in itself, without which the nature of historical development [§2.1] cannot be understood.’ Generation functions in a variety of ways, e.g.:

102 The organization of historical knowledge • •

• • • •

as ‘a general law [. . .] of human development [§2.1], based on the biological law of the limited life-span of man’; as qualifying the referential significance of the period or the era by means of the synchronous co-existence of different generations, which defines the common influences they were exposed to, while subjectivizing the experience of what was happening (i.e. according to each generation’s perspective on it); as the characteristic attitudes of specific groups in a specific political or cultural location in society; as a means of reinvigorating the ‘cultural process [§2.1]’ by means of ever renewed ‘fresh contact’ with the ‘social and cultural heritage [§3.2]’; as defining as an actuality ‘generation units’ where ‘a concrete bond is created between members of a generation by their being exposed to [. . .] a process of dynamic [§2.0] de-stabilization’; as ensuring the ‘essentially correct’ ‘classification of generation types into leading, diverted, and suppressed’ (Mannheim 2000: 278, 282, 291, 293–4, 304, 316, 320).

Generation is thus a most useful, adaptable categorical coordinator because it accommodates the investment of a wide range of ‘psychic additions’ in the historical account it structures. That its conceptual infra-structure is selfreferential ensures the historical account’s “Truth”. Process, like generation and evolution, is a very broad term. It is widely used in historical discourse because it implies not just change [§2.2], but change with an end in view, a micro-teleology. Within the time-segment – the age, the period [§1.1] – the historian takes as his or her framework or context [§3.1], it offers a small, but just sufficiently rational dose of historical determinism. Examples are legion. Its frequent occurrence alone seems persuasive enough to substantiate its inherent sense. But if the reader were persuaded, he or she would commit (what Whitehead calls) the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. In most cases, process is void: it refers to nothing at all. Consider the following examples: (a) ‘what we have to grasp is that both our “ideas” and our “existence” are components of a comprehensive evolutionary [§2.1] process [§2.1] in which we are engaged’; (b) ‘For the historicist, entities do not exist apart from the historic process [§2.1]; they come into being and realize themselves in it, and become intelligible through it’ (Mannheim 2000: 146, 167). Here process makes itself, evolution, and history interchangeable. However, it need not occur at all: simple rephrasing would dispense with it completely, as it could be in the following examples: (c) ‘The process [§2.1] of repression, polarization and radicalization of the reform movement following British entry into the war with France occurred in Ireland as well as in England’; (d) ‘One aspect of this whole process [§2.1] of the activation of civil society deserves special attention, namely the participation of women’; (e) ‘This broad process [§2.1] of mobilization and organization needs to be kept in mind when we consider the events of

The organization of historical knowledge 103 the 1848 revolution [. . .]’ (Sperber 2000: 136, 406, 407). Here ‘repression’, ‘polarization’, ‘radicalization’, ‘activation’, ‘mobilization’ and ‘organization’ all already imply process, be it ‘whole’ or ‘broad’. Consequently, they make its specific discursive presence redundant. As it stands the historical account is tautological. The same syndrome is evinced also in theoretical reflections on the scope and function of history in a globalized world defined not least by the technological compression of time and space. Here the arguments for an “alternative”, “innovative” history still rely on the basic functions of coordinators, as follows: (f) ‘The past and the future are in a process [§2.1] of being reconstructed in new ways and none of them is indispensable’; (g) ‘Time [§1.1] is no longer a simple classificatory principle but rather [. . .] the operator of a historical process [§2.1] – [. . .] the true name for progress’; (h) ‘By the end of the 1870s, as time [§1.1] was being unified the [Japanese] archipelago increasingly possessed myriad pasts. Turning these myriad pasts into a history though, was not an easy process [§2.1]’ (Lorenz and Bevernage 2013: 55, 124, 223). Here ‘being reconstructed’ and ‘turning [. . .] into’ in themselves imply process: evidently, even theoretical reflections on the construction and reconstruction of history cannot dispense with categorical coordinators, even if – as with process – their emphatic effect masks their deficient sense. In fact, “alternative” histories, not just those depending on theoretical innovation, but also subaltern narratives – representing the voices of the repressed and exploited excluded from the dominant modes of imperial or global history – need to find the historical process credible for the sake of their own, belated self-vindication, as in this example: (i) ‘The search for the nature of history has led us [. . .] either to demarcate [. . .] the dividing line between historical process [§2.1] and historical knowledge or to conflate [. . .] historical process [§2.1] and historical narrative. [. . .] What matters most are the process [§2.1] and conditions of production of such narratives. Only a focus on that process [§2.1] can uncover the ways in which the two sides of historicity intertwine in a particular context [§3.1] (Trouillot 1995: 25). Here the sense is confusing: process refers both to what happens and to the production of narratives about what happened (even though ‘production’ already implies process, which makes it redundant). Certainly, its categorical coordinating function is recognized: the overlap of process (as history) and process (as narrative production) apparently reveals ‘the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others’ (Trouillot 1995: 25). However, historical process, in any case a ‘psychic addition’, redundant except for its emphatic, amplificatory effect, offers here as elsewhere only the illusion of determined sense. The perspective of the repressed might well need to find process (as history) credible for the sake of its own narrative production process. But it cannot rely on it – redundant and illusory as it is – without making itself redundant. As the dominant idea of a historicized world, history only ever projected and still only ever projects dominant interests. The competitive claims of entitlement

104 The organization of historical knowledge to determine what historicizes the world are nothing but symptomatic of shifting structures of power, of shifting structures of the academic recognition of power, in a globalized political economy. Trajectory and transition have affinities with process and evolution, as in these examples: (a) ‘the Cold War [. . .] began with a return of fear and ended in a triumph of hope, an unusual trajectory [§2.1] for great historical upheavals’; (b) ‘The process [§2.1] of these multiple transitions [§2.1] had been difficult [. . .]. The subsequent period [§1.1] of European history would see the end of this difficult transition [§2.1], the establishment of a new economic, social and political, framework [§3.1], under the sign of a culture of progress and realism’ (Gaddis 2007: 266; Sperber 2000: 431). Both offer a determined sense, a micro-teleology. In doing so, historical explanation (as in (b) particularly) evinces merely the kaleidoscopic rearrangement of its discourse-logic, of the coordinators that produce its overall sense. Dynamic forces that see history as a course or a stream, or in terms of development, evolution, or process, require the calibration of the types and varying paces of the change they generally imply. Some anticipate change: (e.g.) prelude; run-up; some imply the force of change: (e.g.) catalyst; impact; some identify the location, the historical-temporal site, where change occurred: (e.g.) pivotal point; tipping-point; turning-point; watershed. History may well be in flux, but these coordinators demonstrate that it can be regulated: •

•

•

Impact, evoking violent collision occurs frequently in an attenuated, abstract, figurative way, as in: (a) ‘My primary aim here is to explore the complex impact [§2.2] of the 1914–18 war on European cultural history by focusing on [. . .] the form and content of mourning for the dead of the Great War’; (b) ‘A major theme of English economic history could be written around the impact [§2.2] of immigrants on English economic development [§2.1]’; (c) ‘Yet for most Europeans [. . .] the Revolution’s impact [§2.2] came in the shape [cf. §1.4] of almost continuous warfare between 1792 and 1815’ (Winter 2010: 7; Coward 2003: 23; Blanning 2000: 248). In (a) the impact affects history as a cognitive disposition of the historian; in (c) shape categorizes it as warfare. But as (b) confirms, in all cases impact metaphorically connects physical force with an abstract concept (i.e. ‘cultural history’, ‘economic development’, ‘warfare’). Catalyst also serves this metaphorical purpose, as in: ‘The wars of William III and Queen Anne’s reigns proved to be a major catalyst [§2.2] of constitutional change [§2.2]. They had as great an impact [§2.2] on the long-term [§1.2] development [§2.1] of the British constitution as [. . .] on the short-term [§1.2] pattern [cf. coherence §1.0] of English politics’ (Coward 2003: 450). Turning-point is a variant of change of course, as in the following: (a) ‘It is difficult to forecast where this historiographical trend [§2.1] may lead [. . .], but [. . .] the next ten years might see more evidence that

The organization of historical knowledge 105

•

the mid-seventeenth century [§1.1] was a significant turning-point [§2.2] in the country’s history [. . .]’ (Coward 2003: xxxviii); (b) ‘The TurningPoint’ [§2.2] also defines Howe’s resignation speech in November 1990 that ‘provided the trigger for Mrs Thatcher’s overthrow’; (c) ‘From this perspective, micro change prompted by changes to the environment, shifts in religious or secular or natural environment disasters [. . .] produce “turning points” [§2.2] as important as the more conventional ones such as political revolution, invasion or war’ (Pugh 1994: 326; Claus and Marriott 2012: 37); (d) Princeton University Press has a historical monograph series entitled Turning Points in Ancient History: in ‘presenting accessible books, by leading scholars, on crucial events and key moments in the ancient world’, in ‘aiming at fresh interpretations of both famous subjects and little-known ones that deserve more attention’, and with ‘the books providing a narrative synthesis that integrates literary and archaeological evidence’, it – predicated on this categorical coordinator – offers itself as a model of comprehensively managed knowledge.3 The geological metaphor watershed is also a variant of change of course. It converges with turning-point as in these examples: (a) ‘In whichever way historians [. . .] define historical periods, great and momentous events are made important by the writing of history. These “watersheds” [§2.2] can define a generation [§2.1] or even a century [§1.1]’; (b) ‘These watersheds [§2.2] or “turning points” [§2.2] are constructed by historians but historians can also suggest counterfactual histories that work along different timelines (cf. epoch, era, [§1.1])’ (Claus and Marriott 2012: 37, 38).

History (as events) may well occasion change, often with shock and awe. Moreover, its sense is indeterminate: no-one can know where it will lead. But these categorical coordinators that a priori ensure the coherence of history (as an account) claim at least to identify the types of change occurring. As constitutive ‘thought acts’ or as ‘psychic additions’ supplied by disciplinary procedures they ensure that what happens makes sense. Their eidetic or abstract character is metaphorically transformed into material and physical entities to lend them discursive weight. Their function is anaesthetic and reactive. Historical events may well be unprecedented, but understanding them must be “conventional”.

Stabilizing components The coherence of history (as an account) is constantly disrupted by the dynamic force of historical events. Consequently the unavoidable realignment of the account with events, the subsequent revisions required by constantly shifting perspectives, indispensable for determining sense, must rely on stabilizing components. These categorical coordinators are of two kinds: those that function synchronically, investing stabilizing purpose in events

106 The organization of historical knowledge themselves; and those that operate diachronically, connecting past and present to guarantee that the way things were did determine the way they now have got to be. The synchronic stabilizers include: beginnings; context; continuity; custom; framework; origins; place; precedent; product; roots; tradition. The diachronic stabilizers are typically: beneficiary; heritage; identity; legacy; precursor. The synchronic stabilizers propose a split – to use Whitehead’s term: a ‘vicious bifurcation’ – in historical understanding. Constantly following a course or in a stream, the historical event, the historical issue, appears as not sufficiently motivated to justify itself. So historians resort to synchronic stabilizers that endow it with “more” history in order to substantiate it, to steady it, to make it meaningful. They place the event within a context, framework, or other synchronic coordinator – but these are themselves constructed from events of a similar order as those they propose to contextualize, frame, or categorize. The coordinators signify the augmented comprehension this larger resource of historical meaning projects. They work as history-supplements in a variety of forms. Placing and setting in a (usually) larger or wider framework or historical context is a very common supplementation of history, as in the following examples: (a) ‘by placing [§3.1] these twentieth-century [§1.1] renderings of a set of ancient [apocalyptic] themes within a wider cultural history [cf. context §3.1] of the war, it may be possible to show how a number of artists drew upon [. . .] other currents [cf. stream §2.1] of cultural expression in the period [§1.1] following the outbreak of war in 1914’; (b) ‘The problem of decline [. . .] needs to be set [§3.1] in a larger historiographical context [§3.1]’; (c) ‘My hope was to set [§3.1] the two colonial worlds firmly in the context [§3.1] of their own time [§1.1], rather than viewing them retrospectively through the lens of nineteenth- and twentieth-century [§1.1] developments [§2.1]’; (d) ‘the book sets [§3.1] the Catalan revolt and its early seventeenth-century [§1.1] background within a coherent narrative framework [§3.1] that still holds good’; (e) ‘As basic philosophical categories, time and space are particularly suitable as a framework [§3.1] for a general cultural history, because they are comprehensive, universal and essential’ (Winter 2010: 145; Elliott 2012: 48, 118, 188–9; Kern 1983: 2). Framework in particular demonstrates that categorical coordinators do not “just” constitute the historical account, but through mental and existential coercion work to secure comprehension, as in: ‘we collectively abide in a secure location within time-space. We are locked into our temporal frame [§3.1].’ However, this situation conceals its reality from itself: ‘the experience is so normal that it generally does not seem like a constriction’. The result induces the characteristic psychopathology of life that can be conceptualized only in historicized terms or expressed by historicized reflexes: ‘Meanwhile we can test the boundaries [cf. framework §3.1] mentally and imaginatively [. . .]. Thoughts in the here-and-now can be directed both prospectively and retrospectively to contemplate other times [§1.1]’ (Corfield 2007: 25).

The organization of historical knowledge 107 The categorical coordinator here insinuates the discourse-logic of historical comprehension into ordinary experience: normal experience is experience confined to temporal frames. It implies that nothing other than this discourse-logic (and with it historical comprehension) could lock experience into a temporal framework and pass this constriction off as normal. But it also suggests that, without history’s temporal frames locked in place, experience would not normally be constricted: there would be no constriction to be experienced as normal. Thus history’s discourse-logic testifies to its complicity with the world it represents. As a psycho-pathogenic cognitive practice history so arranges the world as to mask its actual desolation. Roots inverts placing and setting. Instead of being placed in a context, the event now “grows” from it. The cognitive procedure seems natural because it configures itself metaphorically as a common organic development, as in these examples: (a) ‘The use of “narrative” as a metaphor for identity [§3.2] is very useful for discussing identities [§3.2] similar to the “Englishness” under discussion here: identities [§3.2] that are trying to represent a historically rooted [§3.1] culture within a larger, more heterogeneous society’; (b) ‘[. . .] it was customary to deploy two or more [slide projectors] in art-historical teaching to encourage students to speak to the [. . .] contrasts presented by juxtaposed images. This practice had deep roots [§3.1] in the history of the discipline’ (Ashton and Kean 2009: 120; Jordanova 2012: 222). Legacy similarly suggests augmented comprehension provided by a larger resource of historical meaning, as follows: ‘The legacies [§3.2] of the eighteenth century [§1.1] include both the emergence [§1.4] of the United States of America [. . .] and the beginning [§3.1] of the greatest of all colonial ventures, the subjugation of India by Britain [. . .]’ (Blanning 2000: 246). Tradition works both synchronically and diachronically. It can define an event when it occurs: it configures its contemporary situation. It also connects that situation with others like it that keep perpetuating themselves, as the following examples suggest: (a) ‘Schorske identified two main traditions [§3.1], which he saw as preceding [cf. precedent [§3.1] and contributing to modernism – the Baroque and the Enlightenment [cf. period §1.1]’; (b) ‘The tradition [§3.1] of recording responses to Italian art, architecture and archaeology continued [cf. continuity §3.1] into the nineteenth century [§1.1] [. . .]’; (c) ‘The concept “tradition” [§3.1] is particularly challenging to use in a historical context [§3.1] [. . .]. Rather I am drawing attention to a sense of shared frameworks [§3.1] and values, passed between individuals and groups [. . .]’; (d) ‘This collective identity [§3.2] is reiterated by means of cultural performances such as traditions [§3.1], objectified in material goods and by imbuing the natural and built landscapes with commemorative meanings’; (e) ‘Each generation [§2.1] imposes its own experiences onto the object or tradition [§3.1] adding layer upon layer of understanding [. . .] to the artefacts of culture’; (f) ‘The point of Landscape and Memory [. . .] is, rather, by revealing the richness, antiquity, and complexity of our landscape tradition [§3.1], to show just how much we stand to lose [i.e. given

108 The organization of historical knowledge ‘the ongoing degradation of the planet’]’ (Jordanova 2012: 117, 171, 213; Ashton and Kean 2009: 118, 119; Schama 1996: 14). Evidently tradition exerts a stabilizing effect since it implies substance, wealth, value, and its endless accumulation, but also the risk of loss – a model of material capital in an ideal form. Diachronic coordinators suggest stability in terms not just of the events themselves but of the assured continuity between “the Past” and the present. Hence tradition, as a behavioural focus for historical events as they occur, also ensures a self-perpetuating connection between (tradition) then and (tradition) now. Further, the categorical coordination of coherence or dynamics may have been implicit in the historical account, its foundational a priori. However, even though the connection between then and now, also a priori, sustains the categorical coherence of stability, how that stability is achieved can be controversial. Heritage is particularly controversial: it affirms wealth, specifically symbolic capital, as the basic, historically confirmed motive for social behaviour. It may well assure continuity between then and now, but it depends on which “then” history is received by which “now” social or cultural interests. It dissolves into heterogeneity, attracting (amongst others) the tourism industry, the media, historical re-enactment societies, the built environment, living-museums, theme-parks, stately homes . . . For present purposes, it is unnecessary to explore these controversies themselves: the debate anyway continues.4 Paramount here is the presumed connection between the way things used to be and the way things now are, conceived as heritage, as something valuable inherited, material capital as a metonym for symbolic (or ideal) capital, as in the following example: ‘This sense of heritage [§3.2] places an emphasis on the passing down from one generation to another [§2.1] of physical property, lineage or ancestral traditions [§3.1]. Hence the word can refer both to the relics of the past [. . .] and to the processes [§2.1] by which those remnants have been [. . .] preserved over time [§1.1] to ensure their continuing [§3.1] existence into the present. It also implies a desire to see inherited aspects [§3.2] of the past continue [§3.1] to be [. . .] protected so that they form part of the heritage [§3.2] of future generations [§2.1]’ (Cowell 2008: 9). Heritage thus demonstrates that it cannot provide stabilization – i.e. the symmetries of past, present, and future; the “permanent substratum” of temporal processes [§2.1]; generations [§2.1] as already recognized segments in inevitable historical continuity [§3.1] – without the coordinating categories of coherence and dynamics. However, this explanation of how heritage works is improbable. That “the Past” has a present value is symptomatic of an already historicized world – a world in which history has historicized itself, a world conscious of its historical consciousness, a world in which “the Past” (the way things used to be) only magnifies and reinforces the present (the way things are now). Hence, heritage cannot signify what has been “passed on” from “the Past”. Rather it is a historicized value generated subsequently (afterwards) by the present, as

The organization of historical knowledge 109 though it came – as an inheritance – from “the Past”. As a connector between then and now, heritage is a synthetic device, a further example of a conventional ‘psychic addition’. Certainly nothing guarantees that what the present cherishes as its heritage to pass to ‘future generations’ will be accepted by them. Instead, they might well ‘cherish and protect’ what the present now disregards. But a further reservation questions more radically the capacity of heritage to provide stabilizing coordinations at all. Precisely when a necessary connection between “the Past, Present, and Future” is posited, how it should manifest itself – which remnants, for what purposes, as what value, for which social or cultural interests? – becomes disputed. Ongoing disputes about heritage are sustained by its function as a stabilizing connector between then and now. Ironically, therefore, just when history connects with the present, just when this coordination makes history make sense, heritage finds itself fatally compromised. Even in a historicized world what once was never realizes itself again. Identity is a further stabilizing coordinator problematic not because it is flawed (like heritage), but because it is both totally unspecific and totally binding (cf. Davies 2010: 59–73). Certainly it meets a perceived social need in a historicized world. It exemplifies historicized thinking, historicized selfreflection: to find one’s origins [§3.1], to discover what makes [§1.4] one the way one is. It too thus orientates itself by generation [§2.1], except that this time the human subjects place themselves in this succession. In historical discourse, identity also defines social commonplaces: social practices and cultural values that define the social group because, being shared by its members, they ensure its coherence. Identity is, therefore, a categorical coordinator because it coordinates the various categories – the common places – that enable social groups to recognize themselves. The following example – like that cited for roots (a) above – typifies how identity works socially and how historians construct it as a common place, a place a group has in common: (a) ‘the re-enactors are [. . .] separating themselves from [. . .] a “British” identity [§3.2] by working with [. . .] Englishness and thereby creating a new reflexive identity [§3.2] through experience. In the British identity [§3.2] to which they are ascribed by society they see [. . .] the covering up of elements of their English identity [§3.2] [. . .]. This is not to suggest they are right-wing nationalist extremists [. . .] but rather a group proud of a past that is going unnoticed [. . .]’ (Ashton and Kean 2009: 122, cf. 125). Identity is the perfect, most effective categorical coordinator because (as this example shows) it is synonymous with history itself, particularly with history as a current social value. The history of any issue, event, or object – by definition an account of it changing or of its re-functioning – must presuppose some substrate of sameness, some underlying identity of itself with itself. This sameness substrate ensures that the way things were the way they were determines the way things are the way they now have got to be. The development, evolution, or process of a historical issue depends on

110 The organization of historical knowledge what makes these underlying, self-perpetuating ‘things’ the same, however much they ostensibly change. History itself in its very essence [Wesen] is thus a category of identity. It is not just a common place, a place everyone has in common: it is the most common place, since in a historicized world everyone is not only in history but forced to be there, held in it and by it, since there is no place else where they could be. So, as in this example, identities – (b) ‘the six most commonplace and compelling forms of [. . .] identities [§3.2], namely religion, nation, class, gender, race, and civilization’ – generate categories of history. At the same time, a survey of (c) ‘these six collective identities [§3.2] over substantial periods [§1.1] of time [§1.1]’, exposing the conflicts they trigger as well as the communication they facilitate, shows them to have a history of their own. Further identity coordinates these categories, both synchronically and diachronically. Identity is always actual, always current: they are here and now ‘the most resonant forms of human solidarity’. But what identity identifies itself with is invariably historical, a historical composite of its constituent elements (as in the case of the re-enactors cited in identity (a) above). Ultimately, though, this identitary structure tends towards redundancy: it subverts itself. In its diachronic mode identity produces history as the most comprehensive common place, the place where everyone is compelled to be; at the same time, in synchronic mode it produces humanity as the most comprehensive identitary category, at any historical moment transcending all others, as here (d): ‘To write about the past no less than to live in the present, we need to see beyond our differences, [. . .] our identity politics [. . .] to embrace [. . .] the common humanity that has always bound us together, that still binds us together today, and that will continue to bind us together in the future’ (Cannadine 2013: 3, 7, 264). Once identity is collapsed into the history of humanity, its categorizing and coordinating functions are finished. They serve no further purpose: for all the heterogeneity of “history” and “humanity” there is nothing else, nothing different, with which identity can identify itself. However, if identity is affirmed, if it is kept in play, if for its ludic character it is traditionally re-enacted, its categorical coordinating function remains effective. It predisposes the historical account to take the “monographic view”, to take stock of its topic – in its development, evolution, and process – with the “administrative gaze”. This self-elevating stance is characteristically expressed thus: (e) ‘A history of national identity [§3.2] that began at the beginning [§3.1] and advanced [cf. course §2.1] [. . .] up to the present could not have dealt with all that cutting across time and space which identity-making [§3.2; §1.4] involves. Not all English identity [§3.2] was made [§1.4] in England at the same time, but many identities [§3.2] are in play at any one time.’ Identity thus structures a history articulated through (administrative) categories or common places such as state, nation, class, people, land, landscape, country, territory, gender, ethnicity, work, family, authority, etc. Still, it is synonymous with a linear history where these categories too collapse into the ultimate self-identical category – a self-perpetuating

The organization of historical knowledge 111 sameness – they always constituted: (f) ‘There has been an England and an English since at least 937 [. . .]. Since then the territory has stayed the same and the people have continued [§3.1] to call themselves English.’ Identity stabilizes the historical account, therefore, not just because it operates synchronically and diachronically, but also because it makes for more history, it invests the history that was with more stabilizing substance now. In this respect it derives from historicized thinking symptomatic of a historicized world where history (in this case, of England) has become historicized for itself while persisting in the present as an amalgam of heterogeneous values that constantly require reassessment, as in this reflection: (g) ‘Parliamentary government is so embedded in how England has been described that it is hard to think of it as a force [§2.1] acting on our identity [§3.2]. More likely it is seen as part of our identity [§3.2] rather than something actively shaping [§1.4] us.’ Central to historicized thinking is its historicized historical consciousness, its historical hyperconsciousness. The crystallization of historical identity is history become conscious of itself, particularly conscious of itself as a negotiable value, as here: (h) ‘The English stand now in need of a reassessment of who they are. This book is an account of how they were, with present needs in mind. As the conditions for our survival are being worked out, I hope Identity of England explains something of our history and allows the best and most useful parts of that history to be carried forward into the future’ (Colls 2002: 2–3, 6, 7, 380–1). Thus the account of identity, conscious of its historical consciousness, offers itself as a further historicization of an already historicized history. Identity, though an effective stabilizing coordinator, is a most insidious component of a historical account. It enables it to affirm identity as a persona that can be ‘ascribed’, as an administrative category, a common place, for binding people together, so that a historian – a specialized technician or a resources manager – can tell them who they were, who they are, and what they need. It thus ensures ordinary experience is integrated into the technical structures of historical comprehension which then can be tuned to determining the horizons of individual consciousness. But identity in its narrower, psychological sense involves something different from what its historicization enforces. Historians may affirm it as sameness, as what it is in itself, as intrinsic self-sufficiency, but its premise is self-differentiation. The personality is not made or shaped by the imprint of external influences. Rather it produces itself through communication with itself; and this self-communication relies on ‘the intrusion of supplementary codes from outside’ which of themselves change the context in which this communication occurs: ‘The essence of a personality may be thought of as an individual set of socially significant codes, and this set changes during the act of communication’ (Lotman 1990: 22). To constitute itself the personality needs something different from itself. From its inception it encounters and appropriates external codes and develops as it continues to rearrange and reformulate the external differences it encounters. Identity is, therefore, much

112 The organization of historical knowledge more than a component of commonplace group-psychology (as assumed in historical accounts). Rather, it is a relation one has with oneself, facilitated by external codes: what the personality can be for itself, hence what it can be for others. Hence ‘in the process of this autocommunication the actual person is reformed and this process is connected with a very wide range of cultural functions, ranging from the sense of individual existence which in some types of culture is essential, to self-discovery and auto-psychotherapy’ (Lotman 1990: 29). Its proper location is individual consciousness now in its own, immediate cognitive situation – a form of consciousness automatically suppressed when identity becomes a category of information technologically programmed for specialized historical comprehension.

Summary So far one comprehensive categorical coordinator has gone unmentioned: history. But then categorical coordinators in themselves imply history. They are all means of constituting, substantiating, and amplifying historicity. History is the one coordinator that coordinates the coordinators themselves. It coordinates the most comprehensive, but most heterogeneous category of all: humanity – human beings. Historians stress the ‘richness and diversity’ of history (as mentioned above), convinced that ‘history remains fascinating because it is always changing’ (Hunt 2013: 215). But an historical account is possible only through the indispensable recourse to categorical coordinators. They offer means of determining the sense of history; they ensure that there is sufficient sense in history to determine its meaning. Consequently, this ever-changing richness and diversity are coordinated by means of a normative lexicon that guarantees history’s conventional sameness, the consistent self-identity of history itself. The normative lexicon categorical coordinators provide, along with the conventional sameness they produce, explains why these coordinators constitute the truth of the historical account. Even where they do not explicitly figure in it, their effect is self-evident: narrative ipso facto implies course, development or process; analysis inevitably requires causes, factors, and origins; the chronological span of the epoch or the transcendental subject of the historical account involves frameworks or contexts. This conventional sameness determined by categorical coordinators with their normative lexicon establishes a priori the historical account. It produces the indispensable discursive basis that makes discussion of “the Truth” of the account possible. Without this sameness ensured by categorical coordination there would be no account, hence no issue of truthfulness to be debated. Historians may well argue whether or not a particular event was a turning-point in the course of history: they tend not to deny turning-points or courses any historical existence at all. They may well debate the relative importance of the various factors involved in a given historical analysis: but the analysis fails if factors themselves have no historical substance. They

The organization of historical knowledge 113 may well dispute the sense of the chronological definition of the period or epoch they are discussing: but that discussion is senseless if period or epoch is purely the historian’s invention. As in the random examples demonstrating how categorical coordinators work, the historical account is as much concerned with arranging and rearranging them as it is with the exposition of its subject-matter. Categorical coordinators are like the mirrors in a kaleidoscope that as it turns transform the constantly shifting, multifarious data into symmetrical patterns. They illustrate the effects of a ‘symbolic sphere of thinking’ [symbolische Denksphäre] in which concepts are treated as ‘tokens’ [Rechensteine] that function no longer cognitively to illuminate, but to impose authoritative managerial control of reality (Husserl 1986b: 97; §18). In fact the exposition of historical subject-matter comes down to this constant arrangement and rearrangement of categorical coordinators. As a result the question of “the Truth” of the account becomes formal and disciplinary, a question of elucidating the preferred categorical configuration, of debating which categorical conventions produce the requisite professionally approved sameness. In view of the alleged, ever-changing richness and diversity of history, in recognizing that history can produce itself in different media (e.g. film) or that different conceptions of temporality might produce different or alternative types of history, historians may well conclude ‘that ultimately no single agreed-upon method has ever been devised for rendering the past’ (Rosenstone 2006: 10). But the occurrence of categorical coordinators demonstrates that, for the sake of its own self-production, the historical account, whether deliberately or through cognitive habit, cannot exist without a conventional, normative thought-style. So enlisting categorical coordinators to conclude that ‘the history film not only challenges traditional [§3.1] history, but helps return us to a kind of ground zero, a sense that we can never really know the past, but can only continually play with, reconfigure, and try to make [§1.4] meaning out of the traces it has left behind’ takes the discussion back to the basis of history, to its fundamental essence that in this ‘reconfiguring’ makes categorical coordinators a priori indispensable (Rosenstone 2006: 164). Hence, as the discussion earlier has shown, even subaltern histories – as histories – rely on the same categorical coordinators as those that produce dominant, imperial historical narratives. Consequently, a historical account may well invoke Derrida and deconstruction – and by implication their postmodernist subversion of conventional historical narrative – to substantiate its indispensable critique of male-orientated liberal-humanism. But to stress the unstable boundaries between gendered human beings and animals it still relies on the conventional coordination of essentially the same categories (i.e. ‘history’, ‘human’) that underpin the “traditional” liberal-humanist account, as follows: (a) ‘the compulsive inclination to demarcate the territory of the human from that of the non-human [. . .] is one of the great driving forces [§2.1] of history’; (b) ‘To understand the instability and definitions of who is truly human, we need history’ (Bourke 2013: 5). Similarly, different

114 The organization of historical knowledge time-schemes, different cultures of temporality, may well provide different, alternative forms of history to the received model predicated on a stable, linear Newtonian conception of time. But the possibilities for alternative histories elaborated inter alia through Judaic, Aboriginal, Islamic, or Buddhist conceptions of time, still fall back on the traditions that sustain them, particularly since crucial points of their doctrinal orientation are located in their past. For this reason they evince the same categorical convergence of ‘history’ and ‘human’ – given that ‘religions have traditionally [§3.1] dominated the formation of ideas and the intellectual history of most human cultures’ (Gallois 2007: 243). The world, even the human world, is not complicit in one’s knowledge of it: there is no ‘prediscursive providence’ that disposes it in one’s own favour (Foucault 1971: 55). Plots are not ‘immanent to reality’: ‘events of real life [. . .] are drawn out into linear plot by a narrative text’ (Lotman 1990: 223). Knowledge may well derive from an intention inherent in consciousness to discover its own situation. But categorical coordinators derive from a different cognitive strategy: through ‘psychic additions’ to project onto the world the sense meant to be discovered in it in the first place. They are tautological since they are often synonymous with and of the same order as the self-same information that they coordinate and categorize. They are, therefore, indispensable for the construction of history: useful in their categorizing function as administrative instruments and information-management resources; instrumental in their coordinating function for guaranteeing sufficient reason for sense-production. Without them, history, any kind of history, would be a sheer heterogeneous mass of information. Hence, across a variety of forms of histories, including projections of alternative histories, categorical coordinators fundamentally affirm historicity. They vindicate the administrative gaze and the monographic view that find them indispensable for arranging and rearranging the world. At the same time, to produce the conventional sameness of the historical account categorical coordinators operate in principle tautologically: with simple reformulation, they could be removed from it entirely. From this it appears that historicity needs the overcoding or emphasizing of its foundational principles, of its categorical coordinators, not just to substantiate them and thus to compensate for them being merely ‘psychic additions’ – but also for historicized consciousness to conceal from itself the void at the heart of historical comprehension.

Notes 1 The following analysis of historical discourse complements and extends the analysis of historical writing in Historics and Imprisoned by History (Davies 2006: 101–7, 160–75; 2010: 46–81). 2 Examples cited here are deliberately arbitrary: they are drawn from works of history and the philosophy of history over the last century or so. The point here is not to comment on the validity of their argument, but to emphasize the conceptual

The organization of historical knowledge 115 habits prerequisite for producing historical accounts and managing historical knowledge. The arbitrary diversity of the historiographical evidence exposes the reliance on categorical coordinators as a mental reflex ingrained in historicized consciousness. Cf. Biddiss 1977; Hobsbawm 1995; Sissons and French 1964. 3 See: http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/tpah.html (accessed 03.06.2014 – my italics to stress the discursive features of the thought-style that defines comprehension (cf. Chapter 5)). 4 On this topic publications are legion. Some key orientations have been provided by e.g. Hewison 1987; Lowenthal 1993, 1998; Samuel 1994; Wright 2009. See also Davies 2006: 217–30; 2010: 15–34.

5

The purpose of historical knowledge Comprehension

The apparently natural reflex to historicize frustrates itself. It keeps on frustrating its own purpose. It is determined to determine the sense of things, to discover – naturally enough – how things got to be the way they are, given the way they were. Yet this determination discloses only that nothing – either in the way things are or in the way they were – provides sense sufficient for managing the world’s historicized arrangement. (Hence, the conflicting perspectives, the differences of opinion, the varying criteria for selecting evidence, the competing trends in the historiography that coalesce around a significant historical topic: they all feed into the ongoing “debates” that constitute the rationale of disciplinary work, the parameters of academic practice.) As the argument here has demonstrated, causality proves to be logically presumptuous; as the alleged motivation of historical events, rationality appears inadequate; and, vindicating the veracity of historical common places, identity ratifies whatever historical circumstances happen to have available. And then, for a historical account to be drawn up, for there to be a history (or histories) to be managed at all, requires the investment of categorical coordinators, psychic additions provided by nothing other than the historian’s administrative gaze, thought-acts configuring a priori its monographic intention. Nevertheless, a further managerial recourse is available to the historianfunction. There is – apparently – one last escape-route from these reversals of historicized thinking. The frustration, the doubt, the inadequate rationality, the eidetic expenditure on supplementary categorizations might still pay off – and pay off profitably, particularly since they all crystallize into a single, hypothetical question: suppose we do not yet know enough? Immediately these deficiencies mutate into an incontrovertible affirmation of historicization itself. If more history and more about history were known, surely it would disclose more sense in itself, more reason that would now suffice to motivate it, there would be greater scope for self-identification, and finally confirmation that categorical coordinators are more than “just” synthetic discursive or structural devices? However, this comprehensive conviction is the foundational illusion of historicized thinking and of the academic disciplines reliant on it.

The purpose of historical knowledge 117 Beguilingly it confirms its already self-gratifying, historicizing intention: that as history is socially disseminated, as more people know more about it, as more people adopt the academic stance, as more of its practices become embedded in social behaviour, as history thus becomes more comprehensive, the more self-vindicating, the more persuasive it will be. But this makes it only more self-referential, responding to a popular interest in history it planted in the public in the first place, as this typical example confirms: ‘Oral history is a history built around people. It thrusts life into history itself and it widens its scope. [. . .] It brings history into, and out of, the community. [. . .] It makes for contact – and thence understanding – between social classes, and between generations. And to individual historians and others, with shared meanings, it can give a sense of belonging to a place or in time. In short it makes for fuller human beings. [. . .] It provides a means for radical transformation of the social meaning of history’ (Perks and Thomson 2006: 31). Certainly, this assertion is meant to be personally edifying and socially beneficial (‘makes for [. . .] understanding’, ‘makes for fuller human beings’). However, its advocacy of public historicization is actually self-referential and self-gratifying (as in ‘oral history [. . .] thrusts life into history [. . .] and widens its scope’; ‘transformation of the social meaning of history’). Consequently, it promotes a coercive agenda. It sees people as walled-up in history (as in ‘history built around people’); historical sense, defined as ‘belonging’, confines people to ‘a place’ ‘in time’; and then there is the sinister implication that to refuse historicization is to be become humanly degraded – inferred from the indemonstrable assertion that involvement in oral history makes one, by contrast, ‘a fuller human being’! Finally, this dubious conjecture is substantiated and amplified by familiar categorical coordinators that ensure stabilization and coherence (e.g. ‘community’, ‘generations’, ‘belonging to a place’ [§3.1], ‘in time’ [§1.1]), that provide causal or correlating verbs (e.g. ‘makes for contact’, ‘makes for fuller’, ‘can give a sense’ [§1.4]) that affirm its coercive intention in terms of an inherently historical dynamic force (e.g. ‘thrusts life into history’, ‘radical transformation’ [§2.1]).1 This last escape-route from the reversals of historicized thinking is a dead-end. More history, more comprehensive history, not only produces a sense-deficit but also makes it socially coercive, as if coerced historicized thinking made up for its lack of sense. As historical knowledge becomes more comprehensive, its alleged sense-value might have been expected to increase with it. Instead, it decreases, and decreases drastically. Hence this foundational illusion that more history means more historical sense produces the defining syndrome of historicized thinking in a comprehensively historicized world: an increase in historical and historicized knowledge devoid of any sense; historicized thinking socially coercive because demonstrably vacant. Only ‘the human’, with history the category of all other categories, the most comprehensive category, remains to camouflage this destitution.

118 The purpose of historical knowledge

Historicization: a ‘natural attitude’ Comprehension is normally synonymous with “understanding”. But history works in a way that marginalizes two of its central connotations. The first is hermeneutic – understanding as synonymous with interpretation, with eliciting from a given form of expression, such as a poem or a work of art, the interplay of rules and norms of genre and discourse that generate it. Certainly, history does involve interpretation of source material taken as an expression of the life-experience it assimilates. But, since historicization predetermines life experience and its forms of expression as historical, it reduces hermeneutics to a handy instrument of historicist thinking, of historicist comprehension (Dilthey 1961: 237–8). The second connotation is ethical. Understanding a historical figure, interpreting his or her behaviour is like attempting to understand and interpret the behaviour of an acquaintance (Simmel 1999: 162–3, 177–8). Irrespective of the remoteness or proximity in time, the observer attempts to be “understanding” of the person’s situation and motives. Comprehension, therefore, here implies something ethical. In fact, it seems capable of supporting an enormous ethical burden, as Hannah Arendt argues in relation to totalitarianism and genocide: ‘Comprehension [. . .] means [. . .] examining and bearing consciously the burden that events have placed upon us – neither denying their existence nor submitting meekly to their weight as though everything that in fact happened could not have happened otherwise.’ And she adds: ‘Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality – whatever it may be or might have been’ (Arendt 1986: xiv). Even so, comprehension cannot apparently define ethical commitment: the comprehending response and the ethical response, not being identical, only provisionally coincide. So, by contrast, during a visit to Treblinka and reflecting on the ‘meaning of this slaughter’, Elie Wiesel concludes: ‘I think I must have read all the books – memoirs, documents, scholarly essays and testimonies – written on the subject. I understand it less and less’ (Wiesel 1995: 113). Several implications present themselves here in this paradigmatic convergence of comprehensive engagement (‘all the books’) with lack of sense (‘understand [. . .] less and less’): (a) some issues are simply incomprehensible but the ethical commitment persists undiminished; (b) if an issue could be understood, the ethical commitment might diminish. The explanation that made it comprehensible might seem to justify it, since justification invokes the principle of sufficient reason to demonstrate that what occurred occurred for “good reason”; (c) the ethical commitment signifying enduring fidelity supersedes comprehension deriving from rational analysis coming after the event, inevitably late. Thus bracketing out hermeneutic and ethical significance reveals how historical comprehension historicizes. Viewed in its self-vindicating natural attitude, the intention of knowledge is to become comprehensive, ultimately to be encyclopedic. Human science might well be impressive because (as Max Scheler remarks) despite the

The purpose of historical knowledge 119 contingency of human life in the universe, human beings ‘learn to use their intelligence in an ever more comprehensive way’ [immer umfassender zu rechnen]. They thus manage to ‘gain an image of the world that is independent of their own psycho-physical organization, senses, needs, and interests’ and, however much these may change, ‘remains constant’ (Scheler 1978: 47). Certainly (as Husserl also realized) knowledge does tend progressively to broaden its scope and, by means of its technical-disciplinary resources, investigate the reality it had once taken for granted. However (he continues), the accumulated data that makes its knowledge all-embracing [allumfassenden Wissen] deters it from wondering precisely how it all connects with the immediately experienced reality it, with its transcendent abstractions, its world-image independent of the human psycho-physical organization, aims to comprehend (Husserl 1986a: 18, 37). Precisely here history proves authoritative. By means of categorical coordinators it mediates between comprehensive knowledge, predicated on transcendental structures (e.g. the frameworks, contexts, traditions, proper places [§3.1; §3.2] already mentioned in Chapter 4), and the immediately experienced reality of ordinary human life. Consequently, history becomes the comprehensive natural attitude as much in ordinary experience (e.g. particularly with heritage, public history, and oral history) as in the specialized cognitive situation academic disciplinary procedures sustain. Hence, as a natural cognitive attitude comprehension is exemplified by history – by historical scholarship, by the practice of historicism. In terms of its internal logic the historical account must be comprehensive: it must contain all the relevant causes and factors [§1.2]. Even so, the reader with a different concept of relevance, finding other related causes and factors omitted, may regard it as less than comprehensive, as insufficiently rationalized. History, therefore, comprises everything – certainly everything concerning the human species. According to Droysen whose conception of history is still paradigmatic, the historian is required ‘to encompass the entire science of history in its theoretical context’, so that he or she has already ‘a system that in its developments covers the realm of phenomena as it is developing in history’ (Droysen 1977: 31). Historical interrogation ‘presupposes a totality of the information and knowledge so far acquired’ [eine Totalität erworbener Kenntnis und Erkenntnis]. It is a ‘result of the entire intellectual content’ humans ‘have unconsciously accumulated and subjectively formed into their intellectual world’ (Droysen 1977: 107). With historicism guiding his sociological theory, Mannheim also insists that the ‘entire historical process’ is underpinned by an ‘enduring and comprehensive dialectical movement’: the ‘idea of historicism’ is to provide ever ‘more comprehensive new centres’ that incorporate old insights from “the Past” by ‘constructing them anew’ and ‘investing them with new significance’ (Mannheim 2000: 90, 124, 132 (emphasis in the original)). Historicism, he argues, responds to ‘an inherent tendency of all human thought to account for the whole of reality, a tendency which falls short of achieving its goal as long as a fully comprehensive

120 The purpose of historical knowledge systematic principle is not yet discovered’. And, supported by historicism, thought is able to realize ‘the “utopia” of the final total synthesis’ since this is derived from ‘the actual structure of historic thought’ (Mannheim 2000: 178 (emphasis in the original)). For Droysen, as for Mannheim, ‘the fragment, the short span of the ethical world that can be observed and understood historically’, thus discloses ‘an intimation of the totality of which it is a part’. From this ‘need for totality’, Droysen asserts, is formed the idea of the ultimate end of history, ‘the idea of the Absolute, of the Eternally Good, as the completion of the ethical world order’ (Droysen 1977: 38). Thus comprehension functions in various but not clearly differentiated ways: it appears as a purely cognitive, disciplinary imperative; as a transcendental, methodological perspective; as identifiable with historical development as such; as an unrealizable cognitive ideal; and finally – not unpredictably – as the guarantor of an absolute, ethical world-arrangement. That comprehension serves a multiplicity of purposes should not be surprising: that goes with it being comprehensive. But it can be multifunctional only because the natural attitude of the knowing subject, of the self-conscious individual, affirms it. Further, the knowing subject naturally does affirm it, because it apparently offers, if not the rational idealism, then at least the ideal of rationality ordinary life lacks. In constructing his radical philosophy of the transcendental ego, Fichte derives comprehensive authority from an ‘inalienable human right’, freedom of thought. This freedom recognizes an inherently anthropic capacity: reason. From this it follows that reason cannot be rational if it limits itself. Rather it needs to manifest itself through comprehension, what Fichte calls ‘open-ended research’ [Nachforschen ins Unbegrenzte] (Fichte 1971a: VI, 23–4). Conversely, comprehension by definition holds out the promise of an absolute rational principle inherent in reality, as when Hegel affirms ‘Das Wahre ist das Ganze’ [‘the true is the whole’]. With its historicist connotations, this definition implies a dynamic rational-idealist determination inherent in cognitive behaviour focussed on comprehending. For Hegel the comprehensive whole is an entity that achieves completion through its self-reflecting development: the absolute (the originating principle) is essentially a result, its truth its final, finished – ultimately comprehensive – identity (Hegel 1979: III, 24). Consequently, if comprehension is the natural attitude in a historicized world determined by the aspiration of the eventual realization of its total selfknowledge, then it automatically also sustains the social-cognitive function of the ‘scientific philosophical worker’, and his or her colleagues (as detailed in Chapter 2): including the self-abnegating ‘objective man’; the ‘mindless academic specialist’; the ‘humanist bureaucrat’; the ‘trained and specialized bureaucratic official’; the ‘treacherous cleric’; the ‘highly gifted technician’, the ‘resources manager’; the tidy ‘organizing man or woman’; the ‘information engineer’. Their common archetype (says Nietzsche) is Socrates, the ‘theoretical man’, who ushers in a world governed by technical abstraction ‘capable of being corrigible by disciplinary knowledge’ [an eine Correctur der

The purpose of historical knowledge 121 Welt durch das Wissen . . . glaubt], who desires ‘to embrace the whole world of appearances’ [die ganze Welt der Erscheinungen zu umfassen], for whom the search for truth, for more and more truth, means more than its actual possession and who sees this comprehensive quest as testimony of personal ethical behaviour (Nietzsche 1988a: 98–9, 101, 115, 116). Further, these various vocations of comprehension produce (what Bergson calls) ‘usual knowledge’: they promote ‘the socialization of truth’, the technical rationality, the administrative intelligence that conceptualizes, classifies, and arranges reality to make it manageable for human purposes (Bergson 2006b: 95, 140, 246ff.). Conversely, as the ‘product of mental classification, organization, and abstraction’, comprehension is a means of ‘reconstituting the particular thing in its universal condition and relation’ – in its ideal form. Ultimately, the outcome for thought and behaviour is normative and repressive. In operational terms, comprehensive conceptualization ‘insulates and atomizes the facts, stabilizes them within the repressive whole, and accepts the terms of this whole as the terms of the analysis’ (Marcuse 1986: 106, 107–8). Specifically, by means of a lexicon of abstraction and universality comprehension projects omniscience and this makes it authoritative. Its idealistic principle thus boils down to a conventional social-cognitive attitude evinced in managerial, administrative, and specialized technical functions in publicservice and private-enterprise institutions in general. Produced by academic practice, it ‘serves to justify the existing order’ (Bourdieu 1997: 86). Applied socially and politically, it comes down to enlisting information – particularly historical information – to authorize ‘words of command’ for steering thought-processes, attitudes, and behaviour (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 95ff.). Ultimately, therefore, these various functions of comprehension – that project its natural attitude as universal – converge on the historian. The social historian-function coordinates a multifunctional set of “natural” cognitive attitudes, exemplifies the natural predisposition of subjective human consciousness, and manages the totality of specialized cognitive procedures generating ‘usual knowledge’, the knowledge already known. History’s “natural” cognitive authority, its predisposition to determine sense – any sense whatever – in whatever happens, derives, therefore, from the historian being “naturally” the paradigmatic form of the knowing subject, the representative of the universal principle of comprehension. As dynamic as history itself, far from succumbing to relativism, the historian’s standpoint ‘constitutes itself in the element of truth’: his or her thinking, his or her existence ‘are components of a comprehensive evolutionary process [§2.1] in which [they are] engaged’ – at least according to this self-vindicating, historicist perspective (Mannheim 2000: 146).

Comprehensive knowledge: institutionalized knowledge Knowledge is produced and managed by specialists professionally trained to follow the cognitive and administrative procedures their discipline requires.

122 The purpose of historical knowledge So it is not evident how this specialized knowledge becomes comprehensive, how the resulting socialization of truth promotes it. Certainly in theory comprehension does figure as a rational ideal, as a cognitive aspiration, as the telos of historicism. But in practice it is perfectly compatible with disciplinary technicalities. To realize the comprehensive ideal of historicization in a historicized world would mean – theoretically at least – waiting for the end or the fulfilment of history. But disciplinary technicalities can disregard theoretical caution. By inference from its data, prepared according to technical disciplinary requirements, it can generate historical comprehensivity by means both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitatively speaking (as Droysen and Mannheim confirm) the historian can discern transcendent or holistic trends in the ‘historical process’ [§2.1] by close analysis of the perspective offered by the segment of it that is of interest to them. This analysis, though, is predicated on discursive strategies: these strategies – not any thread of causality, any rationalization, any identitary thinking – render the analysis coherent, meaningful. The trope controlling its structure is, as previously mentioned, synecdoche. Quantitatively speaking, it enables the academic specialist, the information engineer, the resources administrator to produce more history by multiplying innumerable specialized and technical parts – by means of journal articles, monographs, historiographical surveys, disciplinary, sub-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and multi-disciplinary perspectives – in order to project comprehension as a whole. Additionally, it takes as its premise the enthymeme. According to Aristotle’s definition, this form of inference permits familiar knowledge to be taken for granted, knowledge already known to be safely left unmentioned.2 Thus precisely the most esoteric (specialized) historical article automatically projects an exoteric (wider, more comprehensive) historical context [§3.1]. Specialized, technical knowledge can thus accelerate the historical process [§2.1]. It can generate more history: it can make more of history, the ‘more’ that, after all, would vindicate patterns of causality, make up for the insufficiency of reason, and extend and diversify the scope for identification. Finally, the intention in the human sciences – particularly in the historical disciplines driving the production of knowledge – is supplied by the rhetorical technique of amplification [amplificatio]: amplification as a means of stressing the significance of an issue, of making more of it, hence of making one’s argument or one’s case more persuasive. However, precisely here the syndrome that characterizes the historicized world becomes clear. The coincidence of a coercive operational rationale (on the one hand) and its total senselessness (on the other) constantly frustrates historicized comprehension. Whatever its qualitative theoretical promise, comprehension cannot manage its world-arrangement except in quantitative terms. To make more history out of the history it already surveys, it can amplify it only by means of increased specialization, by making more and more of knowledge already known. However, this produces only selfincurred redundancy. Self-amplifying specialization atomizes knowledge: it

The purpose of historical knowledge 123 produces not a logically coherent totality (totum) but masses of heterogeneous data (compositum) (cf. Heidegger 1979: 24). It makes it even more specialized; but each specialization puts the article or monograph beyond the scope of anyone but the specialist. Consequently, atomization leads inevitably to ephemeralization. It signifies the final inversion and cancellation of Platonism: instead of being eternal, ideas – produced on an industrial scale through specialized amplification, atomization, and ephemeralization – have become expendable. Comprehension as both coercive managerial capacity and unattainable cognitive aspiration is best evinced in its socialized form in the university, the social institution dedicated to it. The university offers social control through cognitive behaviour enforced by authoritative comprehension. Encoded as moral idealism, this social control is exerted by the liberal idea of a university. Newman’s formulation is paradigmatic and still persists. According to this, the university facilitates ‘the master view’ offered by ‘a comprehensive view of truth in all its branches’, because ‘the true enlargement of the mind [. . .] is the power of viewing many things as one whole’. Comprehension thus affirms itself: ‘it makes everything in some sort lead to everything else; it would communicate the image of the whole to every separate portion, till that whole becomes in imagination like a spirit, everywhere pervading and penetrating its component parts, and giving them one definite meaning.’ On this basis, then, Newman asserts that ‘the philosopher has the same command of matters of thought, which the true citizen and gentleman has of matters of business and conduct’. He also acknowledges that this cognitive capability needs support from the bureaucratic resources of ‘one great social establishment’ that the university is, along with its administrative gaze that ‘professes to assign to each study, which it receives, its own proper place [§3.1] and its just boundaries; to define the rights, to establish mutual relations, and to effect the intercommunion of them all, [. . .]’. This comprehensive system is thus set up to instrumentalize knowledge: the university by definition socializes it; in the academic ‘matters of thought’ and ‘matters of business’ coincide. Both the comprehensive scope of knowledge and economic improvement of society rely on the universal utility of the perfected intellect. (No grounds are offered for this assertion, unless it is the economic mentality to start with: that everything must be useful for something. Rather there is more evidence for knowledge being an existential liability.) On the one hand, then, there is the ideal: ‘that perfection of the intellect, which is the result of education, and its beau ideal, to be imparted to individuals in their respective measures, is the clear calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and with its own characteristics upon it’. Consequently the scope of the perfected intellect is ‘almost’ limitless: it is ‘so intimate [. . .] with the eternal order of things’; it ‘almost’ acquires a transcendental, sacral aura since it is ‘almost prophetic from its knowledge of history’; it is ‘almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature’; it has ‘almost supernatural charity

124 The purpose of historical knowledge from its freedom from [. . .] prejudice’, hence ‘almost the repose of faith’, ‘almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation’. On the other is its instrumentalization, its operational capacity: the ‘union and concert of the intellectual powers’ of the mind, its ‘enlargement and development’, its ‘comprehensiveness’, is ‘necessarily a matter of training’. And precisely this training is useful. It aims inter alia ‘at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, [. . .] at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life’. But, more than this, it constitutes an education that enables its recipient ‘to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility’: it reinforces essentially technical, administrative and managerial behaviour (Newman 1959: 129, 130, 158–9, 160, 170, 182, 183, 191–2, 414–5). The present-day corporate university still operates within the now derelict Newman paradigm and performs an analogous service: selling educational services in a global market, managing the cognitive resources and disseminating the key skill-sets, what Marx called ‘the general intellect’, apparently indispensable for the social production system (Marx undated: 594). But what is best evinced in the university’s socialization of knowledge is the incapacity of its comprehensive disciplinary practices to define in their own terms, in terms not borrowed from the social system it affirms, their own cognitive value. Supposedly a defence of the liberal idea of a university, Stefan Collini’s polemic, What Are Universities For? is in this case exemplary and worth analysing systematically (Collini 2012).3 Premises (i): the historical situation The book title locates the author in an apprehensive situation between aftermath (changes already undergone) and premonition (changes still to come). This situation is defined by the threefold rise in undergraduate tuition fees, the restructuring of university funding, the prioritizing of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics over the humanities, the assessment of the public “impact” of academic research, the total assimilation of higher education and research to economic strategy promoted by an alliance of the government and business élites. But this immediate issue is left unexplored. Rather it is re-encoded in terms of the university as a social institution and the academic’s institutional function. The author, described in the book as ‘one of the most respected voices in public debates about universities and their place in modern society’, is a professor at the University of Cambridge, a university of international renown. This authoritative and institutional status raises expectations that the argument would not only defend the humanities, but also exemplify the academic ethos they signify. In its own self-interest this book would need to exemplify it: its arguments would be reinforced if its example of academic purpose really were exemplary. However (and here

The purpose of historical knowledge 125 comes the first sceptical misgiving), about a third of the book (pp. 115–193) contains articles that have already been published. Certainly this recourse to the already familiar, to what is already known, is a characteristically academic manoeuvre. However, in a context that requires something exemplary it suggests inconsistency between expectations and performance, aspirational idea and manifest reality, an inconsistency that compromises both the comprehensive thought-style and the traditional apologetics of university education based on it, reaffirmed in this book. The question, therefore, is how in these historicized circumstances should it be read? As credibly defending the liberal-humanist vocation of universities? Or, more likely, as depicting the psychopathology of historicized life? Hence the parapraxis, the flawed performance – the evasions, omissions, suppressions – that characterizes any argument that claims to be ‘reasoned’, but particularly this ‘reasoned argument’s’ conceptual structure, its historicizing reflex, and the cognitive practice it affirms (cf. p. 17). Premises (ii): identitary thinking The book – according to historical logic – mobilizes identitary thinking. The question in its title aims to define the university’s identity. Stressing what makes it distinctive, the book’s main theme produces it in an amplified form. The author is asking ‘how we should now understand and characterize what is distinctive about what universities do, what differentiates them from (while sharing some characteristics with) schools, research laboratories, learned associations, museums, and so on’ (p. 4); he considers ‘the character of those central intellectual activities [. . .] that define universities and make them so distinctive’ (p. 38); he finds it ‘better to begin by considering, in an analytical yet also positive manner, what kinds of things are distinctive about universities, compared to various superficially cognate institutions’ (p. 89). And this theme of exemplary distinctiveness is specifically historical: ‘The very strong case which universities have for the distinctiveness and value of what they do should not be allowed to go by default just because there seems no need, it having been well stated in the past, to rehearse it again. The time to stop repeating it will be when it is properly attended to’ (p. 118). But, ironically, the author formulates distinctiveness indistinctly. ‘It is difficult,’ he says, ‘to give a general description of an activity in terms which are at once lively and specific, and it is particularly hard to characterize what is valuable about the life of the mind in ways that go beyond such familiar formulae’. He prefers ‘to operate in modes that are more tactical, opportunist, and polemical’ rather than come up ‘with some all-embracing general formulation from scratch’ (p. 89). ‘It has to be said,’ he says, ‘that in many areas of the humanities “research” can be a misleading term. It is difficult to state briefly how work in these areas should be characterized [. . .]’ (p. 123). He concedes: ‘It’s not surprising that there’s a lot of confusion about what universities are and what they’re for. For one thing, the nature

126 The purpose of historical knowledge of intellectual activity itself is quite hard to characterize and pin down’ (p. 133). He keeps having to confront ‘the difficulty of finding adequate representations of the experience of intellectual enquiry’ (p. 148). Difficulty is evidently a further central theme – and symptomatic here too of that syndrome (defined by Lukács) that disposes technical knowledge to conceal from itself the true nature of the society it works in as well as its own social basis (Lukács 1976: 149). Difficulty (i): the comprehensible excuse for comprehension deferred The author’s difficulties arise from his methodological diffidence. What is being defended may be unclear: the argument still resorts to an apparently justifiable tactic. It does present itself as a polemic ‘founded on the notion of persuasiveness’; it aspires to ‘bring [. . .] the reader to [. . .] recognize something hitherto neglected, misdescribed, undervalued, or suppressed’; it, therefore, appeals to familiarity, ‘to something which the reader at some level already knows’ (p. xiii). Asking what universities are for proposes a critique that, ‘clearing away the discursive débris that accumulates round any widely used category’, allows ‘more adequate principles to infiltrate public debate’ (pp. ix, 195). But then the difficulties emerge. The author rejects abstract definitions: the university’s rational self-justification could become mired in ‘a muddy pond of abstract nouns in which all distinctiveness gets lost’ (p. ix). So he refuses to ‘fall back on a sequence of abstract nouns which [. . .] always risk the danger of sounding pious and lifeless’ (p. 61). He then recognizes yet another difficulty: ‘making a case in terms of widely shared values’ courts a further, familiar ‘danger [. . .] of ending up with little more than a parade of abstract nouns’ (p. 89). He thus avoids asserting ‘any single defining proposition’, compelling assent ‘by means of either logical indefeasibility or empirical comprehensiveness’, or providing ‘a comprehensive analysis of the nature and functions of higher education’ (pp. x, xiii, 195). The argument thus evinces comprehension subdued by its lack of conviction – historical meaning frustrating itself. Difficulty (ii): the loss of the ‘master view’: comprehension compromised The reactive stance is typically scholastic: the conceptual pre-emption of its subject-matter is a disciplinary reflex. But indeterminate premises compromise any exemplary defence. Just when the hitherto received idea of the university faces its hitherto gravest danger, this defence keeps wondering where to start! In this historical situation, just when it becomes necessary, the crucial, ideal ‘master view’, the very principle of comprehension so confidently asserted by Newman, fails. This methodological diffidence gauges how depleted the academic’s credibility has become. (By contrast, it now

The purpose of historical knowledge 127 seems extraordinary that Fichte could seriously, albeit idealistically, regard the academic, on the basis of his comprehensive learning, to be ‘a priest of truth’ [Priester der Wahrheit], living for ideas, duty-bound to be not only the best qualified but also ‘the morally best person of his age’ [der sittlich beste Mensch seines Zeitalters] (Fichte 1971b: VI, 333).) So, all this book offers is a ‘starting point rather than a ruling’ (p. ix) – while still wanting to ‘start from further away in order to revitalize ways of understanding the nature and importance of universities that are in danger of being lost sight of in the present’ (p. 19). In comprehensive terms that also justify this hesitancy, the argument recognizes that ‘no starting point is beyond re-consideration’ (p. 66), and that ‘starting from somewhere else can result in a rich harvest of new insights and interpretations’ (p. 67). In the humanities what ‘distinguishes some of the most original work [. . .] is a persuasive case for the benefits of starting from somewhere else’ (p. 82); it does though insist that understanding works from “the Past” as ‘human expressions’ are ‘the indispensable starting point’ (p. 84). But then the argument ignores its own advice. Insisting that scholarly institutions should take decisions on intellectual considerations based on ‘well argued cases’, it recognizes that ‘defensiveness about the very possibility of such arguments can be a fatal starting point’ (p. 106). Why then insist ‘the whole question of “access” [i.e. to higher education] needs to start from somewhere else’ with the excuse that universities can hardly ‘unilaterally correct for the effects of a class-divided society’ (pp. 155–6)? This aimless quest for starting points is misjudged (– particularly for a book stressing the virtue of academic judgement!). It is a reminder of Whitehead’s observation that being ‘content with superficial orderings from diverse arbitrary starting points’ testifies to a ‘radical inconsistency at the basis of modern thought’, to ‘much that is half-hearted and wavering in our civilisation’ (Whitehead 1967: 76). Those in industry and government urging the commercial instrumentalization of university education want no other starting-points than their own: otherwise they would be denying their own self-interest. Historicization (i): comprehension facilitated So much for the argument’s ambivalent conceptual structure. It aspires to ‘suggest some better starting points’ (p. 195). It comes down to affirming the one, indispensable starting-point of academic practice: history. It defaults to historicization, the starting-point for all starting-points: What Are Universities For? is a text-book example. The fundamental issue, the attempt to define universities’ distinct identity is here presented as essentially historical. History naturally, logically, produces identities since its veracity depends on the identity principle. In theory the academic thought-style insists on ‘open-ended understanding’, on the ‘disciplined free play of the mind [. . .] at the heart of scholarly and scientific enquiry’, on ‘fundamental questioning’ (pp. 62, 98, 136, 199). In practice it is automatically predisposed to

128 The purpose of historical knowledge historicize, to defer to knowledge already known, to the recognized identity, to something familiar. Historicization alone has the capacity to turn the book’s methodological diffidence into ‘reasoned argument’. That is how historical reason, the sense of history, works. History, ‘the longer term view’ (p. 198), thus provides the foundation of the argument, the basis for its ambivalent conceptual structure. The essays in Part Two (i.e. ‘Bibliometry’, ‘The Business Analogy’, ‘HiEdBizUK’, ‘Impact’, ‘Browne’s Gamble’) are earlier responses to successive higher education policy proposals. Like this book they are examples of how an intellectual historian adept at reconstructing historical change reacts to the historical change reconstructing him. Obviously he counters by historicizing. These essays are further historicized by the historicist accounts in Part One, evident from the titles and perspectives they have: (1) ‘The Global Multiversity’ in the ‘early twenty-first century’, in the historical era of globalization (pp. 3ff.); (2) ‘Universities in Britain: A Very Short History’ (pp. 20ff) demonstrates the truism any historicization produces: that ‘different justifications currently offered for universities are a series of residues from earlier stages of educational development’ (p. 21); (3) ‘The Useful and the Useless: Newman Revisited’ (pp. 39ff.) affirms the alleged ‘longevity’ and ‘power’ of his Idea of a University (p. 60); (4) ‘The Character of the Humanities’ (pp. 61ff.) defined as ‘learning how to understand and characterize human actions and expressions across time and culture’ (p. 82); and (5) ‘The Highest Aspirations and Ideals: Universities as a Public Good’ that does begin somewhere else, somewhere historical, ‘almost a century ago’, with reference to Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America (pp. 86ff.). Historicization (ii): categorical coordinators: comprehensive coherence Here in this historicizing discourse categorical coordinators abound. The argument invokes universities’ ‘different cultural [. . .] and intellectual traditions [§3.1]’ (p. 5), it identifies in ‘competitiveness’ and the ‘distrust of reasoned argument’ ‘two forces [§2.1] which bear directly on the discussion of the role of universities’ (p. 17); it recognizes in newer institutions shedding their distinctiveness and conforming to the ‘culturally dominant model’ a ‘dialectic [. . .] at work which was to become one of the dominant forces [§2.1] of the development [§2.1] of higher education in Britain’ (p. 28); it sees in ‘the explosion of student numbers’, ‘the vast expansion of scientific research’, and ‘political ideology’ ‘three main forces [§2.1]’ that have been ‘at work’ ‘re-shaping [§1.4] the landscape of higher education in recent decades’, a ‘process [§2.1]’ that has taken a distinctive form in Britain (p. 30); one function of some universities is ‘the preservation, cultivation, transmission of a cultural tradition [§3.1]’ (p. 91); it needs ‘briefly to recall the evolution [§2.1] of the present system over the past half century’ (p. 180). It concludes that universities ‘have become an

The purpose of historical knowledge 129 important medium [. . .] for conserving, understanding, and extending [. . .] the artistic heritage [§3.2] of mankind’ (p. 198); that they embody ‘an alternative set of values in their very rationale’ that should remind academics that they are ‘merely custodians for the present generation of a complex intellectual inheritance [§3.2]’ they must preserve (p. 199). The categorical coordinators (italicized here) thus counterbalance the dynamics of history (i.e. ‘what has been a rapidly accelerating process [§2.1] of change’) with its stabilizing continuity [§3.1] (i.e. ‘a longer term view of the history [. . .] of universities’ (pp. 196, 198)), which leaves the argument unresolved. No wonder the conceptual structure is ambivalent, defining distinctiveness difficult, and locating starting-points problematic. The constant shifts between committed focus and distanciated assessment meant to optimize comprehension only frustrate it. Historicization (iii): historicized thinking: comprehensive scope Historicized thinking in a totally historicized world triggers the fatal (scholastic) reflex ‘to remember first’ (as Valéry observed). For intellectual historians it is inevitable, an ingrained, disciplinary habit: ‘most of what [they] reflect on and try to understand is necessarily in the past’ (p. 10). The defence of the humanities becomes a defence of this scholastic orientation towards “the Past”, by “the Past”. This is exemplified by references to history, literary history, and archaeology – to ‘deeply learned scholars in Assyrian archaeology’ (p. 105), a ‘leading expert’s’ ‘deep familiarity with Victorian poetry’ (p. 171), ‘historians of Anglo-Saxon England’ (p. 173). The argument requires a reader with a modest acquaintance with cultural history (for example: inter alia the French Revolution, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Socrates, Montaigne, Newman, Arnold, Mill, Ruskin) as too with recent and contemporary critics and social philosophers (for example: E.P. Thompson, F. Kermode, J. Rawls, M.C. Nussbaum). What the humanities mean now boils down to what historical enquiry means to it. The defence of the humanities comes down to a defence of historicization, the very principle of academic practice. Comprehension: the amplification of already affirmative knowledge To historicize means adopting the cognitive stance of comprehension, having recourse to its cognitive conventions: to its naturalness, its self-evidence, its habitual reference-framework, its familiarity, its depth. Unfortunately the universities’ principal non-academic “stakeholders” (in government and industry) view these practices reductively, as valid only for delivering transferable skills to the graduate workforce and profitable innovations to the economy. For the academic this produces a severe dilemma. Comprehensive

130 The purpose of historical knowledge knowledge is already affirmative, already endorses the way things are. And history’s identitary thought-style shows how things got to be the way they were so that they now are the way they have got to be. So faced with the ‘evolution’ of higher education, along with concurrent indomitable ‘forces’ operative within it, the author has no option but to continue to affirm the validity of disinterested, disciplined academic enquiry by specialists for ‘fellow-specialists’ (p. 72). Again he can only react, not by making comprehensive academic practice more comprehensive (which is an impossibility since comprehensive already implies this “more”), but by amplifying the significance of comprehensive academic practice as such. The book claims not to want to provide a ‘comprehensive analysis’ (p. 195). But its multiple references to ‘understanding’ still affirm its comprehensive thoughtstyle. The author might well renounce abstraction, but only for the sake of amplification. Comprehension operates as a transcendental, ‘regulative idea’. It has no counterpart in possible experience; but it orientates understanding. As mentioned earlier, in theory it derives from a dynamic, idealistic principle, the futile aspiration for total knowledge; in practice, it comes down to achieving something “definitive” or “comprehensive” in a field defined by disciplined expertise. Hence, its practitioners (as already mentioned also) inevitably resort to amplification [amplificatio]. Amplified discourse is distinctive for constructions that rely usually on comparatives, sometimes on superlatives that imply ‘more’ meaning (e.g. ‘a fuller human being’; ‘a wider scope’, ‘enlargement of the mind’, ‘a longer term view’, ‘fuller understanding’, ‘amplest understanding’) or the ‘extension’ or ‘more depth’ of meaning. It is tuned to expansion, aspiration, lack of constriction, open-endedness, absence of finality, transcendence. It sets up discursive structures that affirm an anticipated, indefinite generality over present arbitrary and misguided circumstances. Hence, understanding has to be ‘challenged and extended’ (p. 9); the university is a ‘supportive setting for the human mind’s restless pursuit of fuller understanding’ (p. 27); it needs a new Newman with a ‘literary voice of comparable power to articulate in the idiom of our own time the ideal of the untrammelled quest for understanding’ (p. 60). Further, ‘all disciplines involve, ultimately, a similar drive towards open-ended understanding’ (p. 62); so ‘it is vital to emphasize that the goal of work in the humanities [. . .] is better described as “understanding” than as “knowledge”’ (p. 77); ‘[. . .] the processes of identification, sympathy, imagination, and so on [. . .] are essential to the amplest forms of understanding, whether in scholarly work or other aspects of human experience’ (p. 83); ‘the governing purpose’ of universities ‘involves extending human understanding through open-ended enquiry’ (p. 91); ‘the drive for fuller understanding of our human world [. . .] cannot be arbitrarily constrained [. . .] in the interests of some immediate economic gain’ (p. 192); ‘universities provide a home for attempts to extend and deepen human understanding in ways which are, simultaneously, disciplined and illimitable’ (p. 195).

The purpose of historical knowledge 131 In particular amplification employs figures of thought that include ‘Accumulation’, ‘Increment’, and ‘Comparison’ (Quintilian 2001: III, 393ff. (8.4.3ff.)). Based on the comprehensive principle of limitless enquiry, (a) accumulation produces expansive, apodictic-sounding judgements: ‘A better way to characterize the intellectual life of universities may be to say that the drive towards understanding can never accept an arbitrary stopping-point’ (p. 55); ‘We search for patterns in the carpet, but we are aware that the characterization of any one pattern can never be exclusive’ (p. 79); ‘Depth of understanding involves something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness; it involves a measure of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of wide responsiveness’ (p. 83); ‘The forms of enquiry grouped together under this label [‘humanities’] are ways of encountering the record of human activity in its greatest richness and diversity’ (pp. 85, 177). (b) Increment is articulated through progressive repetition. For example, it enlarges what ‘reading a piece of writing in the humanities’ means: ‘The angle of entry to the topic, the distribution of emphasis, the implicit placing or comparison, the specific touches by which a world, an episode, a figure, or a book is conjured up and given density and inwardness – all these things convey to us something of the depth of understanding which is present and is, as it were, underwriting any particular statement’ (p. 73); similarly ‘publication in the humanities [. . .] is often the expression of the deepened understanding which some individual has acquired, through much reading, discussion, and reflection on a topic which has been in some sense “known” for many generations [§2.1]’ (p. 123). (c) Comparison involves increment ‘by starting lower down the scale’; consequently, ‘by exaggerating the lower stage it cannot help raising the level of the higher’ (Quintilian 2001: III, 397 (8.4.9)). Juxtaposing lesser and greater, reduction and expansion, amplifies by projecting relative stages of its subject’s self-enlargement: ‘It may, as I have already suggested, be better to begin by considering [. . .] what kinds of things are distinctive about universities, compared to various superficially cognate institutions’ (p. 89); ‘Universities are organizations for the maintenance, extension, and transmission of intellectual enquiry; this is necessarily a collective enterprise and one which transcends the needs or interests of the present generation [§2.1], let alone of the individual scholar’ (p. 147). In conclusion: far from exemplifying and defending academic practice, comprehension compromises itself. With its methodological diffidence, its historicizing motivation, it betrays what it represents. It makes sense only in its own terms, with reference to an academic system that, with its “leading experts”, its “distinguished scholars”, creates distinctiveness only for itself.4 As ‘usual knowledge’ comprehension may thus have meaning for itself but no sense of – no sense for – its social situation. As knowledge by definition is socially affirmative, its resistance to the commercialization of higher education is automatically ineffective. That the socio-economic re-functioning of

132 The purpose of historical knowledge universities by government and industry relies on the zealous collaboration of their academic managers, themselves often erstwhile humanities students, often still actual, distinguished humanities scholars, it leaves unmentioned.5 It fails to grasp that comprehensively amplified (historicizing) knowledge does harmonize with its commercialization. The obligation to solicit for grants instrumentalizes disinterested academic research as a lucrative income-stream for the corporate multiversity. Academics – re-enacting la trahison des clercs – are automatically compliant. A whole scholastic-managerial cohort motivated by commercial logic markets comprehension (thought in commodified form) as a thought-commodity (e.g. packaged as a recommended course, an indispensable qualification). Some universities will certainly prosper as commercial enterprises: their research income certainly does amplify their capacity for comprehension. Commercializing knowledge-exchange, the latest thing, replicates the same old thing, personified by the Sophist Protagoras, apparently its first ever practitioner. Like him academics seize on the cash they bring in as a convenient gauge of academic reputation, of professional “esteem”, indicative of their capacity for comprehension. Like him they are only too pleased to become ‘a sort of merchant or dealer in provisions on which a soul is nourished’. However, exploiting their customers’ ignorance by ‘commending everything they sell’, they like him also end up perpetrating deception (Plato 1999: 97, 99, 107, 215 (310Dff., 313Bff., 348Dff.)). What Are Universities For? fails to see that the socially affirmative, historicized comprehension it advocates is complicit in the very sophistical socio-economic conditions it rejects.

The redundancy of a ‘great truth’ Knowledge aims for ‘systematic universality’ (Husserl 2012a: 14, §5). As D’Alembert, one of the editors of the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences des Arts et des métiers (1751–1772) asserted, for whoever could ‘embrace it from a single point of view’, ‘the universe would be nothing but one unique fact and one great truth’ [L’Univers [. . .] ne seroit [. . .] qu’un fait unique and une grande vérité] (D’Alembert 2011: 88). Comprehension, the administrative gaze, the monographic perspective in ideal form, projects truth as the common identity of all the facts. Systematic knowledge, therefore, constructs ‘rationally coherent special regions within the rational totality of the universe’: its motivating ideal is ‘omniscience’ [Allwissenheit] (Husserl 2012b: 67, 71; §§11–12). It is consonant with the pantheistic principle, the cornerstone of comprehension, advanced by Spinoza: ‘The more we understand singular things, the more we understand God’ – though this assertion depends on the transcendental premise that God (just like history and its process) is the ‘efficient cause’ of the existence of things and their essence (cf. Spinoza 1996: 18, I, P25; 173, V, P24; cf. Husserl 2012b: 70, §11). Hence, the comprehensive method is inductive: it can only be inductive. From all the given bits of

The purpose of historical knowledge 133 data viewed comprehensively it both permits the inference of a comprehensive truth that transcends them and confirms the conviction of a total rational structure inherent in them. But then, to reassess this cognitive situation, comprehension might be nothing more than an inference – a thought-act, an apparently natural cognitive reflex that automatically generates transcendental structures, that automatically produces more meaning, that offers to reality a supplement both logically legitimate and illusory. Thus transcendental meaning has to be something inferred. Inference is the only means available for discerning in what is given what is not given. From experience it elicits grounds for the probability of more comprehensive knowledge that has not yet been experienced, or as something transcendental, that lies beyond experience (Husserl 1986a: 81–2). Hence, as a form of comprehension, holism may well guarantee truth (as Hegel asserted); even so, it can never be realized, never experienced. As human beings we are as “full” as we are, and if we could be “fuller” – (e.g.) by immersing ourselves in oral history – we would still only ever be as “full” as we would be. How absolutely “full” we might yet be, we would never know: could comprehensive human “fullness” ever be absolutely standardized? (But suppose it could be: would that not be worse?) Nevertheless, if unrealizable holism frustrates comprehension, comprehension itself still mobilizes a self-justifying compensating strategy. Already it manifests itself as a transcendental, historical-logical structure sustained by sufficient reason, infusing reality with a network of causal interconnections. Now it vindicates itself through the principle of identity, the ultimate criterion of truth. Its reliance on comparative adjectival forms and phrases – (e.g.) a ‘fuller human being’, a ‘deeper understanding’, ‘the more understanding’, etc., noted above – affirms identitary thinking. Comprehensive truth is still tautological (A↔A); so the recourse to comparative constructions only reinforces identity, the way things were the way they were (i.e. A↔A+) – where A+ is a more comprehensive, amplified, even more specialized version of the same old thing, A. But here too this more transcends experience. Here too we only ever have the knowledge we have. And we can always want to know more, but this more is in turn only the knowledge we happen to have at any one time. How much more we might have, we never know: it is impossible to know now what one’s future, possibly more comprehensive knowledge will be. Here, too, in the way it operates comprehension cannot help frustrating itself. The ‘ecology of mind’ developed by Gregory Bateson makes this plain: identitary thinking will never achieve comprehensivity. As he says, ‘a precise correspondence between our description and what we describe or between our total network of abstractions and deductions and some total understanding of the outside world’ is, as a form of truth, ‘not obtainable’. Hence, he continues, ‘we shall never be able to claim final knowledge of anything whatsoever’ (Bateson 2002: 25). And the same conclusion is reinforced by Yuri Lotman’s semiotic theory of culture thus: ‘not only understanding but also misunderstanding is a necessary and useful

134 The purpose of historical knowledge condition in communication. A text that is absolutely incomprehensible is at the same time a text that is absolutely useless. An absolutely understandable and understanding partner would be convenient but unnecessary, since he or she would be a mechanical copy of my “I” and our converse would provide us with no increase in information’ (Lotman 1990: 80–1). Comprehension as a cognitive strategy – and not least the basic premise of Collini’s argument – collapses: whatever amplified historical, historicized meanings it produced, in itself it is pointless. But comprehension still persists as the academic stance Collini describes. It has institutionalized support from the various history-orientated disciplines in the university. It is projected as naturally self-evident by the social-intellectual culture of comprehensiveness it continues to foster. It is driven by its selfamplifying momentum, given that (in Collini’s words) ‘Human understanding [. . .] is restless, always pushing onwards, though not in a single or fixed or entirely knowable direction, and there is no one moment along that journey where we can say in general or in the abstract that the degree of understanding being sought has passed from the useful to the useless’ (p. 55). Hence the claim to possess holistic knowledge in the human sciences surely does prove to be an ideological subterfuge, something pseudo-comprehensive. But the “piecemeal tinkering”, the procedures of specialized or technical critique, that are meant to expose it also compromise comprehension by atomizing the problems they address.6 To compensate, to claim as alibis for self-revisionism, for compulsive self-reiteration, comprehension invokes “depth”, “width”, “diversity”, “thoughtfulness”, “richness”, “complexity”, “fullness”, as the ideal, humanistic values it promotes, even if in reality these come under the privileged, administrative jurisdiction of the leading, influential experts, one’s “fellow-specialists”, and “distinguished scholars”. Thus the problem of discriminating between “useful” or “useless” knowledge, of assessing its operational value, is superseded by the misgiving that accumulating ever more specialized information makes no comprehensive sense at all. Extract comprehension from its amplifying lexicon of expansion, intensity, complexity, aspiration, and transcendence: nothing remains but surplus (i.e. redundant) formulations of scholastic understanding. The self-amplification of already comprehensive, historicized knowledge is entropic: atomized into multifarious, heterogeneous sub-disciplines, sub-sub-disciplines, let alone a plethora of interdisciplinary combinations and perspectives, it evinces the disequilibrium, the chaos symptomatic of its ultimate exhaustion. Consequently (as George Steiner remarks), ‘at the level of critical-academic interpretation and evaluation, the volume of secondary discourse defies inventory’. Its dissemination, its replication, produce ‘the dominance of the secondary, the parasitic’, ‘a mandarin madness of secondary discourse’, ‘the universities, the research institutes, the academic presses [thus becoming] our Byzantium’ (Steiner 1989: 7, 23–4, 26, 30). Disclosed here is a crucial problem: here too how to orientate one’s own thinking. It is an ancient insight but, for that reason, all the more actual,

The purpose of historical knowledge 135 as when Seneca argues: ‘The wise man’s mind embraces the whole framework of philosophy.’ Even so (he adds) ‘it is useful that philosophy should be divided, but not chopped into bits’. But he warns against atomization and ephemeralization: ‘Whatever has grown to greater size is more easily identified if broken up into parts; but the parts [. . .] must not be countless in number or diminutive in size. For over-analysis is faulty in precisely the same way as no analysis at all; whatever you cut so fine that it becomes dust is as good as blended into a mass again’ [Idem enim vitii habet nimia quod nulla divisio; simile confuso est, quidquid usque in pulverem sectum est] (Seneca 1920: 378–9; LXXXIX, 3). If comprehension is a self-frustrating, redundant aspiration, if its social function cannot really be cognitive, its cultural persistence must instead serve other affirmative purposes. Certainly it is homologous with capitalism and the broader culture of neo-liberalism. It is the ideal form of the conviction that not one area of culture or society should remain unexploited by (commercially orientated) expertise and of the entrepreneurial motivation to find ever more hitherto unsuspected sources of profit (meaning). So, though proclaimed as an intellectual and ethical ideal, in reality comprehension merely vindicates the prevailing norms of conventional educated opinion – what Adorno calls Halbbildung, the prevailing ‘conglomerate of ideological projections’ [das Konglomerat der ideologischen Vorstellungen]. These current thought-conventions and the ideological assumptions they imply ‘insert themselves between the subject and reality, so that they can filter that reality’ (Adorno 1979a: 104). In pre-emptively occluding experience like this comprehension makes reality make sense – as it always must, as it always does.

Notes 1 The references in square brackets refer to the schematic outline of categorical coordinators at the beginning of Chapter 4. 2 Aristotle observes: ‘the enthymeme and the example are concerned with things which may, generally speaking, be other than they are, the example being a kind of induction and the enthymeme a kind of syllogism, and deduced from a few premises, often fewer than the regular syllogism; for if any of these is well known, there is no need to mention it, for the hearer can add it himself’ (Aristotle 1994: 22–25; I. ii. 12–13 (1357a); cf. 288ff.; II. xxi. 16 (1395a–1396a)). In general the enthymeme has a wide range of persuasive functions on various kinds and quantities of evidence, which confirms its strategic relevance for comprehension. 3 In this analysis page numbers in the text refer to Collini’s book. 4 This trope is integral to the thought-style of comprehension (cf. Davies 2013). 5 As peer assessed evaluations of university research as a means of determining how government funding for universities is distributed, successive Research Assessment Exercises and latterly the Research Excellence Framework (2013–2014) have bound higher education ever more tightly to the categorical demands of the neoliberal economy. It has proved divisive for academic staff and sanctioned the authoritarianism of university managers. Still the immediate response to the REF

136 The purpose of historical knowledge finds humanist academics arguing for their own increased bureaucratic management, on the grounds that ‘everyone in the “real” world manages to assess themselves in a composed manner every year. Why can’t we?’ (Grout 2014: 25); or that forming ‘robust judgement’ about colleagues’ work is no different from involvement in a ‘well-run exam board’; or that (apparently) ‘the REF is not responsible for the management strategies of individual institutions or particular responses to research assessment’ (Maley 2015: 23). This sophistical stance is the mirror image of Collini’s. There is the conceit that the university is something ‘distinctive’, not the ‘real world’ – except that now nothing prevents it from forfeiting this indefinable distinctiveness for the sake of reality. Thus too recourse to the normal academic function (i.e. examining) blocks any insight into how it has been re-functioned. Constantly refined, the RAEs and the REF are instruments designed specifically for the sophistical, commercial exploitation of higher education. They would have been ineffectual if they had not indulged in academics their professionally affirmed propensity to behave as humanist bureaucrats: ‘REF 2014 [. . .] entailed hundreds of academic colleagues carefully calibrating the quality of work [. . .] of thousands of other colleagues and, assisted by dozens of expert impact assessors, examining the effects of that work on the world beyond the academy’ (Maley 2015: 23). 6 On the entropic structure of comprehension: amplification → atomization → ephemeralization, see Davies 2010: 101, 159–63, 184–5; and 2011: 337ff. On the contrast between ‘holism’ and ‘piecemeal tinkering’, see Popper 1974: 58ff., 66ff.

Conclusion The psychopathology of historicized life

. . . und sinnlos dünkt lange das übrige mir. (Friedrich Hölderlin)

Far from affirming a common humanity, history in a historicized world turns psychopathological. Specifically intended for it, “humanity” is a category sufficiently comprehensive to discern its sense, a sense produced by its rationally coordinated arrangement, sealed by its self-regarding ethical idealism. However, in a historicized world human agency is already compromised, its freedom already ‘trammeled’. People are haunted by “the Past” or crave nostalgically for it. But they may dread the future or project onto the history that has yet to happen their utopian desire, the way things might yet be. In a historicized world, history works to depress or stimulate: it has a bearing on how you feel. Like a narcotic, it can be pushed for their own purposes by those who manage political, commercial, or cultural interests either to arouse or to pacify the public. With its sense – technically, professionally finished – already superseded, it has nothing else to do but to work for multifarious purposes, to become an all-purpose, adaptable, always available utility. Still, the question of the sense of human agency persists . . . The term ‘psychopathology’ alludes to Freud’s investigations into the psychopathology of everyday life, the neurosis that afflicts this late civilization of latest things. As suggested earlier, it focusses on, e.g. the hesitations, absentmindedness, slips-of-tongue, misreadings, misunderstandings, obsessions, superstitions, involuntary self-embarrassing behaviour (other symptoms of ‘trammeled freedom’), induced whenever repressed ideas, intentions, or drives intrude suddenly into a consciously managed social reality. The routine sense the individual normally constructs is momentarily disrupted by inhibitions and compulsions in his or her personal behaviour, in ‘flawed performances’, forms of parapraxis. The line between normality and abnormal neurosis is suddenly exposed as fluid: it shows that everyone is ‘a little nervous’ (Freud 1987: 218).

138 Conclusion The psychopathology of historicized life extends this syndrome. Based on the principles of sufficient reason and identity, history suggests that, in its time [§1.1], in its historical context [§3.1], as a turning-point [§2.2], as a catalyst [§2.2], what happened can be known. But then can this naturally scholastic attitude know that it has exhausted the potentiality of the occurrence (given that in chaotic situations a minute, momentary cause can have enormous, enduring effects)? The potentiality may well have a trajectory [§2.1] that takes it beyond not just the historian’s own period [§1.1] of expertise, but also his or her own generation [§2.1]. History might well affirm the way things were, but that provides no basis for assuming that their current affirmation will remain affirmative. After all, what they might yet be, what might yet manifest itself, inevitably redefines what they once were. Further, historicizing events – exceeding anything the human mind could have envisaged, the unintended consequences of intended objectives, testimonies to the power of the historical unconscious – have destroyed the credibility of historical sense in itself, along with its professional, disciplinary management. That in a historicized world history becomes a public utility confirms it has lost its self-identifying sense. Because it works in many different, self-contradictory ways it seems determined to lose all sense of itself. Further, Freud’s psychopathology reveals that discontent, dis-ease, is fostered by civilization as it develops historically. Its technological appliances that realize deep anthropic longings – to go faster, to see further, to communicate globally, to shrink time and space – do not ultimately promote happiness. Instead, each further development in civilization requires the inhibition of individual drives for the sake of society as a whole. The civilizing process is stressful: the drives’ demands are either anaesthetized through narcotics, or sublimated into cultural creation, or conflict with each other in social situations. “Normality” implies nothing healthy, but inhibition, repression, and neurosis instead. Apprehensively enough, aggression and violence lie just beneath the surface of social convention (Freud 1977: 110–1, 114–5, 118). Normality is, therefore, nothing but an illusion of order projected by neurotic self-repression. The psychopathology of historicized life is similarly deceptive. In a historicized world, history, powered by its own momentum, continues to make sense, to make more sense. Partly it thus compensates for its own gratuitousness; partly too it thus maintains its resourcefulness. Here too history works the way the world works: it endorses the world’s work. However, because history makes sense of what happens whatever happens, the historical order is evidently just an illusion projected by the compulsive human need for sense. History still affirms that the way things are is how they have got to be given the way things were. It still vouches for the inherent sense in things. It still promises certainty and, with that, reassurance. Its socially paradigmatic virtues of honesty, objectivity, and truthfulness rehearsed in historical practice (as historians claim) involve administrative and information-management procedures. Approved by disciplinary professionalism, these are consonant

Conclusion 139 with socially affirmative professional-technical procedures in general. The whole set-up looks “normal”, hence credible, hence persuasive. But it is just a “look”. Apprehension still persists: if history’s work produces sense as an illusion, how does the world’s work make sense? The issue here is psychological. If history as the world’s work cannot make sense of the world, then (so it follows) the work one does to make the world work is also senseless. Given the pervasiveness of the “sense” of history, that no historical common place defines this work, that common-sense no longer emerges from it, confronts everyone with a social-cognitive dilemma. Both in personal and in “world-historical” terms, you wonder just how descriptions of what happens (or happened) actually explain what happens (or happened). Gertrude Stein, for example, defines it in a series of propositions: • • •

the statement: ‘they think that when anybody is doing anything that is history’; questions: ‘Is there any difference between doing anything and something happening [. . .] is there any difference between doing something and something happening’?; an affirmation: ‘there is a difference between anyone doing or not doing anything and anything happening’. This difference she defines as ‘the secret of history and [. . .] not the secret of human nature and the human mind’, particularly since ‘the human mind never does anything why should it, when it has no relation to human nature’.

She concludes: ‘Now history has really no relation to the human mind at all, because history is the state of confusion between anyone doing anything and anything happening.’ According to Stein, the historian ‘would rather not know than know anything of the confusion between anyone doing anything and something happening’ (Stein 1973a: 140–1).1 Making sense only for itself in its own terms, history glosses over the ‘confusing’ problem of just how it connects what happens (or happened) to what people do (or did). The historicized world, therefore, constitutes a specific ethos, its own psychopathological atmosphere. You feel a generalized apprehensiveness, a sense of uneasiness, of malaise, a need to get away. History might well be an all-purpose utility. But for historical comprehension to keep generating it, it must somehow make sense of what happened – whatever happened. The constant regeneration of history as a social resource keeps producing more sense. But how much sense makes sense? Does ever more sense make sense? Or does ever more sense occlude the sense already available? In self-amplifying, comprehensive terms: how much fuller is the resulting fuller picture, better the better understanding? The way history works in a historicized world queries its reliability. The work history performs makes it impossible to discern how well it performs. How could anyone ever discover if it made sense where none obtained, given that in a historicized world no sense exists that is not already historicized? As technical expertise by definition oblivious to its

140 Conclusion consequences for the world of ordinary life, history’s sense-making function would surely itself only confirm the ultimate senselessness of human endeavour in a historicized world. In the historicized world historical comprehension certainly projects a simulacrum of sense. With past, present, and future symmetrically related, with its integrating structure-logic, with its stabilizing discourse-logic, and with its capacity for self-amplifying coherence, it seems perfectly engineered. Yet: too perfect, too neat. It seems incredible that scholastic effort relies after all on shaky devices. Conversely, in a historicized world experience traumatized by historicization has exposed the inadequacies of academic comprehension, specifically its technical-bureaucratic perspective already implicated in and compromised by historicization itself. Nothing, therefore, could justify the prospect of a world-arrangement sustained by techno-bureaucratic efficiency reliant on scholastically filtered historical truths. If it is to escape its psychopathological condition, life in a historicized world must reject this redundancy. It defines itself instead as that mentality or attitude (a) trapped between aftermath and premonition; (b) being, therefore, apprehensive; and so (c) for its own sake brought ultimately to confront ‘reality precisely represented’.

Between aftermath and premonition Though historicization – as a historical phenomenon – transcends ordinary experience, its consequences and implications radically alter your personal circumstances and affect your state of mind. In the chaos and confusion – (e.g.) as after the demise of Napoleon – ‘you cannot know if you are treading on seeds or on débris’ (Musset 1968: 7). The very expression of experienced aftermath articulates premonition. Destroying confidence in the future, it induces anxiety: that more is possible than can be imagined, that ‘futures such as have never presented themselves before’ are imminent, that further unprecedented aftermaths loom just beyond the current horizon of events. Both aftermath and premonition suffuse experience in a historicized world, in a world that has ‘passed out of the major order and symmetries of Western civilization’, in the contaminated environment of a ‘post-culture’, faced with the futility of all the ‘history that has been’, appalled at the wasted history it has had to relinquish, an experience unique to the ‘first generation of the last human beings’ (Steiner 1971: 48; Anders 1986a: 174). Aftermath above all reveals human existence in a historicized world as desolate and apprehensive. The resulting psychopathology is typically articulated by Ortega y Gasset reflecting on the ‘essential difference between our time and that which has just passed away’ – a difference that disrupts the temporal order and historicizes history. ‘Our time’, he continues, ‘no longer regards itself as definitive; on the contrary, it discovers, though obscurely, deep within itself an intuition that there are no such epochs, definitive, assured,

Conclusion 141 crystallized for ever.’ This disruption discloses ‘the world of reality, the world of the profound, the terrible, the unforeseeable, the inexhaustible, where everything is possible the best and the worst’. Any sense of release is deceptive. Present life ‘through sheer regard of itself [. . .] has lost all respect, all consideration for the past’. ‘Hence,’ he continues, ‘for the first time we meet with a period [. . .] which recognises in nothing that is past any possible model or standard [. . .].’ The resulting redundancy of history only reiterates humanity’s ontological isolation: ‘We feel that we actual men have suddenly been left alone on the earth; that the dead did not die in appearance only but effectively; that they can no longer help us’ (Ortega y Gasset 1993: 33, 36). Valéry’s reflections (from 1922) on the First World War are also paradigmatic. What has happened produces foreboding: ‘The storm has passed, and yet we are worried, anxious, as if the storm were about to break.’ Everything is bathed in uncertainty: ‘our fears,’ he says, ‘are infinitely more precise than our hopes’. His generation has suffered a double misfortune: not ‘just its moment of coming into life coinciding with the great and terrifying events that will resonate throughout its lifetime’, but also the world transformed by the mind, the emergence of technological culture along with its aggressive social environment generating ‘perpetual trepidation’, ‘incoherence’, and ‘mental disorder’ (Valéry 1957b: 1000, 1037). Consequently a psychological schism appears: on the one hand, historicizing tendencies driven by instrumentalized comprehensive reason; on the other, the human organism incapable of adapting psychologically and physiologically to their frenetic pace. The symptom of this predicament, of this ‘great malaise’, is ‘this general anguish’ [cette angoisse générale] and with that a sense of destitution. In this situation the persuasiveness of comprehensive knowledge has negligible cognitive value. Possess as we might all the knowledge and resources that come from ‘the world being comprehensively organized’, they still ‘leave us blind and impotent, not knowing how to adapt our feelings and thoughts to it’. Hence “the Past”, though abolished by the scientific and technological order, ‘bears down terribly on societies’. It burdens our destiny through historical hypotheses, which means that ‘nothing can be represented as what it is, such as it is, without muddling reality with a host of notions, apprehensions, aversions, associations, evaluations, formulae and tendencies which keep what will never happen again still imperiously working’ (Valéry 1957b: 1144). The sense of aftermath generates anguish, ‘anguish, my true vocation’, as Valéry remarked. Symptomatic of the psychopathology of historicized life, apprehension becomes a mode of cognition. It confronts him (as well as Kafka, Améry, and Cioran, as we shall see) with ‘the real in its pure state’ (Valéry 1960a: 588; 1957b: 1144). In historical terms, taken in their “proper historical context [§3.1]” (allegedly), Ortega y Gasset’s and Valéry’s comments would be deemed typical of contemporary reflections on the conflicted period [§1.1] between the two World Wars, as innumerable monographs and articles already confirm. But the

142 Conclusion issue here is psychological, not historical (not even “psycho-historical”). It concerns sensations of shock and uncertainty and their significance. It defines the mental syndrome automatically accompanying historicization. These comments reveal apprehensive destitution, the defining characteristic of the psychopathology of historicized life. Apprehensive destitution arises when, overwhelmed by what happens, history as comprehensive knowledge becomes redundant. History is meant to accommodate “change over time”; but once the intensity of change exceeds historical comprehension – comprehension that, however amplified, can never be comprehensive – it annihilates it. In exceeding – and so invalidating – historical norms, human potential precludes its historical self-comprehension. Now, far from history inferring change from the pattern of events, the ‘event is change itself’, and with it comes ‘the threat of an order of things out of all proportion to who we are’, subverting the self-same identity principle meant to guarantee historical sense (Halévy 2001: 14–5). Hence, the cognitive-psychological problem of negotiating the unreality of a historicized world, a world suspended between aftermath and premonition. As a technology of technologies, history keeps functioning as though events that invalidate its cognitive capacity could still be assimilated to its preconceived rationalizing structure-logic underpinned by the categories its discourse-logic coordinates. But this professionally disciplined, technical comprehension only thereby affirms its deficiencies. Its internal coherence and its self-authorized validity are achieved at the cost of their remoteness from ordinary experience. This remoteness is underscored by its recourse to self-amplifying expressions of professional expertise: their coherent validity is soon dissipated by its atomization and consequent ephemeralization. That no amount of historical comprehension – however rationalized, however anaesthetic – diminishes the apprehension the historicized world induces, testifies to its psychopathogenic character. Defined by aftermath and premonition, the situation permits no resolution: historicized consciousness finds it intractable, demoralizing. Never has human life – at any point in history – been so technologically, instrumentally sophisticated, yet so irrevocably ‘torn between futility and apprehension’ (Valéry 1957b: 1038, 1136). As Valéry’s response shows, historicization challenges human beings’ capacity for adjusting to historicizing conditions they themselves produce, whether intentionally or not. How can the technological world, a world created by the human mind, be managed when it far exceeds the speed of human thought hampered as it is by its biologically determined mental and physical constraints? Despite the vast resources of information and technical capability available, why do human thoughts and feelings fail to recognize the world they produce? Historicized life is always apprehensive, reactive, in arrears, constantly having to catch up with the latest thing going. It is always somehow behind, just trailing after the leading-edge of self-manifesting latest things in a just now de-actualized present. Immediately historicized experience comes with a regressive drag, indicated by ennui, by the apprehension

Conclusion 143 that ‘any day is [. . .] more yesterday than today and therefore not interesting’ (Stein 1973a, 134). It enforces the deception that life should be lived by going along with what is already going, with what has already been going, since the recognized latest things are – by that very categorization – already historical, whatever is going. Inevitably the pervasive ‘academic spirit’ locates this cognitive situation historically, behind the times. In their comments on what to them seems contemporary, but is in fact already historically recognized, critics and academics in particular are, therefore, ‘many generations behind themselves’ (Stein 1984: 31; 1973b: 160). Historicized, life constantly retains this immediate “past”. Inevitably reflection elucidates what is happening now with historical evidence from a world that just now was the way it was but will never again recur. Its susceptibility to historicization only occludes what is actually happening, a possibly unprecedented future. That historicization enjoins adaptation to already historicized circumstances is characteristic of the psychopathology of historicized life. The syndrome would make historicization something normal. In fact, this “normality” offers no individual life-strategy, just abject self-integration into the historicizing flux, into whatever is going. Nevertheless it is worth asking if adaptation to a historicized world would be feasible, if you could learn to live without premonition. It would mean accepting an existential liability: technical comprehension deploying its knowledge of the way things were to manage the way things are, thereby deliberately occluding their current, unprecedented reality. For personal consciousness it would mean a chronologically blinkered attitude, rather than vigilance attuned to actuality. Ultimately, though, it would require self-abnegation, since how could anyone adapt to a future of unexpected, unprecedented events? How could anyone adapt to the as yet unknown? Hence the prevalence of history in a historicized world: the surrogate “identities” offered by the heritage industry, local history, public history, the custodians of “the Past’s” symbolic capital – illusory compensations for the personal authenticity erased by its historicizing momentum.

‘A world of frightened men’: apprehension Apprehension pervades the atmosphere of the historicized world. In existential terms it never quite intrudes into consciousness: as a mood, it is already inherent in Being, something ontologically prior to personal existence. As Heidegger argues, mood [Stimmung] is already endemic in the way you are in the world [Dasein]: it constitutes within Being itself [Sein] the specific texture of your own existence [Dasein]. It is nothing like transiently ‘being in a bad mood’ [Verstimmung], though the mood-swing might well reflect your contingent existential situation (Heidegger 1979: 134). Apprehension, therefore, confirms that knowledge – particularly comprehensive, historical knowledge – is produced ultimately not from an apparently “neutral” basis guaranteed by academic disciplinarity, as its administrative-technological

144 Conclusion procedures might suggest. Rather, it reveals, these procedures are themselves embedded in the subjective existence of the individual technicians, humanistbureaucrats, and information-engineers that manage them, itself inevitably implicated in the historicized world’s apprehensive environment. The production of comprehensive (i.e. technical, specialized) knowledge in the human sciences is, therefore, already compromised by its psychopathogenic environment, by its fortuitous, already historicized, cognitive situation that has already set its tone [Stimmung]. In psychological terms, however, apprehension is triggered by the preemptively restrictive, if not destructive, effects of historicization, since these limit the ‘sum total of our vital possibilities’ essential for personal existence and the constitution of the world it immediately experiences (Ortega y Gasset 1993: 41). It registers a general misgiving: that, with all its increasing, latest material conveniences its history has produced, bourgeois civilization in fact turns ‘the world of culture’ into ‘one vast hospital ward’ (Nordau undated: 1). This conjunction suggests, therefore, that the psychopathogenic effects of historicization pre-empt any therapeutic remedy for them. They are the fall-out from the critical life-situations that erupt haphazardly in the historicized world. This conjunction exposes too the fraudulence of Santayana’s adage that, if one forgets “the Past”, one is obliged to repeat it. With the psychopathogenic effects induced by historicization, by it generating obsolescence, “the Past” never fades, never does let itself be forgotten. Any euphoria it occasioned is fleeting, at most sentimental reminiscence. Any trauma it inflicted feeds on itself, mutates into the distressful, vindictive psychopathology of aftermath. It darkens the already apprehensive existential and psychological mood of the historicized world. Given the psychopathogenic situation the historicized world represents, apprehension – in psychological terms, as a type of experience in this situation – has a number of constitutive variants: •

As a visceral reflex triggered by sensory data, producing physiological symptoms (e.g. rapid heartbeat, breathing difficulties, trembling, paralysis, etc.) in direct response to the immediate traumatic situation, apprehension is the archetypal cognitive moment. It is thus synonymous with anxiety [Angst; angoisse], involving fear, nervousness, alarm, panic; but it also signifies states of mind accompanying it, such as sadness, melancholy, depression, or insomnia.2 Apprehension is – this needs to be stressed – nothing intellectual, no rational premise, no conceptual postulate, certainly nothing technical-academic. In fact, this is its indispensable cognitive value. There is indeed ‘an anguish affecting everything that for us takes the place of both science and intuition’ (Cioran 2008: 33). Apprehension is after all attuned to the human self-terrorizing capacity of a historicized world, to ‘the self-created risks mankind faces today [that] have never been faced before’, hence to the problematic sense of human action in this precarious situation (Arendt 1993: 63).

Conclusion 145

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Apprehension is alert to “the Past” not just for what has evidently already been perpetrated, but for what this past history might still conceal, what it might yet hold in abeyance, since time itself – and with it the not yet exhausted ramifications of past crises – comes at you from the future. So history is not just a projection of “the Past”, but also a premonition of the future from the future, of what is about to happen, of what will arrive, hence of what will engage and concern you, of what will put an end to history, of what will therefore have a historicizing effect (Flusser 1997: 296–302). Apprehension thus generally characterizes the psychopathology of historicized life. That is why it is the precondition for discovering reality ‘in its pure state’. Apprehension also foreshadows broader, metaphysical shifts in cultural mood: a decline into sadness [tristitia], that ‘transition to less perfection’ (defined by Spinoza), a slackening of the endeavour ‘to persist in [one’s] own being’ with its symptomatic self-diminishing, self-voiding passions such as fear, despair, disappointment, humility, and shame that ‘dominate this epoch’, this epoch in which epochs have become a thing of “the Past”; the development of the ‘unhappy consciousness’, that situation (defined by Hegel) in which subjectivity, confronting in its internal contradictions and the rupture of its dialectical relationship with the world around it, discovers its wretched ‘nothingness’ [Nichtigkeit] (Benasayag and Schmit 2006: 24; Deleuze 2003: 74–7; Spinoza 1996: 75, III, P6; 76–7, P11; 104, §III; 143–4, PP53, 54; Hegel 1979: 164–5, 174). Awestruck by the darkening scene that is aftermath, by the unsuspected realization of the hitherto unprecedented, apprehension responds to historicization as a negative version of the Aristotelian ‘wonder’ that motivated metaphysical contemplation. That comprehensive stance meant ‘wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too’; apprehension produces ideation in chiaroscuro, in a crepuscular world amidst the flotsam and jetsam of forms of life now outdated by successive phases of comprehensive historicization (Aristotle 1996: 13, 982b 10; Hegel 1967: 17). The inherently academic character of the work – the office work – that organizes and arranges the historicized world is in itself mentally and physically debilitating: it induces its own mental and physical pathology. The historian’s disciplinary work is just one facet of a vast technical, bureaucratic, and administrative effort in government, industry, and culture to keep the historicized world working, to make it more useful, more profitable. The historian is thus one example of a general social type: the expert, the specialist, the technician, the professional, their social and cognitive credentials based on their socially recognized academictechnical training. However, as Nietzsche argues, the increasing prominence given to the pervasive studiousness and the arduous standards of expertise is symptomatic of ‘times of fatigue, often of twilight, of decline’,

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while ‘exuberant vitality, confidence in life and in the future are over’. The reason for this depressive mood is that technicians and administrators typically refuse to admit that their disciplinary work makes them ill, that it anaesthetizes and mentally subdues them, so that they are ‘terribly fearful of one thing above all else: regaining consciousness’ (Nietzsche 1988c: 397–8, 403; III, §§23, 25). The same diagnosis of fatigue, but this time indicating the need for relaxation, is confirmed by Baudrillard in his critical sociological analysis of domestic interior arrangements. The administrative-bureaucratic expert – as an ‘organization-man or woman’ [homme de rangement], a ‘functional-man or woman’ [homme fonctionnel] – is ‘from the outset already tired’. In glossy magazines the pictures of displays of countless comfortable armchairs seem to suggest a ‘civilization headed in the future towards resolving its tensions for the sake of the pacified euphoria of the seventh day, the day of rest’. Here, the ideological intention implicit in a technical-bureaucratic world-arrangement is psychopathogenic. Such apparently idyllic settings are meant to persuade the technocratic functionary that all their passions, functions, and contradictions need resolving. He or she is thus left with a system of relationships structurally reproduced in the system of objects arranged in the space created by them around themselves as the sign of their self-integration into the overall (technically historicized) social structure. In fact, they reconstitute for themselves a world relieved of instincts and primary functions, but loaded with social connotations of calculation and prestige. In the end, the effort needed for this performance – for going with the way things are going, for going with the latest things – leaves them weary and bored (Baudrillard 1968: 63–4). Finally, there is the apprehension induced by the experience of having been made apprehensive: realizing not just that the situation is troubling, but also that unexpectedly – or even in retrospect, inevitably – you find yourself in a state of apprehension. As a form of cognition apprehension at least holds out the possibility that one can in response attempt to mitigate the adverse circumstances or to reconsider one’s intentions. However, the apprehension that arises from the experience of having been made apprehensive confronts the realization of its own ineffectiveness: it registers a misgiving with the way things are, something essentially irremediable. Its symptomatic psychopathological expression is nausea (as Sartre defines it): the revelation – once all the structure of human intentions is stripped away – of the sheer superfluous gratuity of existence, a sense of being absurdly extraneous [de trop]; the dawning, visceral sensation of the pure contingency of the physical presence of other people, other things, ‘the affective apprehension of absolute contingency’ (Sartre 1970: 179ff.; 2010: 378, 384). Conversely, for Lévinas, nausea motivates the need to escape from a situation defined by the fait accompli, be it pure Being (as in Aristotle or

Conclusion 147 Heidegger) to which human existence is necessarily conjoined [rivé], be it history, things as they were, a situation in their aftermath now irremediable, taking one’s own immediate existence hostage. Escape [évasion] becomes an imperious need for self-assertion against this ontological and metaphysical (i.e. historical) fatalism, against the inescapability of being who one is (Lévinas: 1982, 94ff.). Its necessity is brought into sharp, political focus for Lévinas as a Jew by ‘Hitlerism’, promoting authenticity and social integration [enchaînement] as it did in terms of heredity and “blood”, an ideology specifically, conveniently premised on the body (Lévinas 1997: 19). The need for escape [évasion] comes with the recognition that Being implies something menacing, that it implies absolute identity as something incarcerating. It spurs the self on to overcome the general malaise of a historicized world: to reject an untenable situation, to break with the self it already is, to move beyond oneself, to redefine its subjective world, even if it has no clear destination (Lévinas 1982: 98). Certainly, with its belief in the human impulse for constant self-renewal (as a Christian premise), with its primordial orientation towards other people, towards otherness as such (as in Judaic philosophy), Lévinas’ thinking is a paradigmatic form of resistance to historicization. But precisely this bid for freedom – to be realized in a different form of humanism, the humanism of the other person, the alien – requires effort, produces tiredness, because of its ethical and epistemological difficulty. Further, apprehension pervades the atmosphere of a historicized world through its social and cultural ramifications: •

Principally, besides the fear of an identifiable danger, ‘real anxiety’ [Realangst], or the ‘fear of death’ [Todesangst], it resonates with ‘neurotic anxiety’ [neurotische Angst], the premonition of hitherto unidentifiable threats, essentially a recurrence of the trauma of birth (Freud 1986: 46, 75–7). ‘Neurotic anxiety’ is, therefore, a response to a state of shame or guilt the catastrophe – a momentous event producing a new phase of existence, a further historicization, a jolt of defamiliarization – has already long since inaugurated. It is symptomatic of the post-traumatic ethos of the historicized world that now envelopes life from its inception. From the start subjectivity is inherently vulnerable, predisposed to apprehension. Marked by the traumatic severance from the secure, ‘oceanic feeling’ immediately connecting it in its infancy with the surrounding world, it constitutes itself through enduring inner conflicts between its duties and desires, sources of anxiety, despair, frustration, hysteria, and discontent, at the risk of incurring mental exhaustion, depression, and melancholy. Civilization, therefore, develops – i.e. it produces itself in its history – only at the cost of the repression or sublimation of basic drives, particularly by internalizing the authority and structure of the

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institutions – family, society, state, religion – that affirm it. Besides with the precarity of organic existence, the individual must now reckon with a complex structure of conventions, manners, and laws. Induced by this further stratum of dangers and susceptibilities, apprehension invades the self-conscious subject, as its everyday psychopathological behaviour implies. Repressing – but most imperfectly – its self-incriminating drives on the one hand, terrified by the sanctions of conscience on the other, the self (the ego) in its subjectivity becomes ‘truly the site of apprehension’ (Freud 1982: 206). Structurally, moreover, this psychopathological situation perpetuates itself as history. As Kierkegaard argues: having acquired knowledge through the first sin, through this primordial historicization, having constituted himself in one qualitative leap as spirit and body, Adam discovers his freedom (in his expulsion from Eden). However, this freedom incurs the possibility for humanity to keep on incriminating itself, as history – evincing ‘objective dread [. . .] the reflection in the whole world of that sinfulness which is propagated by generation’ – subsequently confirms. (“Generation”, it should be recalled, not only connects the family to the taboo placed on the original sin of sexual knowledge that produces it. It also signifies – as Mannheim points out – a major coordinating category [§2.1] of historicist comprehension, which demonstrates that ideal comprehensive concepts [cf. ratio; rational] predispose historical understanding to affirm the logic of a self-incriminating human genealogy [cf. γενε-ratio; “gene-rational”].) Apprehension (dread, anxiety) is the ‘intermediate determinate’ between the possibility and actuality of sin: hence ‘dread [. . .] is a trammeled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but trammeled, not by necessity but in itself’ (Kierkegaard 1967: 45, 50–1). This apprehension suggests a wider malaise expressed, not only in historicization, in history historicizing itself, but in underlying vulnerabilities in human social relationships, by vicissitudes in social organization. After all (as Cioran observes), ‘the objective misery of social life is, in effect, only the pale reflection of misery within’ (Cioran 2007a: 99). The vulnerabilities and vicissitudes characteristic of a historicized world are produced by modernization, by progression itself. Through the socialpsychological effects of exponential technological change, modernization triggers apprehension in the form of pervasive nervousness, a conviction defined by Gertrude Stein’s remark: ‘How slowly nervousness is everything’ (Stein 1973a: 94). The very emergence of modern capitalist society [Gesellschaft], based on contractual agreements between individuals as economic agents (from a premodern community [Gemeinschaft] as an organic, familial symbiosis), evinces a cultural shift in the human temperament that ‘through its restless striving becomes frenetic and inconstant’ (Tönnies 1887: 281). Thus nervousness becomes one of the many social-psychopathological consequences of historicized urban existence,

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in contrast to existence in traditional societies. The individual copes with it and the frenetic environment that induces it by means of a comprehensive response [mit dem Verstande], calculating, exacting, matter-of-fact, as remote as possible from the depths of the personality, hence by increasingly tenacious technocratic regulation (Simmel 1989: 117–9). Further, through their ‘nervous excitability’ they develop a compensating aptitude for imitation. This conserves through the progress of modern urban life ‘the plasticity, the nervous impressionability’ that encourages public receptivity to different social trends, to new things – the latest things – to copy (Tarde 1993: 269). Apprehension is, therefore, the incessant confirmation of the ontological invalidity of the human world, of human existence as the ‘greatest biological crisis’ (Cioran 2004: 212). It is ‘immanent in existence’, symptomatic of a world in which nothing is ever resolved. It has a materialistic, somatic substratum in the ‘terrifying reality of the body’ that through its crises sustains the mind and with its sensitivities keeps consciousness alert (Cioran 2007a: 45, 54). Consequently, knowledge – distilled from interaction with and subsequent reflection on the world – comes imbued with this sense of ontological invalidity, of cultural ‘dis-ease’, of malaise (– however much epistemological theory, be it positivist or rationalist, ideally presupposes a tabula rasa or a pure knowing subject or a neutral cognitive environment). Through inducing ‘continual fear’, ‘the fear of everything, the terror of the world, universal anxiety, supreme worry, the torture of each instant’, the very intention of sickness and mortality is to produce the profoundest insights (Cioran 2007a: 66). Conversely, knowledge – what it discovers, what it systematically develops, what it accomplishes, how it is used, how it is put to work – itself induces apprehension. Through their knowledge capacity human beings have an ingrained tendency to keep frightening themselves, to keep themselves frightened – an innate proclivity for aggression, for self-terrorization. Thus thinking can be a ‘demon that disturbs the sources of life’, an ‘illness affecting its very roots’: confronting intractable problems, it creates permanent doubt about one’s fate. Thoughts and their implications for one’s own existence pursued interminably lead to exhaustion, a weariness with living. Such drama within the subject culminates in nausea: the capacity for reflection appears as a liability. Hence, to have ‘consciousness always alert’, to ‘keep redefining one’s relationship with the world’, to ‘maintain a perpetual cognitive pitch’, can mean being lost to life. ‘Knowledge’ – particularly comprehensive knowledge [savoir] – would then be a curse, and consciousness ‘an open wound at the heart of life’ (Cioran 2007a: 49–50). Existentially speaking, arising as a reflex-response to vulnerability and insecurity, apprehension compels vigilance and reflection. At the same time, it is mentally and physically exhausting, a symptom of discomfort in the world, of ineradicable dissatisfaction.

150 Conclusion •

Combining, therefore, self-intimidation and cognitive acumen, apprehension is the alert consciousness of the precarity of the human situation. It results from a capacity of human sentience instinctively produced by existence, by being in the world. It implies a self-conscious form of existence, rendered conscious of itself through its precarity, through its inevitable mortality – as when in Shakespeare’s play, just at the moment of his murder, Julius Caesar conceitedly belittles human inconstancy by analogy with the movement of stars in the night sky: ‘So in the world: ’tis furnished well with men, / And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive’ (III, i; ll. 67–8). If (like Cioran, like Sartre in La nausée) you reject historical sense, metaphysical supports, cultural reassurances, social conventions as spurious, if you confront yourself in your own existential destitution, you discover nothing but ‘a climate of constant anxiety’. ‘Individual spasms of apprehension’ may well be released by a diversity of frightening situations; but they all refer back to ‘a fundamental reality’ that must be confronted, this ‘essential fear’, the fear of death – the fear of non-existence, of the non-existence of self-consciousness. ‘Abstract constructions’, ‘abstract forms and categories’, the universal cultural values human beings create to defy ‘the nothingness of the dimension of time’, idealism, rationalism, ‘anything the world believes to have created for eternity’: these cultural-historical arrangements are as incapable of resisting the fatal ‘process of irremediable destruction’ as they are incapable of pacifying the apprehension it induces (Cioran 2007a: 31–2).

In the end the historicized world is a ‘world of frightened men’, arising from ‘the very fact of alienation’, from ‘the very fact of the lack of social coherence, [. . .] the fact of the atomization of people, and the fact that everybody is profoundly bored with life that doesn’t make much sense’ (Fromm 2010: 95).

‘Reality precisely reflected’ To summarize . . . To know how history works is indispensable, because history is about how the world works – how it has worked, how things worked out, given they were the way they were; how it continues to work, what is still workable, given that things are as they are; but also how it could still work, given how things as they are might turn out. Knowing how history works is indispensable because in describing how the world works, it also describes itself, how things are with it itself. To ensure it does work, history has these constitutive variants that can be invoked in indiscriminate combination: what happens, how things work out; the evaluation of what happens in terms of history, an assessment of what happenings determine it; and a technology that produces managerial-bureaucratic schemes of historical evaluation and assessment. Crucially, though, history is in a unique position to describe how the world works, what has worked and what will work, because it does

Conclusion 151 work as the world works. The historian belongs to a global administrative, managerial, and bureaucratic cadre of workers that keeps the world working. As variously an expert, a specialist, technician, he or she too for this purpose has information-technological, administrative, bureaucratic, and managerial competences, which confirms the ever-increasing academicization of social functions. That the historian does possess these competences is evinced paradigmatically (as mentioned earlier) in the History & Policy network, ‘a unique collaboration between the Institute of Contemporary British History at King’s College London and the University of Cambridge’ that, ‘providing access to an international network of more than 500 historians with a broad range of expertise [. . .] offers a range of resources for historians, policy makers and journalists’. Through the research it publishes online, it ‘creates opportunities for historians, policy makers and journalists to connect’, ‘demonstrates the relevance of history to contemporary policy making’, and aims ‘to increase the influence of historical research over current policy’. A bundle of motives sustains the way it works: that ‘too often policy reflects unexamined historical assumptions and clichés’; that ‘history is incorrectly assumed to be less relevant to current policy than the social and natural sciences’; that ‘at best, policy without history fails to learn past lessons and, at worst, repeats past mistakes’; but, above all, that ‘historians can shed light on the causes of current problems – and suggest innovative solutions’. That History & Policy exists, that it works, suggests that it is merely symptomatic of historicized consciousness, of the historicization of the public mind, particularly of the precedence it automatically concedes to the way things were. That this case of the trahison des clercs is a cause for pride, particularly in the prestigious universities associated with it, shows too that the historians involved themselves ignore their own historicized situation, that they cannot even learn the ‘lessons of their own past’, not least the dangers of political-ideological naïvety, in relation to their own profession. Would that a historicized world, with its culture of flawed performances, caught between aftermath and premonition, apprehensive of its capacity to terrify itself, could be remedied by historically informed, technical fine-tuning to policies dealing with multifarious ‘current problems’! Evidently history does work as the world works, and so it compromises itself through the work it does for the world, both in terms of what it makes workable and in terms of what – with historians’ supplementary interventions – is still wrong with the world.3 Particularly dubious here is the historians’ conviction of their privileged claim to a diagnostic language transcending the circumstances they talk about – ‘as though every “talking about” was unquestioningly excluded from [these circumstances] and raised above their force-field’ (Pastior 1994: 91). If, in describing how the world works, history does work as the world works, then it describes itself, what works for itself, in its own self-interest. History is a technology: not an art, since art-practices are defined by their originality, originality the public often treats with derision or receives with

152 Conclusion incomprehension; not a science, since it lacks its theoretical approach to determining the constant principles underlying reality. Like a systematic science [Wissenschaft] it has a conceptual armature that ensures its coherence: its integrating structure-logic reliant on causality, rationality, and identity and its stabilizing discourse-logic reliant on categorical coordinators. But – comprising alike the loftiest politics and the oral testimony of marginalized communities, the most banal objects to the most intricate art-work (for example) – its subject-matter is heterogeneous. It has to be if ideally “history” is to work as comprehensive knowledge [Wissen].4 Like a science, too, it abstracts its issues and preoccupations from the everyday environment of human experience. With its pre-emptive structure- and discourse-logic – mental investments in, or psychic additions to its subject-matter – it constructs patterns and sequences in the otherwise indiscriminate stream of events, in the always ongoing ‘collateral contemporaneity’ of things. But then it employs these self-same patterns and sequences as a template for managing issues in the everyday environment whence they initially derived. In this too history works as the world works. Social life is regulated by expert, academic opinion: the social scientist will comment and advise on social issues, the psychologist on social behaviour, the economist on financial policy, the doctor on the merits of new therapies, etc. But for the historian there is this crucial difference: the history technology at his or her disposal promotes a comprehensive, historicized reconfiguration of social behaviour and personal subjective experience. And the historian is convinced of his or her entitlement to pursue this reconfiguration since he or she automatically assumes that professionally disciplined, expert knowledge is “more real”, more credible, than anyone’s own immediately lived experience. This conviction derives from historians’ inevitably abstracted relationship to “the Past” prerequisite not just for determining how things were the way they were then but also for evaluating them in terms of contexts of its “better knowledge” available only now, after the event, in the aftermath. But this cognitive stance, being socially validated in terms of “the Past”, endows this cognitive stance as a stance in itself, this professional attitude towards the world as an attitude in itself, with actual social authority of its own, for itself. It vindicates not just administrative, managerial, and technical attitudes in general, not just the social prestige that accrues to those who possess knowledge socially defined as “better”, “more real”, and “more credible” than subjective experience. Rather, as a Counter-Enlightenment tendency, the expert stance produces a new cadre of guardians intending to reconfigure reality, the world everyone inhabits, in line with their own professional self-interests and, therefore, determined to devalue, to anaesthetize personal experience, subjective consciousness, which is before all else the basis of any knowledge – including specialized expertise – of any experience of the world whatsoever. Conversely, how history works – that it works as the world works, that it works for itself – is defined also by how its workings are experienced in the environment of ordinary life. This world is a priori the basis of all

Conclusion 153 specialized, technocratic knowledge, the world in which individual technicians, humanist-bureaucrats, and experts actually happen to live, but also the place to which this technocratic, managerial, and bureaucratic expertise refers. Given that in a historicized world subjective experience is suspended apprehensively between aftermath and premonition, the experience of history is inevitably complex. It is already compromised as much by its own, uneasy psychopathology as by the problem of identifying an event one witnesses, an issue one learns of, as actually “historical”. In this situation “historical” is often synonymous with “exceptional”, “important”, “significant”, or “traditional”. It is much more difficult to assess immediately whether the same event is a catalyst [§2.2] or a turning-point [§2.2]: this confirms that “historical” implies post-dated evaluation rather than immediate intuition. This cognitive situation suggests that “history” works on a pantheistic model. Everything in the personal and public environment is by definition “historical”: behind it, both implicit and yet invisible, is “history”, the numinous, metaphysical principle that will after all guarantee its order precisely because it is immediately inscrutable. Hence, therefore, the heterogeneous, contradictory variants of history and its significance. History (the account of what happened) offers both socially and psychologically an identity (social, national, ethnic), a common place to inhabit (a sense of community, a sense of place), a heritage (a set of values and traditions) that works as an authentic anterior affirmation of contemporary social and cultural values. Conversely, the historicizing potential of history when and as it happens triggers extreme emotional reactions: a royal jubilee or a national celebration may produce public euphoria; but a terrorist attack leaves its surviving victims mutilated and traumatized, its witnesses shocked and apprehensive. Further, working with original documents in the archive or visiting an archaeological site induces the belief one has “touched history”, “seen ‘the Past’ come alive”, or “gone back to ‘the Past’”. This response suggests that one’s internal time-consciousness can combine various streams of temporality, such as the immediate intuitive sense of one’s own time passing, the social time (the time of day, the date) when one visited the site, and the academic sense of historical ‘world-time’ the site belongs to. Such experiences are legion: in all of them the immediacy designated during or after the event as “historical” suggests rather that “history” – as a metaphysical (pantheistic) principle, an act of thought – works by categorically coordinating the multiplicity of time schemes and dimensions that constitute one’s own, subjective, internal time-consciousness. Further, historicization is also subjectively experienced in terms of the possibilities it either restricts or extends in terms of one’s world: e.g. the difficulties of travelling to Eastern Europe during the Cold War suddenly vanishing after 1989; the impossibility of seeing Dresden now as the “Venice of the North” as it was prior to its destruction. But on a different scale it works adversely in terms of mental and biological health: the effects of neo-liberal social and economic legislation on personal possibilities indicated by (e.g.) what it is

154 Conclusion to have your social benefits restricted, to lose your employment, to grow up unknowing in poverty; the increasing recourse to food banks, being homeless and destitute; or (e.g.) a recent redevelopment due to property speculation erasing a fondly remembered city neighbourhood, or (e.g.) the construction of an airport or railway extension at the behest of global commerce so that rural calm drowns in perpetual disturbance. Lastly, at best, “historical” signifies critical relativism generated precisely by how things being the way they were connect with the way things are now. But still critical relativism is a feeble form of criticism, enfeebled by historical knowledge demonstrating that everything is relative (to its time [§1.1], to its context [§3.1]), including the criticism itself. Calling these and similar experiences “history”, defining them as “historical”, is the first move in the technology applied by professionally disciplined, specialized expertise. History systematizes alike this subjective, psychological competence, the subjective acknowledgement of parameters defining the possibilities in one’s world, the inherent relativity of critical attitudes. That is to say: it subjects them by means of historical scrutiny to expert evaluation; it assimilates them indifferently to its own pre-emptive, rationalizing fabric of accountability. Once having undergone this scholastic filtration, this now generalized information can be diffused into the public sphere as its social self-image, as the reality principle of the public mind, as its “identity”. But the history technology works in this way because it is accepted as comprehensively amplifying subjective experience, because it apparently supports the subjective management of the various streams of internal time consciousness. Thus subjective experience automatically comes to depend on historical expertise and its structure- and discourse-logic. This means that it becomes automatically susceptible to being manipulated not just by the comprehensive stance of historical scholarship that affirms the world works as it does, but to any social or political authority that vindicates itself in historical terms (e.g. invoking nationalism, heritage, “long traditions”, cultural “memory”, community “identities”, etc.). However, justified by comprehensive procedures that produce “better knowledge” after the event, historians’ social authority is more questionable than the authority accredited to other professionally disciplined vocations. A doctor might discuss with a patient his or her medical history in relation to a problem current now: though approaching it from different perspectives, diagnosis (on the one hand), physical discomfort (on the other), the common concern is the patient’s body. A lawyer might review with a perplexed client the ways in which a law on appeal has been successively interpreted: in this case, the common focus is the wording of the legislation. But with their professionally disciplined expertise supported by the technical resources of its structure- and discourse-logic, historians regulate the world as it is experienced by everyone: it works with working-methods everyone to some greater or lesser extent works with. Certainly, in doing so, a vast self-substantiating, self-referential body of historiography and historiographical method and

Conclusion 155 theory develops, but that ultimately has relevance only in so far as it connects with the world everyone inhabits, to that world as it was in the way that it was, as much as to how it is held to be now in the light of historical selfreflection, things being the way they are. That is to say: historians may well lay claim to professionally disciplined, technical expertise that legitimizes their management of their own scholastically filtered and coordinated representations of things; but they are not experts in anyone’s individual, subjective experience of the world, of things being for that subjectivity the way they are, given what for that individual they were. Each individual subject (and this includes historians in their own everyday experience) is a “specialist” in his or her own personal experience of the world, in the world-arrangement determined by and experienced within the horizons of his or her consciousness. And the immediate, a priori concern of subjective consciousness is not to ascertain the way things actually were but to confront its situation, to apprehend its reality now as it is precisely reflected. Further, suspended between aftermath and premonition, this worldarrangement inevitably exhibits symptoms of its particular, apprehensive psychopathology. As a management technology – a technology of technologies – with its indifferent methodology, with its reliance on a constant structure- and discourse-logic, history might be expected to have a remedial, therapeutic effect. It might show how it all makes sense, how it is the way it should be, things being the way they are. In fact its technological indifference, the ubiquitous constancy of its structure- and discourse-logic, means it normalizes this psychopathological world-arrangement. What normalizes it is something quantitative: the ever-expanding volume of self-amplifying comprehension. That history thus keeps generating itself in a historicized world that renders it redundant is itself a ‘flawed performance’ on a metaphysical scale, a cardinal symptom of the psychopathology of historicized life. Comprehensive historical scholarship is presumed naturally to promote human self-understanding. Without this metaphysical, even quasi-religious, sense-structure people would be lost. They rely on it for their personal identity: without it (they claim) they would not even know themselves. As for the human sciences generally, they would collapse, so reliant are they on the history technology. So if the logic of historiography is flawed, human self-comprehension collapses. Demolishing what is left of it exposes the desolation of existence. Surrounded by the technological amenities indispensable for its comfort, the indices of progressive historicization, the human creature glimpses with apprehension its existential destitution. It no longer recognizes itself: fatally corroded by historicizing self-deception its “historical identity” signifies self-alienation. For further reflection . . . Where comprehensive historicist structures collapse, subjective, immediate experience remains the only cognitive resource, as when Schopenhauer insists that ‘there is no comprehensive plan to world history’ as scholastic

156 Conclusion comprehension believes, ‘but only to the individual’s subjective life’. Quite simply, ‘nations exist only in the abstract: individuals are what is real’ (Schopenhauer 1977b: 249). For him personal (subjective) consciousness takes priority: ‘consciousness is what is immediately given’. Hence, ‘the individual is the bearer of the knowing subject and this is the bearer of the world’ (Schopenhauer 1977a: II, 13). The world is as it appears in the individual’s consciousness [Vorstellung]; the world is also the world as it is ‘in itself’, the Kantian ‘thing in itself’, in the life-instincts of the human body [Wille zum Leben]: the individual is thus a microcosm of the world (Schopenhauer 1977a: I, 454–5, §61). Since consciousness is experienced for itself in the actual moment, immediate experience is the basis of reality: ‘The present alone is true and real: it is time as it is really fulfilled and our existence lies exclusively in it’ (Schopenhauer 1977c: 495). Consciousness alone is constituted as ‘what remains and persists, and so individuality operates constantly, continuously, more or less in every moment’ (Schopenhauer 1977c: 386). Thus individual consciousness always precedes history. The deference to “the Past” inculcated by comprehensive historical scholarship may well coerce individuals into existing as historical agents. But, because of its priority, consciousness can extricate itself from its historicized predicament and re-examine its cognitive practices. It is capable of resisting ‘the necessity of identity’, refusing preconceived realities, rejecting pre-emptively occluded horizons (Schopenhauer 1977a: I, 265–6, 278, 282–3; §§36–37). Further, immediate experience is consolidated not by comprehensive, historicist designs but by focussing on crucial, fundamental problems such as: • •

•

• •

reflecting on precisely whether or not somebody doing anything makes a difference to something happening; wondering how knowledge (that is a given) connects with a knowledgeobject (that is not a given, that presents itself fortuitously), how within a mass of (e.g. “historical”) facts an “objective”, transcendental (e.g. “historicist”) meaning can be discovered (i.e. a meaning not already immanent in the requisite mental induction) (Husserl 1986a: 37); realizing that historical, engrained world-arrangements carry conviction only because they are symptomatic of ‘the genuine synthetic consciousness, [. . .] the preeminent ingredient and quintessence of reason’ that ‘has its physiological basis quite evidently in the most characteristic property of the nervous system, the power of taking habits’ (Peirce 1992: 264); realizing too that if these habits are not disrupted, they become restrictive, inimical to evolution, to the indispensable taking of new and different habits (Peirce 1992: 290, 292); recognizing that ‘the conformity of thinking, the persistence in claiming that it is a steady vocation, a self-contained realm within the total social structure, abandons the very essence of thinking’, that axiomatically ‘philosophy’s resistance to reality derives from its immanent principles’, but,

Conclusion 157 above all, that thinking has an existential, ethical function, as ‘already a sign of resistance, as the effort no longer to let oneself be deceived’ (Horkheimer 2009a: 216; 2009b: 336; 2003: 318). Finally, to demonstrate how inimical a historicized world is to immediate subjectivity, how in the end history works to shatter, to de-realize the world constituted by personal consciousness, but also to appreciate the sheer mental effort it takes to refuse its compensating illusions and to see reality precisely reflected in the resulting destitution, the following cognitive situations are paradigmatic. They represent in their different ways the damaged existence of the millions disadvantaged, persecuted, brutalized, displaced, the often unheard, even silenced, but most eloquent witnesses to the psychopathological workings of a historically hyperconscious, historicized world. •

•

There is the situation exemplified by Kafka in his diary on 19 October 1921, a classic depiction of subjectivity under conditions of comprehensive erasure. There he asserts that anyone unable to cope with the world needs one hand to try to somehow ward off despair at his fate while with the other writing down what he sees amongst the ruins; because he sees something other, and something more than others, since he is after all dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor (Kafka 1981: 340). There is Jean Améry reflecting on his own damaged existence, his own mutilated consciousness. Suffering from an inescapable sickness, he feels he has nothing in common with the world. His sense of estrangement is essential to his personality. In post-war normality he feels as isolated as when the Gestapo was torturing him. There can be no common ground between him and the de facto historical world, the successor to the world that condemned him to death. At the same time, though, he doubts that he really is psychologically unwell, that he is suffering from hysteria. From the standpoint both of the unsuspecting world of his upbringing in pre-fascist Austria and of the mental and physical trauma to which he was subsequently subjected, he concludes that the mental illness is not with him, but with history, that ‘the neurosis is on the side of historical events’ [die Neurose [liegt] auf seiten des historischen Geschehens]. Now the cognitive advantage shifts decisively to mutilated consciousness, to subjectivity somehow sustained even at the point of its erasure: ‘I know,’ he says, ‘what causes me distress is no neurosis but reality precisely reflected’. Ambivalent about a Jewish identity forced on him both by the Nazis and by the post-war world categorizing him as a survivor, he has no option but to live apprehensively, wary of resurgent anti-Semitism, mindful as he is of the cataclysm he has just escaped and of possible cataclysms to come. Far from being traumatized, he finds himself ‘intellectually and mentally in complete correspondence with reality’. Erased subjectivity (not self-amplified comprehension), a fateful chance (rather than sufficient reason) determine his cognitive situation:

158 Conclusion

•

‘In my existence I am living through and illuminating a historical reality of my epoch, and since I went through it more deeply than many of my ethnicity [Stammesgenossen], I can shed more light upon it’ (Améry 2002: 170–2, 174–5). For Cioran, though, the historicized world provokes revulsion, as when he remarks: ‘History is indefensible. Towards it you have to react with the inflexible aboulia of the cynic; or if not go over to the side of everyone and march along with the rabble of the disaffected, the assassins, and the believers’ (Cioran 2008: 133–4). This uncompromising insight also would resist the psychopathology of historicized life, even if it means that ‘lucidity results from a decrease in vitality, like the absence of illusion’, even if ‘being aware does not go in the direction of life; getting something straight [être au clair] even less’ – and even if, therefore, ‘one is as long as one does not know that one is’, since ‘Being signifies being mistaken’ [Être signifie se tromper] (Cioran 2004, 117).

This, then, is the world as it is left once the mysterium, history, dissipates: ‘the self is a promontory over nothingness where it dreams of a spectacle of reality’. After all, we are nothing more than ‘illusions of our own thoughts’; being is an ‘absolute never’. Most importantly, ‘nothing precedes us, nothing accompanies us, nothing succeeds us’ (Cioran 1993: 25, 26, 37). Confronting historicized reality and its psychopathology thus reveals a world that does not work as supposedly, historically, it always has done – a world in which history doesn’t work in the human interest, in which it won’t work since in any human sense it doesn’t work. Precisely this history occludes . . .

Notes 1 Stein here thinks like A.N. Whitehead, e.g.: ‘mind is not in time or in space in the same sense in which the events of nature are in time, [. . .] mind is in time and in space in a sense peculiar to itself’ (Whitehead 1920: 69–70). History blurs this distinction: it represents a conventional form of knowledge based on the misleading bifurcation of knowledge into conceptually defined objects and transient senseimpressions. 2 Like Heidegger who sees them as separate but still related, Sartre distinguishes between fear and apprehension [angoisse]: fear defines an external threat, apprehension a risk to which one exposes oneself (Sartre 2010: 64ff.; Heidegger 1979: 184–91). Certainly this distinction helps Sartre define the role of nothingness in the realization of existential freedom. Yet in terms of how this external threat is confronted it is less useful. So presupposing both Heidegger’s and Sartre’s indispensable conceptions of this issue, the argument here elides fear and apprehension. It takes it cue from Cioran. (The discussion of apprehension is here, in any case, assimilated to the experience of aftermath and premonition. A specifically psychoanalytical discussion would also need to acknowledge Lacan’s conceptualization of apprehension in itself (Lacan 2004).)

Conclusion 159 3 http://www.historyandpolicy.org (accessed 10.05.2014). 4 The argument here endorses Schopenhauer’s view that history is not a systematic science [Wissenschaft] interpreting phenomena by subordinating them to general principles, but rather a rudimentary form of knowledge, an accumulation of data [Wissen], lacking logical coherence, it subsequently organizes chronologically and classifies conceptually (Schopenhauer 1977a: I, 110, §14).

Glossary

This glossary defines some terms central to the argument contained in this book, as well as to the Historics project generally (cf. Davies 2006; 2010). It complements the glossary in Historics (Davies 2006: 255–8). Aboulia: ‘Aboulia’ is ‘a reduction in ability to initiate actions and thoughts and a general indifference about the consequences of action. The term is properly reserved for truly pathological cases’ (cf. Reber 1987). Aesthesis: From the Greek aisthesis, ‘perception by the senses’, a ‘sensation, sense of a thing’, it defines knowledge not just as intellection but also as sensation. It stresses that intellectual work comes with a somatic moment, a physical reaction. Where comprehension reckons with abstraction from the ordinary world as a means of managing it in its own interests, thus causing reality to split into permanent intellectual components and their transient secondary qualities, aesthesis represents the intellectual and physiological unity of the act of knowledge. It is thus the foundation of art practices; it also performs a type of eidetic reduction. Aftermath: This term describes the nature of experience in a world that historicizes history itself (see Historicization). It is a precondition for the psychopathology of historicized life. Amplification: This facilitates comprehension (and comprises atomization and ephemeralization). Not that the single account will necessarily be comprehensive, rather comprehensivity is achieved by accounting as such, by the multiplication of specialized micro-accounts, by means of inter-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary work, by historiography in the broadest sense. Apprehension: This defines the aesthetic and mental responses, the experience and knowledge, that arise from one’s own situation as it is defined cognitively, socially, and existentially. It releases a certain mood or misgiving; it may trigger psychological stress; it might manifest itself in physiological symptoms such as nervousness or anxiety. It contrasts with Comprehension. It is a symptom of historicization, of the psychopathlogy of historicized life. Comprehension: This describes the academic standpoint of the historian. It is the basis of his or her disciplinary authority, of his or her

Glossary 161 technical expertise: it justifies the correctional force of academic knowledge. Characterized by the ‘administrative gaze’, the ‘monographic view’: it is all-embracing and pan-optic, transcendental to ordinary experience, to the life-world. With this contemplative stance it represents a form of theory. It works to define the world as it is by means of its own disciplinary meta-language (i.e. its own technical terms, forms of explanation, methodological approaches, etc.). It is affirmative knowledge, even if it is being (in its terms) “critical”. Categorical coordinators: These identify words – and in them – patterns of thought that make historical accounts possible: e.g. ages, forces, processes, tipping-points, roots, traditions, etc. They have two main functions: (i) they coordinate different kinds of historical objects by making them all the same: e.g. heritage can apply to all kinds of material and intellectual culture which then through this application acquire a common historical status and a common identity. Not least they permit abstractions (e.g. nationalism, democracy, revolution) to acquire a material presence (e.g. as a tradition, a process, or a force); (ii) they provide categories that make different kinds of historical explanation possible by investing the chaos of the self-historicizing world with sense by means of: e.g. ‘structures of coherence’, ‘dynamic forces’, and ‘stabilizing components’. Categorical coordinators thus contribute to the illusory character of comprehensive knowledge. Constitution (Reconstitution): This describes the phenomenological relationship to an object. The object given to consciousness is never the ‘object in itself’. However, the impossibility of knowing the ‘object in itself’ is not just defined in terms of the anthropic limits of consciousness (as in Kant). Rather it exposes the “objective” object as a type of abstraction. With the term constitution Husserl argues that one’s perception of an object occurs within a network of motivations for perceiving it. The object appears to the perceiving subject in a given light, a given position. It has a certain value, or a certain function. The subject itself has a particular interest in it, a particular purpose for it. The object is at any time the sum of all these interconnections but is not completely defined by any of them (cf. Husserl 1984: 16ff.). Other kinds of interests in it and functions for it will contribute to its constitution or its reconstitution. The “objective” object tested scientifically in the laboratory or studied technically in a seminar is simply one of a number of ways in which it is constituted for the subject. So the aim of this book is to suggest various ways in which history is reconstituted by exploring the many different ways in which it appears to consciousness. Eidetic reduction: This is a crucial mental procedure in phenomenology. It involves an intuitive examination of what is immediately apprehended by consciousness. Unlike scientific specialization it involves not abstraction from given experience, but immediate intensification of apprehending something. It requires bracketing out of experience everything that

162 Glossary conventionally attaches to the object or in the natural attitude pre-empts its apprehension. (So – to give a simple example – someone looks at a flower: they discount its name, its growing conditions, who planted it, why it was planted, when it was planted, how it typically looks, whether it will work in an eventual flower display. Instead, they concentrate on this particular flower here, at this moment in the afternoon, with a withered petal, and then a bee alighting on it, moving in a cool breeze, some green-fly crawling on its stem, and just a hint of its perfume. There is, therefore, no “objective” flower: there is only ever the flower as it is experienced, as it is given to consciousness – the flower being there as a flower.) Eidetic reduction is thus a form of focussed defamiliarization to access the essence [Wesen] of something. It also confirms the cognitive value of aesthesis. Here it particularly resists the notion that historical understanding is natural. History, historical: This refers principally to the academic study and discipline of history. It also refers to hitherto unprecedented occurrences happening now that “make” history just as other momentous occurrences have done in the past. In this sense history is always a precedent or sets a precedent for what is happening now. Additionally, quite frequently, “historical” is synonymous with “impressive”, “outstanding”, etc., describing an event that will remain in public memory for some while. Historian-function: This term recognizes that, besides academic historians, many people in many occupations and in many organizations work with history (e.g. producers and presenters in the media, film-directors, politicians, managers, journalists, fashion, design, tourism, etc.). Partly this represents the extension into social behaviour of academic procedures; partly it recognizes that history can be appropriated by many social interests (from antiques to ideologies) that elude academic regulation and so make disciplinary correctives indispensable. Historical unconscious: This is defined against the concept of historical consciousness that accompanies the study of history, orientates the historian-function and motivates history-focussed behaviour. It is defined too against the historicist idea that history as a whole reveals the development of the mind of humanity. It derives partly from the nature of action: that (as Hegel in his Philosophy of History remarks) whatever consciously motivates it, whatever it intends, it produces consequences or ramifications unsuspected or unforeseen by the agents at the time (Hegel 1961: 69, 71–2). This cognitive flaw is exploited by the ‘ruse of reason’ [List der Vernunft] whereby world-historical individuals (e.g. Alexander, Napoleon) pursuing passionately – but ultimately catastrophically – their own ambitions are unconsciously, unsuspectingly being manipulated by the transcendental interest of the world-spirit (Hegel 1961: 78). Given the technologically amplified capacity for human action in the historicized world, its self-assertive potential, human action is increasingly hostage to its unsuspected consequences. Where once history was

Glossary 163 meant to demonstrate the development of the human mind, the progress of rationality, now it presents merely symptoms of self-embarrassing behaviour (parapraxis), ‘flawed achievements’, a numinous sense of ‘the erroneousness of the world’ (Nietzsche 1988d: 52, §34) that gives rise to apprehension, that induces the psychopathology of historicized life (cf. Davies 2010: 91ff.). History-focussed behaviour: This recognizes that history influences social life not just in terms of what anyone knows, but also in terms of how people behave. Historical knowledge is the default knowledge of society: it is the basis of the general intellect. Everyone knows something about it. Consequently, the circulation of news in the public sphere concerning history does not just manipulate social behaviour but also ensures that this behaviour, distracted from the present, will focus on history. It includes tourism; visiting historical sites, galleries, museums; media interest in historical or archaeological topics. It represents a form of labour, a form of production, a financial resource for the institutions and businesses involved. Thus history-focussed behaviour is, not least, a means of making “the Past” and the public interest in it profitable. Historicization (historicized world): This term comprises several issues: (a) It defines a world in which history itself has been superseded, when it no longer functions as precedent, likeness or sameness, when it no longer offers lessons for what is happening now or what might happen in time still to come. (Think of the precious material culture lost by war in the past century or so.) (b) It defines a world where, though it has been superseded, history continues to set precedents and make likenesses (i.e. make sense) because it does that whatever happens. Thus it affirms the illusory character of historical knowledge in a historicized world. (c) The world also becomes historicized through historical action [res gestae] being informed and motivated by historical knowledge [cognitio rerum gestarum]. Thus historical knowledge studies history informed by historical knowledge, offers narratives generated by the narratives and their effects produced by historical agents. This is for historical scholarship an identitary situation (A = A), confirmation both of its truth and of its redundancy. (d) Historicization also disrupts the convergence of knowledge and world founded by the identity principle. The more historical knowledge is invested in the world, the more a historicizing production system creates revolutionary, latest things, the less the mind can comprehend a constantly self-historicizing situation it itself has brought about and anticipate its future ramifications. History as a comprehensive system for managing the world – as the total system of the totally administered world – still functions unsuspectingly, automatically, but its grasp on what is happening is ever weaker. In this sense too (i.e. through this self-encounter of the mind), history in a historicized world is redundant. Because in these ways the history management technology runs parallel to the world, mirroring the way

164 Glossary things are going, with its own momentum going along obliviously with the way things are going, it inevitably induces apprehension. Identity, identitary logic: This defines the way in which history makes sense. History is the permanent identity of change: whatever happens it proves to be the same as the same old thing. The latest historical research revises, corrects, and amplifies the knowledge already known about the same old thing. Its identitary logic ensures that however much changes it remains still the same, that it guarantees to produce “likenesses” and “samenesses”. This occurs in several ways. (a) History is a source of social, cultural, ethnic, national identity. History – allegedly – tells you who you are: it puts you in your proper place. It maps out what you have in common with (what makes you the same as) those who share your identity. It also justifies discrimination against those who do not, which makes it lethal. (b) History produces “likenesses”: it describes “the Past” in terms of what it was really like. Its redescription of the past is meant to be a faithful likeness. It is thus predicated on the principle of identity, the very foundation of thought and truth (A = A). (c) History offers “likenesses” of what is happening now in terms of precedents, analogies, similar cases in “the Past” as determined by the historian’s comprehensive, administrative gaze. The intention of comprehension and its scholastic methods is to produce types and categories of historical “likeness”. (d) History makes itself an indispensable means of engagement with the world. Human interests may well be diverse: pursuing them inevitably involves discovering their diverse histories, which, necessitating historyfocussed behaviour, normatizes and standardizes them, veils them in sameness (cf. Davies 2006: 81–9; 2010: 59–81). Illusion, illusio: This defines the knowledge produced by comprehension and historicization. Disciplinary procedures preselecting from the collateral contemporaneity of the world issues that already interest them and then projecting the knowledge gained from these abstractions back onto the world as a whole produces the illusory quality of academic work. (It is the diametrical opposite of aesthesis.) Life-world [Lebenswelt]: In Husserl’s phenomenology this term defines the world in which people ordinarily live, their everyday social and cultural environment. Science, disciplinary knowledge, is an abstraction from this world; at the same time this world is managed by science and disciplinary knowledge on the basis of these abstractions. Hence the interests of scientific management and disciplinary administration diverge from the interests of human existence, even proving inimical to it. In this context historical expertise is particularly treacherous: where the natural sciences require uncommon expertise, historical knowledge in the form of the historian-function and history-focussed behaviour offers experience as common sameness. It thus infiltrates the life-world, assumes its governance, and reorientates existential interests on behalf of the social, political, cultural, and economic managers whose work both depends on and directs the way in which history works.

Glossary 165 Natural attitude: This defines the routine attitude to the world in which one ordinarily lives [Lebenswelt]. It accepts and reckons with the various contexts it encounters. It discovers the world by means of comprehension. It affirms the way things are, given the way they used to be. To elude the pre-emptive strategies of the ever-recurrent same old thing, it needs to be resisted and challenged. Phenomenology: This is defined here by the works of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and its interpretation by Emmanuel Lévinas (1905–1995). Breaking with comprehensive, historicizing, and psychologizing methods, it offers an analysis of how the world intuitively appears to consciousness and a means of describing how it thus appears. Accessible introductions are The Idea of Phenomenology [1986a/1907] and Phenomenology as a Rigorous Science [1965/1910/1911]. Psychopathology of historicized life: This term (suggested by Freud’s On the Psychopathology of Everyday Life [1987/1904]) describes human behaviour in a historicized world, a world mentally incoherent and for that reason also mentally unrestricted. It involves: (a) The desperate, futile attempt to cope with the chaotic anachronism of contemporary life. This comprises both the nostalgic attachment to the same old thing and the constant desire for the ever latest thing. This displays atavistic cruelty by means of sophisticated communication systems. It confronts a cultural system that defers to tradition but is sustained by a production system that reckons with the constant, aggressive modernization of social practices. (b) Both the trauma of aftermath and intimidation by what could yet come. Historical knowledge both reveals the past as a jumble of ‘flawed achievements’, of forms of parapraxis, of unintentional self-embarrassment, and works to provide it with a redeeming – but ultimately illusory – coherence and sense of purpose (cf. historicization). (c) An existential situation in which ‘the culmination of what is living [becomes] transposed into experiencing what is historical’ [die Kulmination des Lebendigen [ward] eben ins Erleben des Historischen verlegt], in which immediate experience (aesthesis) is pre-emptively occluded – hence invalidated – by comprehensive historicization (cf. Mannheim 1984: 151). Historicized life thus seems so natural that it blocks any intimation of its essentially pathological condition.

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Index

academic: administrative gaze 16, 56–7, 65, 69, 73, 93, 95, 110, 116, 123, 132; depleted credibility 126f.; disciplinary corrective 13, 20, 59, 120, 121; disciplinary knowledge 60–1, 66, 82; disciplinary practices 124; disciplinary procedures 60, 105, 119, 121, disciplinary professionalism 138; disciplinary regulation 79; disciplinary scholarship 70; disciplinary technicalities 122; disciplinary work 116, 145; disciplined discourse 2; disciplines 46–7, 49, 51–5, 73; institutional function 124; monographic view 16, 56–7, 62–3, 69, 73, 78, 93, 96, 110, 116, 132; technical training 145; see also scientific worker aftermath 13, 124, 140, 141–2, 144–5, 151, 153, 155 amplification 13, 37, 42, 64, 83, 91, 95, 122, 129–31, 134, 154 apprehension 3, 16, 23, 32, 33, 60, 69, 78, 82, 139–51, 155 atomization 83, 91, 121, 123, 142, 150 capitalism 33, 37–9, 45, 69, 89, 135 categorical coordinators 5, 14, 31, 37, 43, 45, 49, 61, 70–1, 91–5, 99, 100, 102, 105, 112ff., 119, 128,f.; causal coordinators 99; dynamic forces 93–5, 99ff., 104, 107, 109, 117; stabilizing components 94–5, 105ff.; structures of coherence 93, 95; temporal coordinators 96ff., 116–17

causality 52, 70–1, 74–8, 85, 89, 90, 117, 122 collateral contemporaneity 52, 60, 78, 83, 152 comprehension 9, 13, 14, 23, 25–6, 28, 31, 32, 36–7, 56–7, 61, 64–66, 71, 78–81, 83–4, 87, 91, 93, 106–7, 112, 114, 116ff., 120–4, 126–36, 139–43, 156–7 consciousness 19, 34; intentional nature 17, 86, 91 discourse logic 15, 61, 67, 70, 91–2, 104, 107, 140, 142, 152, 154–5 ecology of mind 133 enthymeme 122, 135 ephemeralization 91, 95, 123, 142 general intellect 20, 55, 59, 61, 124 habit 4, 61, 62, 74, 78, 156 heritage 17, 108–109, 143 historical discourse 99 historian-function 4, 8–13, 15, 62, 92, 121 historical action 1, 16, 22, 28, 80, 85 historical consciousness 19, 24 historical knowledge 12, 20, 68, 117 historical meaning 13ff., 29, 112, 126; metaphysical principles 13, 15, 31, 64, 74, 78, 153 historical scholarship 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 27, 31, 36–7, 39, 46, 55–60, 63, 68–9, 78–9, 83, 86, 89, 91, 95, 98, 119, 155, 156

178 Index historical truth 94, 95 historical unconscious 80 historicism 77, 78, 80, 118–19, 120, 122 historicized consciousness 24–8, 111, 114, 142 historicized knowledge 9, 20, 22, 62 historicized world 2, 3, 13–16, 19–25, 27–8, 31–4, 37, 39–41, 50, 62–4, 66, 68, 77–80, 83–4, 92, 95, 100, 116–17, 120, 122, 137–40, 142–5, 147, 151, 157 historiography 80, 90, 116, 155 history 77; abstract of abstractions 10, authority 9f, 46, 62, 74, 121, 154; capital 39; categorical coordinator 112f., 117; common currency of thought 49; common memory of humanity 14; comprehensive heterogeneity 50, 114; compulsive self-amplification 14; constant self-production of human nature 73; creation of a uniquely human sphere 79; ecumenical faith of a godless world 14; existential liability 26, 28, 84, 143; guarantor that human existence means something 17; indispensable for arranging the world 49; intellectual convenience 17, 69; instrument for reconfiguring the world 64; limitless jurisdiction 13; means of orientation 7; narcotics of yesteryear 66; no special place 7, 9, 11, 20, 26, 47, 78; occlusive pre-emption 28, 36, 53, 59, 64, 135; pantheistic structure 72, 74, 90, 97, 132, 153; paradigmatic of disciplinary functions 59, 62; paradigmatic form of human selfknowledge 25; a resource 63, 68, 69; self-redressing mechanism 13; social management functions 5, 15, 61, 65, 67; socially pervasive 48; story of human self-incrimination 51, 148; technology of technologies 41, 46, 51, 58, 64, 68, 70, 77, 79–80, 142, 151, 155; trace left by human endeavour 88; type of intellectual and ethical regression 75

history-focussed behaviour 4, 8, 9, 21–3 human beings 117, 133, 149 humanism 21, 80, 81 humanities 5, 129 humanity 15, 17, 31, 41, 43, 67, 110, 137, 141, 148; as categorical coordinator 112, 117 human sciences 73, 134 human world 84, 85, 88, 114 identity 52, 70, 78, 86–90, 98, 107, 109f., 116, 120, 122, 125, 127, 132, 138, 147, 153–6. latest things 38, 55, 146, 149 Lebenswelt 8, 91, 164; everyday experience 92, 152, 155; everyday life 4, 8, 71, 78; immediate experience 65, 75, 78, 83, 119, 152, 156; ordinary experience 65, 71, 77, 78, 107, 142 ordinary world 65, 91, 119, 140, 152 metonymy 10 nihilism 14, 15, 42, 78, 83 parapraxis (flawed performance) 125, 137, 151, 155 past 1ff., 6ff., 10–12, 15–16, 23–4, 28, 37, 41, 45–6, 52, 59–60, 68, 72, 75, 80–2, 87, 90–1, 94, 108, 119, 127, 129, 137, 141–5, 152–3, 156 postmodernism 14 psychic additions 14, 93–4, 98–100, 105, 114, 116, 152 psychopathology of historicized life 3, 16–17, 95, 125, 137–8, 141–3, 155, 158 redundancy of history 16 same old things 88 scientific worker 120; academic manager 132; highly gifted technician 67, 120, 144–5, 151, 153; humanist bureaucrat 36, 57, 120, 136, 144, 153; information engineer 57,

Index 179 120, 144; objective man 57, 120; organization man or woman 57, 120, 146; philosophical worker 57; resources manager 57, 120; specialist 57, 120, 145, 151; technical expertise 139, 145–6, 151–5; technician of practical knowledge 57; theoretical man 120; trained bureaucratic official 57, 120; treacherous cleric 57, 120, 151 social-cognitive behaviour 3 sophist, sophistry 27, 51, 132, 136

structure logic 15, 61, 67, 70, 90, 140, 142, 152, 154, 155 sufficient reason 23, 52, 70, 78–9, 90, 118, 122, 133, 138, 157 synecdoche 10, 97, 122 technology 34, 37, 39, 40, 41, 58, 81 vicious bifurcation of nature 98, 106 work 3, 8, 53, 54, 56, 150, 151 world 3, 19, 35, 72; finished world 36, 37