Hayden White’s Interpretive History
Aniruddha Chowdhury [Aniruddha Chowdhury received his PhD from the Graduate Program of Social and Political Thought at York University. He is the author of Post-deconstructive Subjectivity and History: Phenomenology, Critical Theory, and Postcolonial Thought (Brill, 2014)] _________________________ Hayden White has challenged the veritable intellectual tradition that since the time of Aristotle rests on the distinction of poetry (imaginary) and history (real). According to White, the modern positivism on the one hand and the Philosophy of History on the other consolidate the oppositions (fact and interpretation, objectivity and imaginary, scientific and artistic). However, it is not only the critics of history, White’s favourite example is Claude Levi-Strauss, who insist on the “mythopoetic” aspects of the historical discourse, but the great practitioners of history themselves, say, Jacob Burckhardt or Ranke, to take two distinct examples, dwell on the artistic and the poetic, if not the speculative-theological, ground of history. Now, If White is intrinsically a hermeneutic thinker who questions the separation of fact and interpretation his hermeneutic enterprise has a Kantian aspect (of historical reason) of a transcendental-formalist kind. What characterizes White’s interpretation, I argue, is a catachrestic formalism. The objectivity, in White’s account, is not erased, but appears as figural object. If White is a transcendentalist, as I think he is, then it is quasi-transcendental as the nature of the ground is figurative. When White wrote his essay ‘The Burden of History,’ in 1966, much of the claims of either the scientific or the aesthetic conception of historical work had been considered antiquated in the sense that what was outmoded was history’s attempt to combine a late-nineteenth century social science and a mid-nineteenth century art, which had led the historiography to an essentially positivist distinction between scientific objectivity on one hand and imaginary on the other. 1 Now, it is not only the philosophers of history — Hegel, Nietzsche, Croce, Dilthey, Spengler, Foucault et al– who have challenged the non-discursive claims of the historians either from cognitive-philosophical or from artistic perspectives, but the distinction between objectivity and imaginary in the historical discourse has been refuted from within the “proper” historical discourse itself. Even if we set aside the work such as Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance which experimented with the most advanced artistic techniques of his time and with an aesthetic conception of science not in order to tell the whole truth about the Italian Renaissance but one truth about it, the very notion of objectivity to which Rankean positivism appealed and the radical self-effacement that his (Ranke’s) method implied was supplemented by the theology on the one hand and literary hermeneutics on the other, as Gadamer has shown perspicuously. Even if Ranke rejects speculative philosophy of history of the Hegelian kind he nonetheless grounds universal history in a certain Lutheran theology. The notion of the singularity of each period and its immediacy to God, which the historian chronicles was not sufficient to mark a break with speculative philosophy of history since in Ranke’s universal history, as Gadamer argues, the universe is raised to a consciousness of itself in a manner close to German Idealism. This consciousness is an empathic co-knowledge of the universe in the context of which Ranke’s famous self-effacement should be understood. 2 The Whitean formalism is to show that it is discourse that constitutes the source and the ground of the opposition of history and metahistory. White’s intervention consists in the fact that he represents a kind of Copernican turn that unravels the discursive ground of historical reason and, may I say, of historical being. In Metahistory, White writes an ambitious history of the historical consciousness of the Nineteenth Century Europe. It is a discursive history of the already discursive historicities (on the historicity later). This is precisely what his formalism amounts to. The discursive historicities (the object of White’s history) include the historical practitioners such as Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt and the philosophers of history such as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce. It is White’s point in the masterwork that the real or the actual in historical discourse has no pre-critical, transcendent status as opposed to the imaginary but is constituted in relation to what is imaginable. They are dependent upon not only the figurative discourse that the historian uses but also, on another level, upon the linguistic tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche etc. These two levels — the verbal discourse of figuration as narrative plots and the linguistic forms– constitute, for White, the ideal-type structure of the historical work. 3 The turn from the one level to the other is one meaning of what White calls troping. Even though White never denies the objective pole of the historical discourse, the referent, he insists on the discursive nature of the actuality. There is something profoundly inventive about the discourse that constitutes objects of history. It has to be said that in White the temporality of the historical discourse belongs to the instance of imagination and invention in figurative discourse. Discourse, for White, is a movement of meaning from one notion to another notion with the acknowledgement that things can be expressed otherwise (TD 2). “A discourse moves “to and fro” between received encodations of experience and the clutter of phenomena which refuses incorporation in to conventionalized notions of “reality,” “truth,” or “possibility”(TD 4). The possibility of other expression belongs to the inventiveness of discourse, especially the verbal, figurative, discourse. There is no transcendent (which we have to distinguish from the notion of the transcendental) referent in which discourse must be grounded. Following Barthes White too would suggest that the real in a discourse is a certain “unformulated signified, sheltering behind the apparently all powerful referent.” 4 It is White’s influential point that the content of the historiography is indistinguishable from the discursive form in which the ‘real’ is articulated. A history, especially a classic, is not a picture that resembles the object it depicts but a complex linguistic form, allegorical in nature (more on this later), which is “dense and opaque” (Frank
The Feel of Not to Feel It (Classics of Literary Criticism Revisited III)
Susan Stewart, The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011] “to compose is the verb applied to the making of poem” Along some seashore, sometime, we detect a young boy who, after working on a sand-castle for a whole day, goes on to destroy the same structure by the evening. Once gone, the sandy walls and turrets and moats of the castle are then barely distinguishable from the sand surrounding them. This routine, the idea of erring voluntarily, for Susan Stewart, shows “…a certain relation we have to making. Without the freedom of reversibility enacted in unmaking, or at least always present as the potential for unmaking, we cannot give value to our making.” By annihilating the mere thing, the boy seems to be restituting the power of the form back to his own self, as if what he had been practicing all along was a mode of memorization or learning. Once the artistry used in making the castle in its entirety was internalized, the same set of skills was set to be used again: “Unwilling or unable to be the curator of his creation, the boy swiftly returned it to its elements, that is, to its pure potential.” How free is the artist in making? How far can human action, circumscribed by divinity, nature and history, be free in order to fashion itself, so that it can choose to make? Freedom, for Stewart is an act of affirmation. Humans are living, willing intelligences, and hence, their freedom to make and act arises out of their interaction with the wider world. For example, Schelling bequeaths us with a notion of a consciousness that emerged in nature; prior to existence proper.And a felt sense of peril is part of a certain kind of freedom. So, Schelling describes the free person as a dizzy man poised on a precipice who has a desire to jump into the abyss. In order to make, one must be “…mortified in all his ownhood, for which reason he must almost necessarily attempt to step out of it and into the periphery, in order to seek rest there for his selfhood.” This relay race between unmaking and making is what makes art a process of continual beginnings.’ Susan Stewart’s works (I am also thinking of The Fate of the Senses and On Longing) are testaments to a powerful definition of the act of poetic making, a definition that she builds up painstakingly in this classic work too. The relay between making and breaking and a gradual building up and reaching to our readers and interlocutors about our apprehension of the world through metaphors are recurring openings for her: “… art as a summons to apprehension—to call, to speak, to hear, to touch—reveal the etymology of aesthetics in sense experiences. Whether we are reflecting on our own artistic practice or the works of others, our freedom in aesthetic activity is exercised as well in the interpretive task of receiving finite forms, imputing intention and purposiveness to them and then our jarred and anxious apprehensions are transferred along the lines of face-to-face encounters with other persons.” Absorption is a release. Only through art therefore are free associations of an open future formed. Thanksgiving/praise is the oldest mode that keeps the relay going. The most fundamental act of artistic making is the act of creating value by praising. Praise is the poet’s obligation of naming, judging, withholding, and giving. Indeed, human praise cannot approach the scale of the gods, but humans can praise with things they have made—things that are an accomplishment of generations who have practiced and refined their mastery over materials. We are thunderstruck by the ancient crafts of the rope-maker and the potter. The devices of yoking, binding, and containing—devices that run through all weaving, printing, painting, molding, and sculpting foremost leave us awed. These objects thereby hold the forces of heart, tongue, hand, and eye that were involved in their own making. Hence praise. And praise is judgment. Praise travels from praising specific objects in their respective milieus to praising creation itself by means of forms and modes of praise that will praise the praiser—the one who has mastered these epideictic forms. A certain relation between making and being follows this reflexive turn from the qualities of objects to the qualities of expression. In praise judgment is not linked to deliberative thought or appetite or other desires to possess and consume. One purely judges the integrity of the form, an appreciation that follows contemplation. Praise is not wrested from the world but drawn from within. Since it is given, it also may be withheld. The oldest public forms of praise are sung. As we know from the Hebrew psalms, what is surrendered in praise is sound—praise is sounded by speech and singing, by the “joyful noises” of lyres, timbals, and drums, and by the human drums of clapping and rhythmic shouting. Such sounding emphasizes all the more that there are no restrictions on praise’s production and no restrictions on its distribution. What is sent out returns not only concretely but also in multiple form: like the psalmist declares in Psalm 34, “Oh taste and see that the Lord is good.”The volitional nature of praise lies in its being freely, liberally, and continually offered and drawn from the energies of the person who praises. Allen Ginsberg in Kaddish writes: “Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing—to praise Thee—But Death.” And Stewart reads these lines by relating it to the freedom of making: “Ginsberg brilliantly weaves the querying, death-obsessed thoughts of the mourner into the dignified unfolding lines of the prayer until the prayer seems to speak as the voiceover that the lyric “I” once was. The incongruity of the mourner’s kaddish, like the punctuation of experience and suffering exemplified in the progress of the Psalms, returns us to the sheer inutility of praise—its freedom from