On Historiography (I)
1.
In 1920, Paul Klee made an ink-transfer monoprint called Angelus Novus or the “the New Angel”. The print is now in the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The image, etched in dark lines on a earth-brown background shows a being with upraised stubby wings, big almond-shaped eyes, a schematic somewhat porcine nose, and pursed lips. The monoprint has been called one of the icons of the Left.
The German Marxist philosopher and historian, Walter Benjamin in his Nine Theses on History described the picture in these terms. (He mistakenly believed the image had been painted.)
“ A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
Benjamin purchased the print in 1921. He wrote his Nine Theses on History just before he committed suicide (while fleeing the Nazis) in September 1940.
2.
19th century historians aspired to develop their craft into a science. They thought that the past was a real object that could be objectively studied. Further, they believed that this real object behaved according to certain laws and that predictions could be made about its movements and surface fluxions. The past to these historians was like Mars or Venus, a planet that is remote from us but that can be studied like any other thing. As our tools for study improve, our knowledge of the planet gets better. Telescopes gives us a better vantage and enhance our understanding. Perhaps, we can develop spectrometers that will penetrate the cloud cover on the planet and let us see details of its surface. With better tools comes better understanding. The goal of this study is two-fold: to render the planet’s surface, geography, geology, and atmosphere as accurately as possible; and to discover the laws that control the planet’s motion and fluctuations in appearance. History, in the famous formulation of the German Leopold von Ranke was the determinations of wie es eigentlich war (“how things actually were”). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are exemplars of this great tradition of 19th century history – they used the tools of economic analysis (akin to a telescope in my analogy) to construct theories about causation in history, theories that they thought had predictive force.
By 1931 (and before), many historians had doubts about this project. Carl Becker in 1931 said that “history is the memory of what was said and done.” By injecting the notion of memory into his definition, Becker implies that memories can be selective, biased, and, even, false. Borrowing from Freud, there can even be “screen memories” – that is, vivid memories of events that never occurred that conceal from us memories that might otherwise be too disturbing or unpleasant to be comfortably assimilated.
3.
The concept of historiography inevitably revolves around the definition of “history” as a craft and study. Jacques Barzun in Clio and the Doctors (1971) defines history in very limited terms. History to Barzun is a narrative, written in clear and jargon-free prose, that applies common sense to the chaos of past events. Barzun, although famously conservative, believes that there is no objective order to the past – it is a confused assembly of miscellaneous things that people have happened to transcribe. (For Barzun, all history is based on archives or writing; there is no history without a written trace of the past.) Barzun denies the status of “history” (under his definition) to economic studies of the past; similarly, studies of the past that invoke specialty disciplines (geography, statistics, anthropology, or scientific technology) are not properly characterized as history. Barzun goes so far as to refuse the status of history to biography. History is casuistic, based on particulars marshaled into a story or narrative, and can not be governed by any sort of preordained method – method, Barzun claims, corrals facts in ways that lead to the writer ignoring salient aspects of the past. Barzun is adamant that history teaches no lessons. For this writer, history is a liberal art, akin in many ways to the profession of the novelist. Barzun argues that a true history has these characteristics: diversity (facts are diverse and unpredictable), variability, uncertainty (outcomes are not preordained) and superficiality – this last criterion means that the historian should not speculate as to the depths underlying actions, but should content herself with presenting the surface of events in a concrete manner.
History, Barzun thinks, must bear the “imprint of a single synthesizing mind.” It can not concern “truth absolute” since such truths are inaccessible to us and, perhaps, don’t even exist. Barzun says that “man has no nature”, that “human behavior is multiform and infinitely variable” and that, therefore, history can not apply any method successfully to its subject matter.
4.
George Santayana famously decreed that “those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it.” Most modern historians regard this dictum as nonsense. In the exact sciences, students discover laws that can replicate results. Heat applied to certain chemical compounds always produces certain reactions that can be predicted and measured. History never repeats itself. History is an experiment that can not be replicated because of the vast number of variables and the unpredictable way in which they interact. This understanding has led to modern historians turning away from the study of historical causation – most historians today no longer think that cause and effect can be established with respect to historical processes. Michel Foucault, a French philosopher whose thought has heavily influenced the practice of history in the last 50 years, derided the “scramble” to discover the causes of historical events. Seeking origins for events, Foucault said “is a harmless enough enthusiasm for historians who refuse to grow up.” Foucault, by contrast, developed a practice of historical analysis that didn’t emphasize causal continuity but, instead, privileged “discontinuity, difference, notions of threshold, rupture, and transformation.”
5.
An example from modern art may be helpful. Let’s consider three examples of white paintings, that is, canvases that to the eye seem to be blank. The Soviet modernist, Kasimir Malevich produced in 1918 a painting called “Suprematist composition: White Square” – this was a penciled square on a white piece of canvas. In the San Francisco Museum of Art, there are several “white on white” paintings made by Robert Ryman around 2003 – these are canvases with white surfaces showing varying degrees of opacity and translucency in the pigment. Robert Rauschenberg made an art work by erasing a drawing by the abstract expressionist Wilhem de Kooning – Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning” was made in 1953; it consists of a gilded frame enclosing a blank piece of scuffed paper. All three of these art works if displayed together would look very similar. In fact, they are functionally identical. But as the art historian Kurt Varnedoe pointed out, the three works are completely different. Malevich’s “White Square” is a development of the artist’s theoretical ideas about abstraction, arising in the context of the Suprematist movement’s attempt to simplify painting to its essence – further, the “White Square” of 1918 correlates with the Russian Revolution, that is, an attempt to begin society from ground zero. Ryman’s painting is a logical evolution from the fields of abstract color made by Abstract Expressionists in the fifties and sixties, heroic “overall” painting such as that pioneered by Jackson Pollock and, then, rarefied into huge abstractions such as those made by Barnett Newman and Clifford Still. Rauschenberg’s “erased de Kooning” is a reaction to the heroic age of Abstract Expressionism, an expression of a quirky Dadaist sensibility and a critique of the commodification of art – in some ways, the Rauschenberg work prefigures Pop Art and Andy Warhol. The point is that, while the three art works that present to the viewer apparently blank canvases that look alike, they are, in fact, the products of entirely distinct historical traditions and arise from completely incommensurate contexts.
So, similarly, one might observe that the French Revolution and the Sandinista uprising in Honduras look similar and have had similar malign outcomes. The Maoist Chinese revolution might seem similar to the Russian Revolution. (In fact, Crane Brinton has written a book about “revolutions” that has this general thesis.) But, in fact, the only thing that these historical developments share in common is that they have been called “revolutions” – this is a defect in our language for such events. Each revolution was the product of unique, non-replicable circumstances, and we can’t really apply the lessons of one set of historical events to another.
6.
Sometimes, history just ends. This idea arises in a “historicist” understanding of history. Hegel thought that history was the evolution of the Weltgeist (“World Spirit”) toward its own self-consciousness. When the Geist had achieved consciousness of itself, evolution ended and history also came to end. There might be events after the End of History but they would not be “historic,” that is, not a part of history conceived as a grand narrative with a telos or objective. Hegel’s theory is the most radical understanding of this concept but not without parallels. For instance, Christians believe the objective of history, it’s end or telos, is universal salvation or the Last Judgement (depending upon the flavor that you prefer). Once everyone is saved or has been judged, the sheep divided from the goats, there is no more history. As it says in the book of revelations: “And the sea is no more.” Marx thought that when history advanced to its telos, the classless society, there would be events and occurrences, people would be born and die and there would betrothals, marriages, and funerals, but no more history. (Needless to say, Marx’s understanding of the end of history is vague and indefinite). From the opposite perspective, the neo-conservative thinker, Francis Fukuyama, also influenced by Hegel, declared that history had ended in 1992 in his book The End of History and the Last Man.
Chief Plenty Coup of the Crow wrote an autobiography in 1928 – he had been born in 1848, fought in innumerable raids and battles, and aligned his people with the American government. For him, the destruction of the buffalo economy on the Great Plains signified the end of history. He wrote: “When the buffalo went away, the hearts of the people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After that nothing happened.”
7.
Marx: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please. They do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves; rather, they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited. Tradition, from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
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