History and Commitment: A Miniature Manifesto

[I went to the International Congress on Medieval studies at the University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo ('The 'Zoo' to its afficionados) last week where I participated in a session entitled  Burn After Reading: Miniature Manifestos for a Post/medieval Studies (A Roundtable).  You can read the full line-up here and another of the Manifestos (the other history one) here.  Here is perhaps the most inspiring of all.  Below is my own effort.  Thanks to Eileen Joy for inviting me to take part in a very interesting and enthusing session.]

                       Item: Rankean History is dead.  

No one will pretend it is possible to tell history as it really was

But no one has seized the implication of that

Its empirical ghost remains, although simple factual accuracy sets the bar pretty low for a historical project

Is the cry ‘Rankean History is dead: long live Rankean history’?

Or is it time to explore again the pre-Rankean idea of history as philosophy teaching by example?

Item: History is not ‘relevant’

History does not tell us ‘how we got here’

History’s value lies in:

                                             i.            not believing what you’re told;

                                           ii.            understanding that the world didn’t – and doesn’t – have to be like this: there are other ways of doing things

                                          iii.            Ethical and political stances are implicit in both; to which we must be committed

History has no monopoly on these; what sets it apart from other arts, humanities and social sciences might uncontroversially be said to be its focus upon concrete situations and completed actions

And yet it is there that lies the aporia we must explore
      Fuck reality; fuck endings

Item: Historical narrative is a series of temporal spaces defined after the event, enfolded, closed up, by the process of narration – of completion – of concretion

These spaces are the un- or pre-symbolised pre-historicised temporal Real

History must open up these spaces, not just to look at the causation of the event that marks its closure

History must open them to a more attentive - yet critical - listening, which is a listening to our writing of the past as well as to the voices of the past 

Such listening avoids subordination to the usual demands of historical narrative

It escapes the inevitability - the contingent necessity in Zizek's words - of history; where every letter really does arrive at its destination

In these spaces everything was still to play for

because people frequently didn’t know what they were playing for – they were usually doing something else
         History is what happens while you're making other plans

These are the spaces of the radically undecided

Here, the aims of the actors do not necessarily decide the outcome,

Here, things no longer possible remain possible

These are zones of pure chance and encounter

Item: Opening up these spaces makes us rethink historical narrative

                              This makes the historical narrative inescapably ironic

                             It is not the ‘what if’ history beloved of the Right, where a different throw of the dice does abolish chance

                              It understands what happened by exploring what didn’t

We furnish a better guide to ethical and politically committed action in the present by restoring to the past its once possible impossibilities