Introduction
Seventeen years ago I published
an article entitled ‘The Merovingian Period in North-East Gaul: Transition or
Change?’ In this piece I principally argued
two things: first, at a general level, the concept of transition is essentially
teleological. The whole concept of
transition depends on one having determined, after the event, the start and end
points of the transition. ‘From X to Y’:
think of how many books and articles have titles of that formula or the related
one: ‘the origins of X’. It relies on
one determining from what, and to what, things are in transition. This tends to remove people from their
history; mostly people don’t experience their lives as transitions, largely
because they don’t know where their lives are going. I borrowed a rather nice quote from
Ferdinand Lot to open the article - ‘…we who, in regard to our ancestors, are
gods because we know their future’ – and, characteristically perversely, the
example of Fountains Abbey. The transept
tower at Fountains was completed in 1526, and is an impressive monument at an
impressive site – but a ruined site.
Within ten years of the tower’s completion Henry VIII had begun the
process of dissolution which in 1539 would see the Fountains monks expelled
from their site. If historians regard
the sixteenth century as a period of transition, it can hardly be thought that
the Cistercians of the Yorkshire Dales saw things the same way. As I wrote in 1995:
The only transition that, in c.1520, the Yorkshire monks and canons
thought they were living through was one to a period of prosperity and better
management, as manifested by their works of restoration and improvement,
certainly not one of ‘reformation’, let alone one from ‘medieval’ to ‘early
modern’; in that respect they had more important things to think about.
The second, more specific, point
developed the first. The article
originated as a contribution to a conference on ancient to medieval
transitions. I argued that to view late
antiquity, or Merovingian Gaul, as a period of, or place in, transition muddied
the waters by obscuring all the dynamic change that took place within the
centuries grouped together under the heading of ‘late antiquity’ or ‘the
Merovingian period’. In all such
approaches we prioritise processes that we
see, from our perspective, as having
led somewhere, at the expense of all those which we know, but crucially people at the time didn’t, weren’t to lead
anywhere. I didn’t make as much of that
last point as I would have done had I written the piece ten years later.
In 1995, I was concerned with the
dynamism of change. Partly this was
political – partly local, academic political, in that I wanted to make clear
that the Middle Ages wasn’t one big millennium-long lump that a single member
of staff could be expected to cover all of; partly political in the wider sense,
in that I wanted to argue for the human scale, the lived experience, of
historical change and thus that all people have a role to play as historical
agents (this, remember, was written in the depressing aftermath of the 1992
general election). High level political
change was intimately related to myriad decisions made at local levels – even
in the fifth-to-eighth centuries. All
this, it won’t be surprising to learn, was born of an encounter, via
post-processual archaeology, with Anthony Giddens’ concept of structuration and
Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘habitus’, both of which in their own ways
concern the recursive relationship between ‘structure’ and agency. The structure within which people act is itself
formed by a sort of memory bank of all previous actions and their acceptance or
otherwise, a memory bank constantly remade or altered (in however infinitesimal
way) by practice, by the innumerable, on-going actions of myriad social agents. This approach has informed almost everything
I have written since then.
That said, the extent to which it
can be harmonised with the approach that I am going to suggest today is a
problem to which I don’t yet have an answer.
What has increasingly interested me over the last decade is the irony of
history. That is to say that what
happens in history may not be the result of one social actor failing or
succeeding, or compromising to some extent, vis-à-vis his or her aims, in his
or her relationships with another, which is the way that I – and I suspect most
historians – have tended to view the issue.
Rather it might be something intended by nobody. This is something I discussed in the central
section of Barbarian Migrations and the
Roman West, where I tried to construct a historical narrative in the ironic
mode, attempting to depict events unfolding without colouring my account or
analysis according to what I know (but my subjects didn’t) was going to happen
next. This was to some degree an
exercise in writing without the usual portentous phraseology of historians:
‘and so it was that, for the last time, the Roman army campaigned north of the
Loire’; ‘this decision was to have fatal consequences’; that sort of
thing. It’s a lot more difficult than
you might think… Going back to the terms
of my 1995 article, what sorts of ‘transitions’ did contemporaries think they
were living through, or trying to bring about, which actually went nowhere, or
went in a completely different direction from the one intended? The usual methods of history have a
tendency to ignore all this by assuming that the path of history is cut by
agents who know where they are going and are capable of bringing about the
changes they want. History is thus
deliberate. While I don’t want to remove
the knowledgeable social actors or the ability to effect change from the
equation, I am increasingly convinced that the course of history is
fundamentally unintended, chaotic and accidental.
Folding the Ribbon of Time
To explore all this further I am
going to talk about historical narrative and to explore it using some concepts
from the two Jacques: Lacan and Derrida, principally the latter. Where these thinkers and their like have been
used in the past, it has generally been in the issue of analysing written (or
other) sources or in the problems of extrapolating from such data to historical
‘reality’, a rather pointless debate in my view. I’m sidestepping that to some extent to look
at history, or rather at narrative, itself.
I’m also going to use Derrida to do something creative rather than in
the way that he has been used by past theorisers of history, where he serves
simply to bolster a posturing, half-thought-through epistemological nihilism –
which does him scant justice. Before I
go any further I should make clear that I am no expert on the philosophy that I
am using as a springboard for these thoughts; I’m not setting myself up as, any
sort of philosopher. I’m an absolute
novice in all this.
I am currently working on a
project provisionally entitled ‘The Transformations of the Year 600’ – an
exploration of the wide-ranging and diverse changes that occurred between c.560
and c.650. As this period has long been
regarded as one that saw the ‘transition to the Middle Ages’, the issues of
change and transition are of some importance, as they have been throughout my
work – perhaps even more so. In tandem
with this, though, I am also interested in the politics and ethics that inhere
within the historical project.
All that having been said, none
of this represents any kind of fully worked out thesis. These are ideas, if you will, in transition
and – like, as I will argue, everyone involved in what might someday be seen as
a transition – I have no idea at all how they’ll turn out, if they turn out as
anything at all. Let me just try out
some ideas with you and see where they go.
Let’s start with some pretty
basic and uncontroversial modelling. Maitland
said “[s]uch is the unity of
all history that anyone who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his
first sentence tears a seamless web”. I think that it is time, as it is lived and experienced,
that is the seamless web (or, for the sake of diagrammatic convenience, we
might see it as an endless undifferentiated line). History,
I will try to demonstrate, is itself the
seams in the web. Let’s envisage past time as an endless
ribbon; a ribbon extending up to the present moment (itself ever moving) (as left). Now, while we might be able to imagine that
past, it is, I contend, impossible to make sense of it without selecting
particular elements from all those events that have already happened and
placing them in a sequence, rightly or wrongly.
Prior to such activity the past is shapeless, amorphous, unsymbolised,
rather than our neat ribbon (right). It can be
imagined but not really made sense of. History
is surely the inescapable and absolutely essential process of making seams in
that web or, in our diagrammatic metaphor, that ribbon. That process inevitably involves a process of
winnowing; you can’t remember everything that has happened (unless you’re Funes
the Memorious in the Borges story), and you can’t record everything in a
history. We’ll return to the
implications of that. 
For now, let us
place our chosen sequence of events along our ‘time-ribbon’ (left). The space between our chosen events is the
amount of time that elapsed between them.
However, when we compose, relate and perhaps write a narrative, those
time-lapses are erased. It is as though
we bring all those events together, bunching up our ‘time-ribbon’ between
them (right). We often talk of a narrative
thread and I would develop that metaphor to mean that thread that we use it to ‘stitch
together’ or sew up the events in our story. 
If we give a more 3-D representation of the effect, it would look like
this (left). All the ‘loops’ in the ribbon
are, as we have seen ‘eradicated’ and thus concealed from the reader, listener
or other consumer of the narrative. Thus
to envisage what our narrative really looks like, concealing the ‘loops’ of
unrepresented time, we have to view the ribbon from this side, [the blue arrow in the diagram) so in fact it
looks like this (above right). Each of these folds
stitched together by our narrative thread is an event, between our start and
end points, and here the only thing that determines the width of the fold from
this perspective is the amount of time we devote to describing the event, and
thus its relative importance, as we see it.
The relative time between each event has no depiction in the account.
If you want an idea of how things
might look otherwise, it might look this two-page spread from Stéphane
Mallarmé’s most famous poem, ‘Un Coup de Dés’ (above).
Mallarmé set out the poem with varying spacing over each two-page spread
and in different fonts, to try to represent the themes he was exploring. Different fonts linked particular ideas which
made sense on their own, even though the poem read left to right (over each
spread) and down the page, as usual.
This, for example, is actually part of the title (Un Coup de Dés n’Abolira le Hasard). I often wonder about writing history like
this, with spaces of different lengths indicating the amount time elapsed
between events, and different fonts and font-sizes representing the different
threads within the story. It'd be a huge
task and a real work of art, and would sell about three copies even if someone
took it on. But it'd be interesting.
To return to our ribbon metaphor,
though, you could break the thread at any point and look at the cloth opened up
– say look at the space or the transition between the second and third ‘events’
in our sequence (left) – but to understand it you would still need to make it into
a sequence of smaller folds (right); open up one of them and look at a smaller piece of
time but have to stitch that into smaller folds still, and so on. Or you can unpick all of the seams and behold
the whole ribbon opened up – and return us to our blurry, undifferentiated ‘ribbon’
but, inevitably, you will only be able to make sense of it by stitching it
together again, even if in a new way, with different bits of cloth (time)
concealed in the folds. You can argue
that the latter is what happened when historians stopped thinking that their
subject was simply the chronicling of high politics, kings and wars, and
started thinking about social history, or women’s history. For today’s purposes, you could say another
example came when historians cut the thread at the great fold that lay at 476
and the End of the Roman Empire and made a new fold, called Late
Antiquity.
Everyone who has ever lectured to
first-year history students about the perils of periodization knows that
historical periods are, fundamentally, simply units of convenience that mask
certain continuities by fastening upon other pre-determined aspects of
change. But the problem reaches down
much further than that into the very way in which we write the narratives (I
like to call this stage ‘chronicling’ rather than ‘history’) that we then
analyse and explain, which, in my view, is ‘history’ properly defined.
Obviously, though, all that
folding or seaming, stitching or threading happens after the event. Deciding what constitutes an event in the
first place, what marks the edges of a fold, how we write about them in purely
descriptive terms, and so on, is all ex
post facto. It’s a truism that very
rarely (outside the obvious limit cases) do people see the events through which
they’re living in the same way as later historians will. Between 1914 and 1918, for example, we could
say that people were experiencing the horrors not of a ‘war to end wars’, as
they (or some of them) thought, but of a curtain raiser for an even more horrible
war. I have written that before about
470 at least, it is very unlikely that anyone alive in the fifth century
thought they were living through ‘the Fall of the Roman Empire’. Now I’d argue that that may even have been
true for people alive for two or three generations after 470, too.
None of my comments thus far is –
I readily admit – startling, new or profound.
At its most basic, essential but initial level, history is the process
of symbolising the past. It’d be
uncontroversial to say that we can’t even imagine the past in any meaningful
way without this sort of process happening first. We can imagine all that protean mass of
‘stuff what happened’ but we can’t access any of it without selecting from it,
placing those selections in sequence, evaluating them and having some idea of
their meaning; in other words without placing it within the symbolic
order. Only then can we really begin to
think about the past. Thus, ironically,
it is true to say that memory – or history – happens before the past.
Historical Narrative is structured like a Language
Here, I hope, things might begin
to get more interesting. I’m going to
steal Lacan’s famous comment that ‘the unconscious is structured like a
language’ and twist it to make a different point: Historical narrative is
structured like a language.
What I mean by that is that events
gain their meaning within sequences from their juxtaposition with other events,
before and after, like words. It is these
juxtapositions that allow us to emplot historical narrative as tragedy or as
heroic epic, or in an ironic mode, or however.
It’s not just that we have to use words to describe events, which make
sense only through signifying chains of difference; events themselves – types
of events or specific events – have different meanings according to the way
they are emplotted within a narrative.
This is old news as anyone who
has read Hayden White knows. But let’s
return to our stitched ribbon of narrative and explore what is implicit in that
potential difference in meaning. Behind
the ribbon, invisible from our perspective, are all those loops of ribbon: time
that has escaped symbolisation (as right).
It’s these loops which I want to
think about. The spaces or gaps in the
narrative that they represent are where history happens. They are the spaces – as I will return to
discuss – where nothing is decided and where time has not yet been symbolised
in any way – where time or the past has not yet become history. In that sense I like to think of them as the
spaces of The Real in a way that is influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis via
Slavoj Žižek. For those who haven’t risked an encounter
with Lacanian theory, The Real is, with The Imaginary and The Symbolic, one of
Lacan’s three orders (right). Essentially the
Real – the trickiest of the three orders to grasp, not least because Lacan
himself changed what he meant by it – is
the stuff that’s out there; it’s not ‘reality’, as such, as distinct from
imagination, so much as what escapes the process of symbolisation. It is fleeting, always shifting around on the
edge of your vision, and yet always in the same place. Any encounter with The Real is
traumatic. We could attempt a preliminary
transposition of Lacan’s three orders, as they relate to history, thus (below, right).
The spaces closed up, represented
metaphorically by the loops in the ribbon represent the temporal Real of lived
experience. This can only be folded and
seamed after the event, thus symbolising and historicising it. This process only (as we’ve seen) creates
further loops (unless, as I said earlier, one were to write in spaces that took
as long – relatively – to navigate as lived time) and so it can never be
grasped. Yet it is always there, always
in the same temporal place. In grasping
it you pass through it; it is like a ghost, a spectre. In my transposition, the Symbolic – the order
of language – is ‘history’, the incorporation of the past into a sort of
semiotic order, and The Imaginary – the sphere of the ideal – is ‘Narrative’ or
emplotment, especially personal narrative.
I’m not investing much in that transposition. It might work or it might not; you can
dismantle it at will.
But let’s shift our ground, our
viewpoint, and move from the après coup historian’s construction of narrative
to look at what happens in these loops. This
historical, ‘temporal’ Real is where things happen without us yet being able to
understand or place them in any sort of symbolic order. Encountering this Real can (as in Lacanian
theory) be a terrible thing. To take the
usual limit case, who can have experienced the Shoah (in whatever role) without
being aware of living through terrible history as it was being made?
These spaces are zones of
infinite possibility. Let’s assume we can somehow open up the tiny temporal
space closed up by the ‘and’ of the sentence ‘Napoleon’s army met Wellington’s
south of Brussels and was decisively defeated in the battle of Waterloo’. (Forgive me for using a non-medieval
example.) This space – the morning of 18
June 1815 – is inhabited by about 150,000 men and women. French and allied armies are deployed but not
engaged. Blue-clad troops swarming over
the horizon to the east are Prussians.
At this point anything is possible.
Napoleon can disengage; he can fight and win (or lose). He (and the other 149,999) can yet survive
the day or be killed. The day can turn
out to be the allied victory of Waterloo, or the French victory of La Belle
Alliance, or an insignificant encounter some days before the great Battle of
Somewhere Else, that no one other than Napoleonic military history buffs have
ever heard of. It could be the day that
Wellington died heroically, trying to stem the rout of his army, or the day of
infamy when Gneisenau inexplicably halted the Prussian army, leaving Wellington
to be defeated. Or the day the Emperor’s
head was knocked clean off by a Prussian canon-ball at the moment of his
greatest triumph. Or whatever.
Now, this does not simply mean
that ‘what happened’ was different; the whole way in which we symbolise and
understand it differs. That
symbolization is ever shifting as the narrative lengthens in time. Thus the symbolization of an historical event
is never fixed.
Our temporal Real – lived time –
is a true zone of Derridean ‘differance’.
That is to say that its meaning derives from difference from other
signifiers and that any ‘true’ meaning is endlessly deferred. For those unfamiliar with it, Derrida’s
concept of differance (with an ‘a’) was – to put it very simply – formulated in
the course of his argument against speech having primacy over writing, having a
prior link to a metaphysical presence of meaning. What Derrida argued was that spoken words
operate in the conveyance of meaning in the same way as written ones. This is why he coined the term ‘differance’ –
pronounced exactly the same (in French) as difference (with an ‘e’) but meaning
something, well, different. That
difference could only be established through a mental process of
differentiating the two words or graphemes.
And you can still get the meaning wrong, or repeat it and convey a
different meaning to someone else. Differance
with an ‘a’ merges the terms ‘differ’ and ‘defer’.
As another modern example, take
the history of Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. If we were writing in 1946, say, we would
doubtless see ourselves in a space of triumph after a terrible ordeal; although
the future would seem very uncertain, there would be grounds for hope that a
new and better world was coming into existence after the horrors of
Nazism. If we were writing in 1982,
though, the picture of these events would look very different, a melancholy
exchange of one tyranny for another with no sign of anything getting any better
any time soon. Even respected professors of modern history could see no
prospect of the Fall of the Wall – a good example of why you should never ask a
historian to predict the future. If we
wrote that history now, the Soviet occupation would look like an interlude. The description and analysis, not just the
narrative, changes. The future looks
different from the way it looked in the ‘80s but it is no less
unpredictable. Donald Rumsfeld (of all
people) once said that the future is no less predictable than the past; the
past wasn’t predictable when it happened.
Moving back to our period, a
history that stops around 500 finishes with the end of the Roman Empire (Good
Thing/Bad Thing/Supreme Irony/whatever) but a cultural history of the period
c.300-c.700 can pass through it as though, in most meaningful terms, the Empire
didn’t end at all (as in some works within the Late Antique paradigm). A political history that continued to 814
would end with the revival of the Western Empire under Charlemagne – so the
Empire hadn’t really ended after all.
And what if, hypothetically, in our unpredictable post-banking-crisis future,
something very odd happens, with the EU becoming a pan-European dictatorship
renamed as a revival of the Roman Empire?
Do the 207 years since Francis I’s deposition as Holy Roman Empire
become an interval or blip, like the 324 years between Romulus Augustulus and
Charlemagne? Even the history of the
Roman Empire hasn’t necessarily ended yet…
What was the significance of 476?
It’s too soon to say.
The Temporal Real is a zone of
pure chance and encounter. As in my
Waterloo scenario, it’s not just the relative skill in generalship of
Wellington and Napoleon (and Blücher/Gneisenau), nor the bravery and skill of
their troops, nor any combination of those that determines the signification of
the event. All sorts of chance events could
intervene. Turned the other way round,
and using a late antique example, no one could have expected, on the morning
that the ambassadors of the Quadi came to visit Emperor Valentinian I on the
Danube, that their statement – that they had a right to attack Roman troops
building a fort in their territory because
they had intruded into their territory – would anger the Emperor so much that
he would drop dead of apoplexy. That was
a ‘response of the [temporal] Real’ if ever there was. As I set out in Barbarian Migrations, at the start of 421 it looked as though the
Roman Empire was going to weather the crisis of 395-413 and re-establish its
borders, having gone from this state in 410 (above left) to this one in 421 (below, right). Who knew that Constantius III was about to
contract pleurisy and die, leaving the Empire to a four-year-old Valentinian
III and his incompetent uncle Honorius?
This is by no means the ‘What
If…’ history beloved of right-wing historians like Niall Ferguson and his
ilk. In this type of history, the
premise is that if one thing happened
differently, the whole of European or world history would unfold in a quite
different way. This is logical
nonsense. In the poem discussed earlier,
Stéphane Mallarmé wrote that ‘a throw of the dice will never abolish
chance’. Quite so, but for Ferguson and
co. a different throw does. What if
Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo?
Well, what if he did? What if he
fell off his horse and broke his neck the next day? Or, alternatively, what might have happened
if Napoleon had lost the Battle of
Waterloo? By 1848 both branches of the
Bourbons had been deposed anyway and by 1851 Napoleon’s nephew was ruling
France. Different outcomes are always
possible – they’re still possible. Vive
l’Empereur! Julius Caesar declared the
die to have been cast when he crossed the Rubicon. He must have thought he’d rolled high, too …
until he got stabbed to death by Brutus and the rest, having ended up in the
wrong place at the wrong time after all.
The throw of the dice did not abolish chance. There are no endings in history.
Quite apart from the competitive
interplay of actors’ intentions (which side ‘wins’) or the intervention of
chance, the outcome of actions can be quite unintended by anyone. I’ve argued – I hope I’ve demonstrated – that
the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century came about in
spite of the fact that in the hundred years prior to 476 we cannot find a
single person who actively tried to bring the Empire down. I described the end of the Western Roman
Empire as an ‘accidental suicide’, the ironic result of actions aimed not at
destroying the Empire at all, but at dominating it in the tradition of more
traditional fourth-century politics.
Every crucial action contributing to the Empire’s political demise was
brought about by people trying to preserve it.
The ‘Fall’ was an outcome that no one intended. The intervention of chance and the fact that
the outcomes of actions are not reducible (usually teleologically) to the
achievement or frustration of particular actors’ aims is a major problem with
many models of social interaction – even phenomenological. My way of seeing might help us avoid the
totalising tendencies of such approaches.
Implications: Deconstructing Historical Narrative; Deconstructing Transition
I would like to suggest that this
way of seeing has some quite important implications for thinking about the
concept of transition, which are somewhat different from the problems with the
idea that I set out in 1995. For one
thing, even the teleology inherent in the definition of transition is further
relativised by the approach to thinking about the symbolisation of time and
narrative that I have set out in this paper.
In 1995 I argued that one had to separate early medieval data out by
time and place. In the neutral sense of
comparing data from the same place and time, this is something that I’d still
stand by. What the approach I have been
trying to set out makes problematic is the idea of ‘context’, that key premise
of historicism. Context is everything,
we are told, and indeed it is – except, that is, when discussing the importance
of context, which is supreme, regardless of context… Obviously context is vitally important, but what exactly is context? We can leave
aside the fact that historians often treat context pretty loosely, so that
putting – say – Gregory of Tours’ writings of the 570s in context means setting
them alongside texts by Gregory the Great written ten or twenty years later, or
those of Isidore of Seville from later still (this chronological woolliness is
born of several different traditional approaches to the period, which we’ll
leave aside for now). A Derridean
deconstructionist approach actually relies on a certain contextualism, not
least to provide the other traces that go to make up the ‘texte’ – the network
of traces – of which our written texts are part. It also relies on a certain stability of text
which is not often available in early medieval studies; these points are often
forgotten.
Nonetheless, these points being
made, it must be said that many of the premises even of so-called New
Historicism are questioned by the approach I’m exploring. How, after all, do we define context? Surely, as often as not, that is done after
the event too, when we select those features which we think define the
thought/society/politics of a particular period – when we do this we select and
obscure just as much as when we select events – joining up features and leaving
others out of the equation. Indeed those
two processes are often interlinked.
Context, in terms of politics, is often related to the selection of the
events used to fold up our ‘ribbon of time’ – we saw already that this
selection can differ from those used for, say, gender history. The whole contextualist historicist approach
is essentially circular: first one creates a context from the available
evidence by selecting key points, features or areas of similarity from it; then
you argue that the evidence is best analysed against the context you just
created from it. These are the people
who like to mock Derrida for saying there was nothing outside text (something
which, incidentally, he never actually did say)…
Leaving the absurd – or some of
it – that to one side for a moment, another problem with the contextualist
approach is the way it artificially closes down the range of
possibilities. Part of that closing down
comes from the approach itself, as I just described. As a historian I find the approach worrying
in that it denies creativity, experimentation, invention, failure – the blind
alleys that I have referred to before.
It denies the possibility of non-orthodox readings, subordinate
readings, mis-readings. It denies
chance. A throw of the dice never will
abolish chance, said Mallarmé, and (in the last line of his poem) every thought
is a throw of the dice. Thinking about
other disciplines than history, I find it bewildering that a source can only be
read and analysed in the terms of its own period. I wonder of historicist readers of literature
think that medieval writers’ readings of the Classics or the Fathers are to be
condemned for not reading them ‘in context’?
The more I think about historicism, the more utterly incoherent it all
seems, heretical and subversive though such thinking is in [Poppleton].
So much for all that. What I want to dwell upon is deconstructing historical
narrative. Deconstruction is a grossly misused (and abused) word. People often
describe simple close reading as deconstruction; alternatively, people who’ve
never actually read Derrida (like, it has to be said, most of Derrida’s
historian and analytic philosopher critics) have alleged that it opens the way
to holocaust deniers, complete relativism and so on. It isn’t; it doesn’t. Deconstruction, said Derrida, is ‘what
happens’ (‘ce qui arrive’”). To be
super-simplistic, when dealing with texts, what deconstruction (as I understand
it at least) tends to involve is the identification of pairs of concepts, one
being haunted (to use a term from later Derrida) by the other but sublimating
it. Then that sublimated term is brought
to the fore.
If we take that as a means of
reading narrative, then what it allows us to do is to look at historical
moments (our loops in the ribbon), what happened and the terms we use to
describe it. All that is haunted by the
spectres of their opposites, the reverse concepts (victory/defeat, for
example), and the things, the outcomes that didn’t
happen, the outcomes that perhaps people (even the people who seem to have
got their way) were trying to bring about.
In a sense that allows us to deconstruct transition itself.
To return to the sorts of
dynamics that I thought in the mid-1990s were implicit in social change – the
interplay of identities – one has to look very closely into the loops in the
‘ribbon of time’, into context if you like.
Identities, by their nature, are about likenesses and a likeness can
only imply looking backwards. Ambitions,
obviously, by contrast, can only imply looking forward. In both cases what one has, in Lacanian
terms, are elements of the imaginary; in later Derridean terms you have
spectres: no one can quite imagine things as they aren’t. Such ideals are like ghosts, spectres. Actions are ‘haunted’ by these spectres. In later writing Derrida coined the term
‘hantologie’ (hauntology), which in French sounds the same as ‘ontologie’
(ontology). We’re back to
differance. Nonetheless, that gives us a
way into the sorts of unintended outcomes that I’ve been interested in.
Lastly, though, this approach
permits, as I see it, a more ethical reading of history. At the heart of the whole historical
enterprise, as I see it, lies an ethical demand to listen attentively to the
voices of the past. Attentive listening
doesn’t imply acceptance of their point of view; it implies engagement. Engagement is consistent with
deconstruction. Deconstruction was
always concerned with politics and ethics, as Simon Critchley has argued and
indeed as Derrida himself was at pains to make clear in the last decade of his
life – it was just that the political element in his thought became more
visible later on. Deconstructing
narrative (or transition) means listening for the ideas that didn’t come to
fruition, for the ambitions that failed, for the outcomes that didn’t come out. As I see it there’s nothing more ethical than
that.
Ultimately, what an ethical,
politically-committed approach to history is about is telling us that things don’t have to be this way. It is about (to use a phrase of Frederic
Jameson) keeping faith with the impossible, with the once possible
impossibilities of history. A throw of
the dice, after all, will never abolish chance.
And each thought is a throw of the dice.