Getting the point of pointlessness (Or, Back on the piste again. ... In which I dabble in philosophy)

[This is the paper which I gave at the 49th International Congress of Medieval Studies, in Kalamazoo MI last Saturday.  It went through at least three versions up to this point, in what might be seen as a miniature example of the general point being made.
My thanks to Patty Ingham and the Exemplaria editorial team for allowing me to speak at the session, which, my piece notwithstanding, was a very good one.  Thanks also to patty for her opening question, which opened up a great discussion, to Elizabeth Scala for chairing, and to Peggy McCracken for rigorous questioning on the humanist point.]

In this paper I am doubtless going to discuss issues and problems that long ago ceased to be critically imperative elsewhere in ‘medieval studies’, and responses to them that I am nervously – painfully – aware will sound naïve, glaringly obvious, or probably both, to the philosophically-aware from those other subject-areas.  Please bear with me; in history the problem I will discuss does seem to me to be an issue.  Perhaps, on the way, I will raise points that resonate with other disciplines’ critical imperatives but I am principally here to hear your thoughts.  As will be clear, this is very much new territory for me.

***

Of all the humanities, with the possible exception of philosophy, History has perhaps the longest and most grandiose tradition of a sense of its own point, purpose, or transcendent worth, or at least of worrying about it.  From Thucydides onwards, the point of history has exercised its practitioners and produced a galaxy of grandiloquent statements of History’s enormous value to society.  ‘A society with no history is like a man with no memory’; ‘those who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it’; that sort of thing.  Whether this obsession is to be understood as revealing a subliminal recognition of History’s absolute lack of utility or value is a question I will to some extent sidestep…. Nonetheless, against this background it is not surprising that the so-called linguistic turn should have had such an unsettling effect.  After all, the arch-empiricist nineteenth-century idea expressed by Leopold von Ranke, that history should be about ‘telling it just as it was’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen) held sway over the discipline ever since, as a foundation for judging the quality of history, in particular as the touchstone of professional historical writing.  The theory wars in literature surely produced their fair share of invective, but perhaps not the panic that they engendered in history.  After all, with so much at stake, over centuries of reflection on the issue, what would be the point of history if the straightforward re-description of the past were no longer possible? What if all history really was fiction?  What if there really were no difference between historians and … … literary scholars?! 

Nonetheless, the historical front of the so-called ‘Truth Wars’ of the 1990s was a fairly unedifying and intellectually low-level skirmish, a veritable festival of point-missing.  (Or, put another way, if you think this paper is bad, you should read what it's kicking against.) On the one side, the more traditional wing maintained a ‘common-sensical’ defence of History as, to some extent, the factual recreation of the past.  Implicitly, on the other side it was too, among the the self-styled 'post-modernists' [no, really]; if the factual recreation of the past wasn’t possible, history itself wasn’t possible. The latter apparently thought and think the writings of Derrida et al authorise the relativist claim that there is no truth even at the lowest empirical level of historical fact; their opponents accepted this claim and then accused them of legitimising holocaust-denial – the continental philosophers upon whose work the ‘post-modernists’  based their argument were caught in the crossfire (egregiously misread or, ironically, unread).  And there the debate – insofar as it ever really was a debate – seems to have stuck, with both sides continuing to talk past each other or, more commonly, not talking to each other at all. Most of the discipline, though, has continued in what Žižek would call an ideological fantasy, the ‘je sais bien mais quand-même’.  Although accepting that writing history ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ isn’t possible, they go on writing as if it were.  Historical method and the standards by which history is judged remain ultimately predicated on the possibility of retelling history ‘as it was’.  Now, modern theory is much used in history – let’s be clear – and well-used, especially in late antique history.  Good medieval historians don’t simply quarry their texts for facts any more.  But this awareness has, it seems to me, tended to operate at the more local, methodological level, deployed to make reconstructions of the past more sophisticated but not transferred to the level of what history can or might be.

***

My question, providing an answer to which is, for me, a critical imperative, is whether history can play a bigger role than simply describing historical facts (something that most historians at least appear to consider the sine qua non of proper history and which is especially important to me, as someone not from an academic background), without falling into the old trap of believing there is a ‘truth’ or even a true account to be reached about history.  Simultaneously it is whether one can continue to recognise that there is no object history, against which the important levels of historical endeavour can be judged, without lapsing into epistemological nihilism.  This matters in historical dialogue.  As throughout academic discourse, the concern can be to convince everyone else that you are right (and they are wrong), to change the paradigm, and so on.  This does not necessarily take a macho, open, confrontational form; it can be masked by overt statements about consensus, covering operations of power every bit as insidious and frequently working to rule out discussion.  Obviously, though, discussions that hinge on consensus, paradigmatic dominance and so forth are ultimately founded upon a Rankean notion that one explanation can be ‘truer’ than another.

Where do ethically- or politically-committed historians go from here?  It is rather pointless to restrict history to the level of establishing and cataloguing things that did or didn’t happen, and in my view equally pointless to tell stories about the past which offer no basis for action in the present and/or which don’t differentiate historical endeavour from other forms of study.  To anticipate the broad outline of my argument, what I want to explore is the possibility, not of going forward into some kind of post-history, so much as a return to something like the pre-Rankean idea of history as ‘philosophy teaching by example’.  The other key element of these necessarily inchoate thoughts is that Derridian occupation or the Nancéen hesitation on the edge, of, a resistance to, a refusal of, the space/moment of Hegelian Aufhebung.

In suggesting some responses, I am making use of a fairly closely interconnected cluster of philosophers, but principally drawing upon the works of two: Simon Critchley, above all in Very Little … Almost Nothing, but touching upon his other writings; and Jean-Luc Nancy, mainly in La Communauté Désoeuvrée. Critchley and Nancy both draw on Maurice Blanchot as something of a touchstone, and there is not coincidentally a constant circling around the works of Derrida and Levinas.  I confess to not finding these works – especially Blanchot’s – easy, and I am very conscious that I may be mangling them, so you are welcome to call me out on that.  I must also confess that I am not claiming to offer a detailed exegesis or application; I have tended to use these texts in a slightly freewheeling way, as a springboard to my own thoughts, which I hope are at least moderately consistent, between themselves and with the general thrust at least of the ideas that inspired them.

My own confrontation with this problem starts from two unfashionable points: a modified empiricism and a modified humanism.  I adopt the first not out of pragmatism but because all critiques of empirical history that I have read seem ultimately founded upon an ability to make choices to some extent based upon an acceptance of some kind of empirical status for the bases of those choices.  It is impossible to stand outside at least some sort of empiricism.  I espouse a modified humanism because of what I see as the political-ethical demand at the heart of the historical project, to which I will return, and also because of my own political reservations about at least some aspects of post-humanist writing.  No hierarchical distinctions or impermeable boundaries, just the insistence on the importance of recognising a common human experience, in all its suffering and finitude.  That seems to me essential to a committed history.  Does that let a different transcendence in by the back door?  Perhaps.  But to steal Critchley’s formulation, a very little one … almost nothing.

To begin at the beginning, what brings us to the study of history?  What lies in that moment of fascination, when we first think of finding out more about history?  What lies within the moment when we first decide we want to write about the past?  Is it an aesthetic moment?  One of attraction? One of desire?  Or is it rather something more akin to dread?  I think that there is something of all of this in different ratios, but, whatever one may decide to do after that initial moment, it is crucially pre-rational.  It is the moment when, as I was reminded on Thursday, Benjamin says that the past flashes across the centuries – I don’t remember the term Benjamin used but suspect it may have been Schein, with all its Hegelian undertones.  On the whole it may be best to think it through Barthes’ notion of the punctum, which I think it is useful to remember, contains an connection, linguistically at least, with trauma.

What seems to me to be common to any of these options is the sense of a thing which is there and yet not there.  We might want to think this element to some extent in line with the il y a, which Blanchot adapted from Levinas.  Obviously in this context, it is not entirely flippant to see this simultaneously as the il y avait, the ‘there was’, and is not.  There lies one of the many points which so-called post-modern history has missed, in its obsession with endlessly repeating the glaringly obvious point that history is not the past itself, as though this were somehow an epistemological issue limited to history.  The idea that there we feel something out there that talks to us (and of which the material traces, actually are out there and do speak to us) and in the gaze of which we imagine ourselves, seems strangely not to figure.  This does seem to me to be assimilable, in concept or in function, with a number of other concepts, such as, perhaps, the Lacanian Real in at least some of its manifestations, especially if, with Critchley, one wants to insist upon the traumatic nature of the Levinasian il y a.  An exploration of this space of engagement obviously entangles us, or conjures, Derrida’s hauntologie in Spectres de Marx, itself in a way a kind of structuring trace, a différance.

How to respond?

There may be much in Blanchot’s L’Espace Littéraire (however hard…) that can be thought with by historians thinking about the process of writing history.  The issue of fascination – a potentially destructive fascination – is one; the idea of a summons to write a sense of pure exteriority might be another – the past seems to me to be as pure a form of exteriority as there can be.  Then there are, and here I am drawing more heavily on Critchley’s Blanchot, the two pistes or slopes of literature (or history-writing).  One, would be that which seeks to dominate, by reducing to or ordering, classification within language, by shaping into a narrative, to insist upon the rightness of a singular explanation: the similarities with the stage within the Phänomenologie (ch.3?), where the self-consciousness understands itself through its ability to consume is fairly clear.  Ironically, to my mind, it seems to me that both traditional and soi-disant post-modernist approaches can equally – if in different ways – be seen as on this slope.

The other piste is the attempt, so to speak, to see through language to what lay before, to get back to the original.  Clearly, this is very frequently what traditionalists think they are doing.  Rather than the triumphal domination of the other slope, this is an attempt to erase writing, to merge the description with its object.  But crucially these aren’t really choices.  The point of Blanchot’s two pistes, in Critchley’s reading, is that one never knows which one is on, without thereby switching to the other.  Here, for my purposes, lies important ambiguity and potential irony.

In particular, the imagery of the slope is useful to me because it will bring me to a vision of worklessness, of a commitment to the work – one that is never finished, however one is misled by the production of the finite piece – the book is a ruse – says Blanchot.  [Or, the unit of assessment is a ruse. At this point I riffed ironically on the idea that we might rather embrace the REF as an ethical space of Blanchotien désoeuvrement.]  Blanchot’s statement resonated with me.  I am surely not the only one here who towards the end of a project – and maybe it is just the seemingly interminable tedium of those last stages of checking and footnoting – really feels that when this is done one will have said one’s last word – never again – that’s it from me - and yet, as soon as the manuscript is sent off, somehow races to the idea for the next thing. Therein, it seems to me, lies one means of hesitating between the options of transcendence and nihilism.

This hesitation, as I said, opens up spaces of irony or undecidability.  One of the issues especially discussed in Critchley’s account, and crucially important to me, is finitude – as someone who made his name studying cemeteries, I guess it would be.  Critchley’s reading of Blanchot finishes with a vertiginous experience of finitude opening onto ‘compassion for suffering humanity’.  This is my modified humanism.

The moment of punctum, I would like to suggest, draws its force from its revelation of some other human experience.  Here lies my empiricism, in that one assumes that some experience of the world was acting sufficiently upon – had sufficient ‘reality’ for – past people to cause them to react in ways that leave a historical trace.  I propose, at the heart of this ‘moment’ lies an ethical demand, to listen to the other person (perhaps broadly assimilable with Levinas’ autrui).  This is, to be honest, only a restatement in different language of a standard historical methodological injunction.  It is, of course, a doubly – triply – multiply – impossible demand.  It is impossible really to listen to that voice (at all sorts of levels); it is impossible to recreate the reality that called it forth; and, with Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding, all ethical demands are impossible.

So how do we respond to the pointlessness to which that multiply-layered impossibility might seem to condemn historical endeavour.  Here, I draw yet again on Critchley’s oeuvre but this time his insights in On Humour.  Can we suggest a way in which laughing with (again) a shared human futility might be a more productive means of bearing the unbearable ethical weight of being a historian?   The value of being able to laugh at the endless futility of rolling Sisyphus’ rock up the hill is that it reminds us that, like Sisyphus’, the task of history is and never will be finished.

Again not coincidentally, there are affinities with the notion of the horizon in Derrida’s work, perhaps especially the open, Messianic horizon in Spectres de Marx.  This might be seen as operating in different dimensions.  It seems to me that the encounter with the past, in its singularity, should open up ethical reflection on justice, in its universal dimension, just as Derrida discusses in Spectres... But to paraphrase Derrida on Hegel, we will never be finished with reading and re-reading our historical sources.  The reflection on justice, though, surely comes via empathy and a notion of iterability, my modified humanism, which in turn enables some sort of political action in the present.  That, in turn, provides, for me, a different and more sophisticated ethico-political means of choosing between histories.

[There were two elements of the argument, of which space precluded discussion.  One was the extension of this point through writing history, in the ironic mode, see Barbarian Migrations, and also the Gaps Ghosts and Dice musings on this blog.  The other was the sense I have that in some ways Gregory of Tours'sense of history is not entirely dissimilar from certain aspects of this argument.]

I would like to propose that this might lead to a somewhat different form of historical discussion, which might move away from the obsession with paradigmatic, explanatory dominance and consensus.  Implicit I hope in all the above is an openness of dialogue.  With a move away from a striving for consensus comes a purer form of community, such as Jean-Luc Nancy has discussed in numerous writings.  What I am arguing for, alongside this sense of history as constant movement in the space of the present, is, in Nancy’s term, an unworked community (communauté désoeuvrée) – une histoire désoeuvrée, if you like – one which recognises and values disagreement (such as, ironically, current post-modern history gurus seem not to) while preserving grounds for critical engagement and response.

The last line of Sellar and Yeatman’s classic 1066 and All That is that, when America became Top Nation, “history came to a .”  The irony is that, although to a British reader that said “History came to a [full stop]”, to an American it said “History came to a [period]”.  We might also read it, with the French, as “History came to a [point].” But the only way that history can have any point, at any point, is to realise that there is no point to which history can ever come.

Meandering from the Individual to the Human

[In a particularly inchoate and convoluted stream of thoughts that I have found hugely difficult to write, I am going to try and critique the idea of the individual, on the basis of various bits and pieces of philosophy that I've been reading.  This will involve me unpicking some of my own work to address and maybe resolve something of an aporia within it - that is to say between wanting to write a history that enables in a radical, left-wing political sense and my insufficiently theorised use of the term 'individual' which could be read to (and perhaps does) imply an adherence to key concepts of bourgeois, liberal capitalism.  It also exposes the fact that my own discussion of 'the individual' in fact saw it as anything but individual.  Thinking on the basis of what my earlier writing implied (in the light of what I've read and written since) suggests that the social actor is overdetermined by identities.  Those identities, furthermore, involve (obviously enough) identification with others, so that the social/historical actor overflows the boundaries that might be seen to be imposed by the body or the notion of the individual.  Going further, exploration of how identities function in action shows that psychoanalytically the actor is not individual; s/he is a 'dividual' in Simon Critchley's terms.  As an umbrella term I want to use the word 'human' to encompass all possible acts of identification with other actors.  Multiple identities and the lack of an absolute, totalising individual 'core' permit an ethical engagement with the past which moves us past 'identity politics' history.  It also permits a more diverse ethical political action in the present, not prescribed by dominant or hegemonic identities (as, in turn, defined by party political dogma.  Well ... see what you think ...  As always when I write about this sort of thing, any reference to a theorist or philosopher's works should be prefaced by 'if I understand it correctly'.  ]

As you know, I’m not a philosopher.  I always feel the need to say this for several reasons.  One is that I get very annoyed by people who set themselves up as historians, who aren’t, and I’m sure (indeed I know) that philosophers get annoyed by people who set themselves up as philosophers, who aren’t (some indeed deny the title of philosopher to extremely important philosophers by holding a prescriptive definition of what philosophy is, but that’s another issue).  Another is that a small group of ‘post-modernist’ philosophers of history has had an influence out of all proportion to its value; the problem is not that these people aren’t historians so much as that they aren’t really philosophers either.  The position they have adopted is that (discussed in my piece on so-called interdisciplinarity) of the interlocutor: the person who stands at the edge of the ‘set’ of one academic discipline and reports on or critiques it through appropriating the perceived stance of another, without actually being situated within that discipline. 

I am a historian but, as you also know, I am interested in exploring a theory of how the study of history has ethical and political value in the present.  This, as yet again you will know, stems from a view that assigns a value to historical study not on the basis of the knowledge of ‘what happened in the past’ but on the basis of the ways in which one studies ‘what happened in the past’.  This project has led me to an ever-greater interest in ‘continental philosophy’, which seems to me to be far more meaningfully politically-engaged than its ‘Anglo-American’ ‘analytical’ counterpart.  My approach is (ideally) not just to see how I can employ this philosophy in thinking about history (the classic ‘interlocutory’ move), but also to see how my understanding of history allows me to engage critically with the philosophy.  As yet, though, my reading has been more of an exploration of different strands of philosophy, getting myself oriented within a large and complex body of traditions and ideas, and with less (thus far) of the critical engagement from a historical perspective.  What this series of meandering and largely inchoate thoughts will be about is how I might get from the problematic notion of ‘the individual’ to a more helpful (if in some areas unfashionable) concept of ‘the human’ and, simultaneously, about how I might get from the analysis of social action in the past (in other words from historical explanation) to an understanding of and guide to action in the present. 

I have to make it clear that I am a very long way from being an expert in or authority on any of what follows.  I’m using this as a means of putting my thoughts into some sort of order, to attract comments and criticism and in the hope that it might be of some use to someone out there as well.  I have recently (Early Medieval Europe 19.4 (2011), p.461) been described as ‘only a theorist en passant’, using theory ‘pragmatically’.  This is just, and indeed possibly even more so than intended.  I’m not a pragmatist in the Rorty sense but my readings of philosophy are themselves pretty pragmatic rather than truly, rigorously systematic let alone dogmatic.  This (especially the lack of rigour) will doubtless be underlined in what follows.

So, preliminaries aside…

The individual is a subject I have been mulling over of late.  It has a particular historical weight.  In the British (and especially English) context it has an especial resonance.  What is held to be specific and different about the trajectory of British/English history (its Sonderweg – special path – to borrow the German term) is very often couched in terms of individualism.  Alan Macfarlane classically considered the origins of English capitalism and thus individualism to be sought in the end of a true peasant class in England at a point at the end of the Middle Ages, much earlier than in other European nations.  Richard Hodges later tried to move the origins of English individualism even further back, into a putative tenth-century Anglo-Saxon ‘industrial revolution’.  The links between this form of analysis and a nationally-centred, economically- (and perhaps politically-) conservative form of history is clear.  Indeed, the concept of the individual is something of a corner-stone of modern capitalist politics and economics, of all shades, not just the conservative.  Individualism is connected with the (competitive) pursuit of personal interests and the ability to pursue personal interests, vis-à-vis other people’s interests is widely held as a mark of liberty and even (even more problematically) of ‘human rights’.

Another famous historical aspect of the problem is the ‘twelfth-century discovery of the individual’, presented in a classic article by Caroline Walker Bynum.  I have never found Walker Bynum’s argument especially convincing but it raises the question of the reality of the individual as an analytical unit.  The approach, perhaps, is mistaken on two counts.  First, it might teleologically be looking for a ‘point at which’ where the conception of what we regard (now) in liberal capitalist western democracy to be a fundamental unit or building block of society emerged from an earlier concept of society.  Again, the idea might have been to push Macfarlane’s ‘point at which’ back earlier into the Middle Ages.  But to do this it needs to assume something ‘natural’ – even essential – about the notion of the individual, as we understand it.  Maybe it is not so natural.  So maybe past understandings of (let’s call it) personhood cannot be so easily assimilated with modern ideas.  Second, more fundamentally, what if our concept of the individual is itself just a misleading, politically-contingent construct?  If that were the case, then it would be no more meaningful to talk of the twelfth-century discovery of the individual than it would be to talk about the fifth-century (BC) discovery of Atlantis, or the fourth-century (AD) discovery of the hippocamp, or of Pliny’s discovery of the African Blemmyes (with faces in their chests), or Aethicus Ister’s discovery of the cynocephalus (the dog-headed man).  Discovery would be the wrong word.  Did twelfth-century people develop a concept of the individual that is like that of the modern world?  That would be the less politically-loaded formulation of the question (the answer in my view would still be ‘no’ but that’s a separate issue).

To indulge in a little autobiography, my work has very often been concerned with the individual.  Ever since Settlement and Social Organisation (1995) I have tried to open up the possibility that every individual social actor has a role to play in history.  The course of history, in other words, is not just determined by the actions of a few ‘great men’ and nor is it determined by economic, technological, climatic or ecological considerations beyond ordinary human intervention.  I also wanted to avoid seeing history governed by faceless ‘class analyses’ of classic Marxist formulations and similarly I wanted to argue against the idea that past people acted in equally predictable ways according to other ways of dividing up society (gender, kindred or ethnicity).  Now, some people expressed the thought (in conversation) that this meant that I was, by stressing the individual, advocating a fairly conservative approach to history.  What I was trying to do (in a work written during what seemed at the time to be an interminably disastrous period of Conservative government) was to argue, from a historical analysis, that claims that there was nothing that we, individuals, could do, or that certain things represented the ‘natural’ and thus unchanging/unchangeable ‘common-sense’ or ‘human-nature’ way of things could and should be countered.  Or, you might say, ‘Change?  Yes We Can!’

My analysis of Merovingian social interaction saw social change as happening as the result of myriad infinitesimal modifications to the social structure (formed not as a body of laws and modes extrinsic to social action but as continually constituted by action, by a society’s accumulated knowledge of all previous interactions, those deemed correct and those considered wrong).  Interactions were based on the interplay of identities chosen situationally by social actors in order to pursue their own aims (achieve power/wealth/general satisfaction in life).  This could be fundamentally be based around a struggle for finite material resources between particular types of élite group and their competitors (as I saw it in Warfare and Society [2003]) or less uniquely concerned with material gain (Barbarian Migrations [2007] made some important changes by acknowledging the existence of affective bonds that might transcend material advantage).  Nonetheless the image was, one might say, agonal if not agonistic.  This was in opposition to what I saw (and see) as a historically and politically deeply problematic conception of ‘consensus’. [Again, that’s for another time; for now let me just say that the idea of ‘consensus’ and the repressive political work that the term does has not been sufficiently rigorously theorised.] 

So: agonal, based around competition for resources or the achievement of other ‘satisfactions or aims in life’: there are points of contact here between my conception and that of the liberal, bourgeois notion of the individual.  That must be acknowledged. 

Digression: Words and Why they Matter: There is an interesting point here about how one’s political intentions for a piece and how it can be read might not match up.  As some of you will remember I have made the point forcefully (indeed deliberately shockingly), and I will make it again at some point (just how is the issue that concerns me), that it is simply not good enough to disclaim any responsibility for the use made of one’s words, as an excuse for lazy thinking and lazier writing in the discussion of politically sensitive, current issues like, oh, ... say (for the sake of argument), immigration.  One hard-of-thinking possessor of a D.Phil accused me (in an offensive message) of having a ‘shallow’ understanding of history because I didn’t appreciate (or accept) that how someone uses your words is independent of what you write.  One might call this the philosophically-uneducated man’s post-modernism because it shows absolutely no understanding of the issue at all.  This kind of lazy get-out-of-jail-free card – or, as I would rather call it, this kind of complacent, elitist, sophist fuck-wittery – just won’t wash.  All readings are not equal (and, as far as I am aware, neither the terribly-maligned Derrida nor any of the other continental philosophers regularly blamed for the idea ever said they were).  At one extreme, no guilt can be laid on an author for a clearly forced reading with little or no regard to the text itself; but when, at the other extreme, one can interpret one’s words (whether or not the author agrees) via a more or less straightforward retelling, then – whatever you believe – you have responsibility for not being able or willing to think more carefully and responsibly about the composition of your text.  Taking (ironically given the usually avowed contempt for what they call ‘post-modernism’) the relativist line that anyone can read your text any way they like might enable you to quaff your free port at Saint Frithfroth’s high table with a clear conscience the next time someone, drawing their motivation from a matrix of ideas and attitudes to which you have - however unwittingly and in however small a way - contributed, fire-bombs an immigrant hostel or guns down an island-full of Norwegian children in the name of the defence of Europe, but it cuts no ice around here.

So, as you can imagine, whether or not my earlier writings can be taken as a straight endorsement of capitalist individualism is an issue that troubles me more than somewhat.  Indeed, with the current neo-liberal UK government and its policies, it troubles me deeply.  Going back over the texts I’m not sure it could be done very easily, given the stress I laid on everyone having a role to play and everyone being able to change the system, to it being a way of moving away from ‘safe’ history (Settlement and Social Organisation, p.281), and to putting people back into their history (Barbarian Migrations, p.518).  At no point do I say anything like ‘anyone can do what they like and stuff society; and that’s how progress comes about.’  Nonetheless if someone presented a deconstruction that showed how what I said was actually supportive of an opposing political stance, then I would have to put my hands up and admit that I hadn’t thought it through hard enough.  A fortiori if someone were able simply to juxtapose verbatim quotes to make the point via an entirely unforced reading.  Well, to suggest that I was either right-wing, careless or stupid would be fair enough.  [And yes, that is a challenge, by the way…]

Similarly, I think that the consensus theory of medieval politics and the ways it envisages social/political power are, if you scrutinise the concepts closely, pretty reactionary and thus quite the opposite of the political beliefs that I know are held by some of its proponents.  I could not, however, (I think) make that reading and interpretation emerge simply from a series of quotes from, say, Dame Professor Janet L. Nelson’s writings.  It would have to be a close, deconstructive reading.  And because of that it would have no adverse critical bearing on the quality or intentions of the original work itself except (if it could be done) to say, ‘I think one needs to probe these concepts more carefully’.  I admit I need to probe my own concepts more closely - see below.

Satis.

As a (however gloomy) analysis of how things happen in social change, I still think that this is broadly on the right lines, though always susceptible to greater refinement and subtlety, but with one key drawback to which I will return at the end.  That does not imply that that is the way I think things ought to be or of how I think one ought to behave.  However, the fault-line that I can now identify within my argument – its aporia if you like – is that my concept of the historical actor was in fact anything but individual.  It could be divided along any number of lines.  The actor (let’s call him/her that) is a unique node where different identities meet.  But this node is not static and never just identified with a single identity (it is this that makes me opposed to identity politics and – more so – to the writing of history for the purposes of identity politics).  This is not simply because there is nothing immanent about an identity and not simply because an actor often can choose which identity to play in a particular situation.  It is also because the nature and range of identities changes through time (gender modified by age or the life-cycle for example; the precise value of an age-based identity changing through life; etc.).  And it is because the nature of an identity deployed in a given social situation is governed by the broader historical setting.

The situation:setting opposition was something I adopted and adapted in Barbarian Migrations from an article on ethnicity by J.Y Okamura ( ‘Situational ethnicity.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 4.4 (1981), 452-65).  The situation is the specific encounter between human beings during which identities are deployed, and the setting is the broader social background against which it is set, and which defines the precise ways in which identities are seen.  What I did was to assimilate this with the reflexive relationship between social structure and social interaction that I had already long used, inspired by Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice and the ‘habitus’ and Giddens’ theory of structuration.  Thus the ‘setting’ determines the weight and nature of particular identities and how they can be used in particular ‘situations’ but is itself constituted by the results of all previous ‘situations’.  Although I used this to discuss ethnicities, the idea could be applied to any sort of social identity.

This, in turn brings up the question of what an identity is.  The key point about identity – and it is one I haven’t really made enough of in the past (though there is a nod towards this on Barbarian Migrations, pp.168-9) – is that it is fundamentally an identification, an association, a sameness with an other.  In this perspective, then, what might be called the ‘individual’ is only created through an identification with the other.  At this point one can employ Žižek’s use of Lacan’s ‘graph of desire’ to explore subjectivity in The Sublime Object of Ideology, focussing as it does on the inter-relationship between identities and the way that behaviour is defined as much by what someone thinks other people expect (“Che vuoi?”) if someone playing a particular role as by ‘free will’ and intention.  Žižek more than once quotes Lacan to the effect that ‘a fool who thinks he’s a king is no crazier than a king who thinks he’s a king’: in other words identities and roles are not immanent but constructed from people’s expectations about how they behave and how to behave towards them (which in its own way brings us back to Bourdieu and Giddens).

The ‘individual’ can, as I see it, never be all the things that it is at any given time.  It is never a totalised/totalising whole.  It is an overdetermination.  Perhaps, too, it only has something like unity bestowed upon it and its actions in retrospect.  In any given situation, which is always a situation of becoming, after all, an actor could try to deploy/could be allowed to deploy different identities, to greater or lesser effect.  Only afterwards, in retrospect, once their results are perceived, might his/her actions be understood as those of a male/female, young/old person, person of a particular ethnicity, family, religion or social rank, etc.  I wonder whether, when we confer meaning upon interactions, there is a point of contact here with the Derridian notion of différance.  This may or may not work.  I also need at some point to sit down and read Badiou’s Being and Event and The Logic of Worlds and his application of set theory to social action, to see whether it can be harmonised with some of the other ideas I have been playing with.

So, thus far we can see that an ‘individual’ is not really individual at all.  S/he is not singular, sui generis – far from it – even if s/he occupies a particular, unique place on what I once called the social map.  This is true even in terms of self-identification.  Therefore the individual is in psychoanalytic terms not individual either, as a subject.  One is measuring one’s own actions against the sorts of images and backgrounds I have already discussed: this is the realm of the super-ego.  In these terms, Simon Critchley therefore calls the subject a ‘dividual’.  No matter how one looks at it, then, the individual is a myth.  The twelfth century can thus no more have discovered the individual than it can have discovered the unicorn.

One must then be very wary of the ideology of the individual, where the latter is a figure for liberty.  We must look behind the figure to the ideology that it obscures.  I wonder if you could unpick the figure of the individual how much of the rest of capitalist ideology would come adrift.  I wonder whether the figure of the individual is the ‘point de capiton’ of the whole signifying system (as I argued the figure of the civilised Roman male was in the Roman Empire).  Now, unpicking the individual is not necessarily a move back to simple ‘class analyses’ or a move toward dismissing human life in the interests of a greater good (I think Alain Badiou comes close to both of these things in some of his writings, like The Century).  Quite the opposite.  This is where I want to start thinking in terms of the human instead.  Now, I know that the concept of the human is historically localisable and was in many ways bound up with enlightenment ideas that were Eurocentric, sexist, racist even but I think that it is salvageable as an important concept, for reasons to which I will return.  After all, I have spoken before about putting the humanity back into the humanities. 

I think this means that I am critiquing the ‘individual’ in a similar way to that in which Jeffrey Jerome Cohen critiques the ‘human’ in Medieval Identity Machines (though I’m as yet not too far into that very interesting volume).  However, while I am irresistibly attracted to the idea (if I correctly detect the way Cohen’s argument is going) that Europe was post-human before it was human, there are ideological reasons why I want to stick to the individual, rather than the human, as the term for the notion I am critiquing, and for why I want to preserve the human as something to strive for.

I recently read Le Mythe de L’Individu by the argentine philosopher and ex-guerrillero Miguel Benasayag.  This – funnily enough – was one of the prompts to write this piece.  Dating to 1998, it’s a remarkable book, weaving philosophies together from Plotinus through Spinoza to the present.  [You will understand that I don’t buy his critique of Camus’ Le Mythe de Sisyphe as entirely fair, but there you go.]  One of the things I like is Benasayag’s way of thinking of the human being as not individual and not bound by the body (coming close to Cohen’s critique of the human) but as a sort of shapeless, amoeba-like thing that extends arms (or pseudo-pods, as he says) in all sorts of directions, binding with particular other people in particular times and places: family, friends, colleagues, fellow travellers.  In all these cases the human sees him/herself as part of other people and (I suppose) vice versa.  This I think is implicit in what I said earlier about identification.  Going back to the ways I thought about things sixteen years ago, in Settlement and Social Organisation, what I said about links and barriers could be transposed into a situational willingness or otherwise to ‘extend’ oneself towards identification with someone else or to accept or refuse someone else’s ‘pseudopodal’ extension towards oneself.  Benasayag’s philosophy is phenomenological, focussing on ‘the situation’ and stresses trying to see the universal in the particular, the eternal in the fleeting.  He postulates that one can free oneself from the condition of lack, of ever-waiting, of desire for mastery that never – can never – come that the concept of the individual brings with it, by living in and for the situation.  There is thus an ethical side to all this that brings me back to ideas I have expressed before, about pre-rational ethics and history, etc.

Meandering my way towards a conclusion, then, what I think has been wrong with my thinking in the past has been its concentration upon the ‘rational’, the conscious pursuit of aims, with regard, say, to control of material resources etc.  This is not to deny that this is important but simply to push the idea further (re. the ‘affective’ community mentioned in Barbarian Migrations, p.41) that the non- (or pre-) rational also play an important part in such relationships.  There are two points that I think could emerge from this admittedly disorganised thinking.

One is that in ‘identification’, in that extension of a ‘pseudopod’ towards others there is some of that pre-rational ethics of empathy, of seeing oneself in others that I discussed before.  Therefore the most creative and positive identification of all must be (as Schopenhauer thought) the recognition of another striving, struggling human being.  And this, because it permits no exclusions (apart from other species, which is a problem I admit), must be crucially important.  As I see it, it trumps all the other identifications.

The other point, which stems from the non-immanence of identities, and the non-existence of the individual, affects historical methodology and political action equally.  We don't have a single dominant 'individual' identity - and even if we did, its nature would perpetually be changing, as above.  This makes history written to extend present identities backwards problematic.  For the same reasons I am dubious of identity politics generally, I suppose.  What I think the movement away from the individual to the human might permit, politically, is a non-doctrinaire, non-partisan, piecemeal kind of political action that operates situationally according to the ethical demand.  This, then, would be the sort of ethical ‘anarchist’* politics of commitment that Simon Critchley advocates in Infinitely Demanding.  By stressing a shared humanity we might be able to get around having to choose which identity we see as most important in an absolute way, and thus get some purchase on the problems of hegemony and socialist strategy (on which I need to go back and finish my reading of Butler, Laclau, Žižek, Mouffe etc.).  We might find a new kind of ethically-founded community (which reminds me that I need to get round to reading Agamben on The Coming Community) – one that would itself be (in my way of seeing) as ‘amoebic’ as the ‘human’.

* Not anarchist in the traditional sense of Bakunin, Kropotkin and the rest, but as rejecting the rule of a single political dogma and programme.

[This took me days to write and it has made my head hurt (although that might admittedly be because my varifocals were broken when I got attacked in Poppleton town centre a couple of weeks back) - I might keep tinkering with it for a while yet.]

Judging History … Or why historicists are the real relativists (The Unbearable Weight, Part 3-ish)

Si rien n’est vrai, rien n’est possible

(If nothing is true, nothing is possible)
-          A. Camus, L’Homme Révolté, p.98

Yay!

Boo!

Nietzsche (according to Camus) said something similar.  So did Lacan, again starting from the widely-cited but evidently erroneous ‘quotation’ of Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov that if god does not exist, everything is permitted.[1]  Lacan said that if you didn’t accept the existence of someone or something that you accepted could permit, then (logically enough) nothing could be permitted.  It’s not just about the semantics of the verb to permit; what, like Camus and (apparently) Nietzsche, Lacan meant (as I understand it, anyway) was that the absence of some sort of accepted yardstick against which things can be judged means that there are no grounds for acting for or against anything.  So much for the continentals.  One of the founding fathers of hard-line analytic philosophy, A.J. Ayer, said that ethics were not a true subject for philosophy because they were metaphysical (which he thought wasn’t proper subject-matter for philosophy).  You couldn’t make a logical argument for something being good or bad; all ethical arguments reduced ultimately to the equivalent of ‘yay, charity; boo, theft’.  Put in historical terms, you could transpose that to ‘yay, FDR; boo Hitler’.  Actually, that's a bad example, because I want to separate the judgement or assessment of individuals from judgement or assessment of their actions: let's instead say 'yay: founding the Red Cross; Boo: the Nanjing massacre'.  In its way, this is the same argument as Lacan’s/Camus’/Nietzsche’s.  However, whereas, because there was, for Ayer (a hard-line atheist after all), no acceptable, rational, neutral yardstick, it was pointless to attempt to discuss it, I would follow the continentals into the solution of discussing these things other than in purely rational terms (as in the first part of these thoughts).  And so what I am going to attempt to argue in this latest in my inchoate series of meandering ‘thoughts’ (if they can be dignified by that term) is that it is not those who are influenced by continental philosophy who end up in a position where they are disabled by relativism but actually the historicists, and by the logic (such as it is) of their own arguments.

With that in mind I am grateful to ‘ADM’ for her comment on the last instalment of these wafflings, essentially because it suggests to me a number of points I have often heard and with which I could not disagree with it more!  I can say that without any trace of personal disagreement or animosity because these points that ADM sets out so well pretty much represent, I would say, the orthodoxy of the historical profession - and because they points I will respond to aren't quite the one's she is making!  Me?  Not following the orthodoxy?  I know you will find that an absurd idea![2]

Essentially, and to anticipate my argument somewhat, I think that the debates on judging history have the whole problem the wrong way round.  There was quite a useful representation of what I mean in a forthright review-article [3] by Roger Collins of several recent works including a book containing an essay by Lisa Bitel which argued for a politically-committed teaching of medieval history.  Collins is quite right, that finger-wagging at the past for its sexism, racism and so on is an empty gesture, aiming, I would say, at little more than the facile, grandiose public occupation of some sort of moral mole-hill.  And yet, I would also say that Bitel is right that a politically-committed historian cannot unproblematically pass things over in silence.  To do so is tacitly to acquiesce in it.  It is surely pointless now to tut-tut about Charlemagne executing thousands of Saxons in the 780s, in itself, but to pass over the massacre of Verden as simply ‘what people did in those days’ (what can you do, eh?) is ethically highly questionable.

Tamurlane: Misunderstood

You can’t say that Hitler is just different from Charlemagne, because he is more recent and some of his victims and/or their children or relatives are still alive.  There is no historical statute of limitations.  Otherwise, at what point do we start discussing the Holocaust as just another historical atrocity, like Tamurlane’s slaughtering of the inhabitants of central Asian cities (millions of dead, some people estimate)?  Well, it was just an extreme case of the antisemitism that pervaded much of Europe at the time, wasn’t it?  Who are we to judge?  But people died; human beings like us.  There’ll always be something qualitatively different, unique about the Shoah (with luck, by which I mean I wouldn’t want repetitions) but there seems to me to be no compelling reason to enshrine this as the only atrocity of history deserving of ethical treatment and comment.  There is an annual remembrance day and pressure groups that preserve its memory, for sure, but people have died in horrible circumstances throughout history.  Pity the victims of the Armenian genocide (which Israel has accepted Turkey’s denial of, shockingly), or – even more so - those of the ‘colonnes infernales’ in the Vendée in the 1790s, or the victims of the massacre of Thessalonica in the 390s who have no one to speak for them.  They were human beings, like us, too.  If you accept that the Shoah was ‘all bad’ (as anyone sane surely must) the only logically consistent conclusion you can draw from that, without descending into grotesque Zionist arguments, is that all massacres are Bad Things, just different and (usually) on a smaller scale.  Let me make it quite clear that I’m not trying to reduce the significance of the Holocaust to being just another bad thing[4]: quite the opposite; I’m moving the scale in the opposite direction.  Here in some ways I return to my points about the universal in the particular.

The way out of the impasse is, I suggest, by acknowledging that both sides in the debate as usually rendered are looking through the wrong end of the telescope.  The issue of an ethical engagement with history is not about us judging the past, but about the past judging us or, better, about us judging the present through the prism of the past.  I came to this point of view via a comment made by Slavoj Žižek in In Defence of Lost Causes (I think) about the issue with Marx today not being about what Marx has to say to us but what we would have to say to him (or something like that – anyway it was the same general point).  So, to return to the massacre of Verden, what I suggest is that the event is viewed as a focus for thinking about – an opportunity to meditate on – such actions in general.  These were the ‘dark ages’, right?  What light does it shed on our supposedly more ‘advanced’ civilisation?  Put another way, to consider the massacre (say) as an historical phenomenon can (and should) include its ethical treatment without it necessarily becoming in any way about ‘judging the past’. 

One of my innumerable teaching mantras is ‘to explain is not to excuse’.  Of course one must see things within some sort of context, but ethically things should not stop there.  One reason why they should not concerns causation.  If historical context becomes an explanation in itself, as it inevitably does in the historicist way of looking at things, then no one has any agency or moral responsibility at all.  You can’t make any exceptions to this rule that will withstand any close analytical scrutiny. 

Oradour/Glane:
"A regrettable incident"?

2nd SS 'Das Reich':
"Men of their times"?

But the moment you allow individual agency into the equation the ethical issue surfaces.  If that person had a choice (as surely s/he did) then you need to explain why s/he made the choice that s/he did.  And this of course has to take into account the commonly-accepted options of the time and the reasons why people saw some choices as valid and others as not.  But people did not always make the choices that ‘their time’ demanded of them.  If they had not done, nothing in the world would ever have changed (and furthermore, such an approach leaves one wondering where the accepted options available at any one time actually came from if not by people actually making new choices further back in the past).  This is where the historicist position reveals one of its many internal contradictions.  Most historians will have no problem with the historian who writes that Charlemagne executed 4,500 Saxons at Verden because he thought it would put an end to the Saxon revolt, and leaves it at that.  But that is not an ethically neutral statement.  It is no more ethically neutral than one that says that men of the SS 'Das Reich' division wiped out the village of Oradour-sur-Glane because they thought it would put an end to Resistance attacks on them, and leaves it at that.  What, exactly, was Charlemagne doing in Saxony?  In fact the statement is no more ethically neutral than the statement that Hitler killed six million Jews because he thought it would bring unity and benefits to the German race, and leaves it at that, or one that says that Stalin wiped out however million Kulaks because he thought it would further the dictatorship of the proletariat, and leaves it at that.  Leaving things unremarked upon tacitly approves them.  It buries the victims just as surely as the perpetrators did (if not better in most cases).

There are very many, very common ways of approving and disapproving in historical writing, without actually saying ‘This was A Good Thing’ or ‘That was A Bad Thing’ (which I used simply as 1066 And all That short-hand).  The orthodox position generally sees no problem with the approval or admiration of things past.  Presumably, when a historian expresses admiration for Charlemagne’s energy and ability to organise (I have praised this myself), that is OK.  Think about it; instances of this will be littered throughout the works of all kinds of historians whom I regard as very fine practitioners of the art.  Aesthetics work in the same unidirectional fashion.  You can coo over early medieval metalwork or manuscript art, or the beauty of the space of the Hagia Sophia without exciting comment, but you can’t say (as I have done) that this is ‘obviously rubbish’ or that the decoration on an early Parisian plaster sarcophagus was ‘clearly not the work of a well man’, except for comic effect.  Indeed I well remember David Ganz getting physically irate with me for describing Venantius Fortunatus as the ‘W.T. MacGonagall of his day’ (fair enough; it was at best a pretty flippant gag).  Thus, in fact, in practice, the historicist position says we are allowed to commend, but not to criticise.  There is no consistency, methodological or theoretical, here.  It allows ethical and aesthetic judgement in one direction but not the other.  Actions, productions and results transcend their time if we like them, but not if we don’t.  What this is, is the position that allows us overtly to praise Mussolini for getting the trains to run on time (if indeed he did) but prevents us from openly condemning him for dropping gas bombs on Libyans and Ethiopians.  Charlemagne?  Wonderful organiser and strategist, you know; lovely sponsorship of learning.  But a cold-hearted murderer of thousands in an afternoon, just to shore up his conquest of their land?  Ooh no: now you’ve gone too far; you’re allowing your own feelings to influence your judgement. 

This is why the orthodox historicist position is in fact one of disabling relativism.  It allows no position to act in the present on the basis of an understanding of the past.  Because actions in the past cannot be condemned (only praised or commended), because they have to be understood in context, then nothing in the present can be combatted or condemned either.  They also have to be understood in their context, which evidently explains and excuses all.  Everything is valid on its own terms.  As we have seen, this approach enables no means of criticising history written to support extreme and distasteful political positions (on right or left), as long as that history does not falsify evidence or deny the reality of events or commit other obvious sins of method.

To explain, however, is not to excuse, but both elements of that equation need to be present for good history.  In fact, what I think we would agree on is that it is not the commendation or condemnation of past events that makes a bad historian but one-eyed condemnation or commendation.  A historian that goes out of his or her way to explain away the ‘stains on a reputation’ and ‘big up’ the good things is probably not a good historian.  Nor is the historian who condemns in simplistic fashion, without the ‘explaining’ element of the equation.  But it is the lack of even-handedness that makes them that way, not the recognition of and commenting upon good and bad things.  If all history that approves or condemns is bad history, as ADM suggests, then all history is bad history, by its very nature (as I will return to explain below).

Here is where I return to the first part of these musings about history and ethics.  There is, I argue, a contradiction inherent in this historicist position, especially when used to espouse what I consider to be ethically and politically dubious positions.  When approaching the evidence, all schools of thought, I think, accept that (as I argued before) one does so in a spirit that allows the preserved voice of the past to speak and be heard (in the first part, I argued that that ethical demand was actually inherent in what I called the ‘aesthetic moment’ – the decision to study history in the first place).  As we’ve seen, we then listen and we grant that voice some priority as that of another human being.  That does not imply that one must purely take it on its own terms – that approach would logically lead us to a place where all we could do was to re-describe the past as manifested in the surviving evidence, without comment.  That is chronicling and antiquarianism, not history.  I don’t think that that is a controversial statement.  But once we permit some people (those whose voices are preserved) to be examined with that respectful but critical scrutiny then the implication is that we allow all people – all fellow human beings – that same respect.  That means that the voiceless victims cannot be passed over in silence as collateral damage for the ambitions of the great and the good.  We are back with the universal in the particular, inherent in the ethical demand that is itself present the decision to study history, but none of this is really controversial.  In a way, women’s history and then gender history have been about recovering the experiences of those who do not dominate the record, and the same is true of Black history and other sub-types of the discipline (actually I am opposed to ‘interest group history’ but that’s a different matter [I no longer, at 19/11/2021, have any recollection of what I meant by this]).  All I am really trying to do is to bring out and develop an ethical dimension (indeed a demand) that is actually already implicit within accepted historical ‘good practice’, in a way that would be empowering and enabling for politically-committed historians.  In that sense, then, I disagree that this is something that is going far beyond history.  Far beyond antiquarianism and chronicling, perhaps…

Ludwig von Wittgenstein: Anyone
else think he looked like the late
Patrick Wormald?

Wittgenstein, in one of his apparently increasingly numerous manifestations,[5] said (in yet another version of the argument I started with) that:

“Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world, dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all the people that ever lived and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgement or anything that would imply such a judgement.  It would of course contain all relative judgements of value and all true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made. … Our words, when we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense.  Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only contain water and if I pour out a gallon over it."[6]

I would adapt that to say that if all the events of the past – thoughts, words, deeds, justifications, etc. – were recorded in a Great Book of All The Past, it would not contain a word of History.  And it couldn’t contain History any more than a teacup could contain a gallon of water.  As I just said, the ‘teacup’ is just antiquarianism and chronicling.  What happens when we start history is that we start analysing, commenting and explaining; all things that in a way are transcendental.  Such analysis, comment and explanation is, as I have tried to argue, not ethically neutral or disinterested.  If one looks for a value to history, the usual defences (‘relevance’; ‘learning how we got where we are’) are pretty weak if scrutinised closely (I’ll have to leave why for another time) and certainly of little comfort to medievalists.  For me the key (not the only) purposes of a historical education are twofold: the ability to scrutinise what you are told critically, sceptically, and understanding other people and their cultures.  These are both things that make history a dangerous subject.  In both of these dimensions there lies the ethical demand of history to treat the other human being (the ‘autrui’ of Levinasian ethics) with priority and respect.  Where history is written in a way to justify unethical politics and positions in the present – whether of left or right – by writing off the suffering of human beings, without further comment, as some sort of unavoidable collateral damage on the altar of some principle then, I maintain, it contradicts the principles and demands inherent in the process of historical analysis itself.  It thereby becomes ‘bad history’.

Thanks for all your comments thus far, for helping me see what needs further justification and explanation.  Keep ‘em coming!

Notes

---

[1] I’ve never read The Brothers Karamazov so I wouldn’t know.  I’m still girding my loins to try one more big push to finish Crime and Punishment.  To quote Father Ted, I think Dostoyevsky lost his way in that novel, somewhere between the crime and the punishment.  Anyway, it’ll be over by Christmas…

[2] It’s a pretty damning indictment of the profession that I still haven’t yet found anyone to take over from me as the Enfant Terrible of the early medieval historical discipline.  I’m 46, for heaven’s sake.  I should be in carpet slippers and charter witness-lists by now; that or endlessly repeating the researches of my youth.  Oh, hang on, though…

[3] This is a bit of an unfortunate piece.  Roger does make some very good points, as you’d expect, and savages at least one very deserving victim but (to mix my metaphors) this sort of blanket bombing of the profession inevitably catches some innocent people in the blast.  I emerge quite well from the carnage, but I think I have developed a sort of ‘survivor’s guilt’ as a result.

[4] Not long ago I was pretty shocked to see a book that described as a ‘genocide’ the massacre of Goliad, where 400 Texian rebels (who had, let’s not forget, risen in rebellion to defend their right to own slaves against a Mexican edict of liberation) were executed by Santa Anna’s troops.  As a massacre, clearly I have to condemn it, but to call this genocide really is pretty absurd and insulting to the victims of genuine, systematic killing.  It might have been this book.  If not I apologise, although further down the page the author inaugurates a discussion on how American settlers into Mexico – illegal immigrants – were different from Mexican illegal immigrants in the modern USA, producing the all-too-predictable responses.  Goliad is also described as genocide in an evidently pretty poor book reviewed here.  I was going to say that maybe one ought not to expect historical perspective in Texas, a state where - I am told - about half of a school-child’s historical education is taken up with the history of that state alone, but there I go.  Historical perspective: what does that mean?  That 400 Texian lives didn’t count because there were far worse massacres in history?  Does their legal status as rebels according to contemporary the laws of war justify describing their killing without comment?  Does the morally objectionable basis of their cause justify their execution?  The risk is to give that impression.  There is not, admittedly, a numerical threshold at which systematic massacre becomes genocide (I have an image of two soldiers amidst the ruins of a slaughtered village, and one saying to the other ‘Damn! We only needed one more to make it genocide’).  But the massacre at Goliad, brutal though it was, wasn’t genocide.
[5] How did Wittgenstein die?  He became the Late Wittgenstein.  Sorry but that’s the only Wittgenstein-based gag that I know.

[6] In conversation, apparently, Wittgenstein used to express the same point, more crudely, as ‘you can’t shit higher than your own arse’.

What do we mean by ‘Interdisciplinarity’?

For reasons unconnected with the project I came back to this recently.  As I have seen it alluded to a couple of times on other medieval blogs and as I think it is a clear statement of my current views of the subject, and of methodology, I thought it might be worthwhile to post it here.  It was orginally given at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in July 2009. 

At the time what struck me was how many people came up to me afterwards and said they agreed with me, before revealing that they hadn't really understood what I was saying at all...  Ho hum.  Netwise, Jon Jarrett has a nice summary on his Blog, but he seems (to me) to see me as taking sides with those who think that historicist dominance is either a "good thing" or the only way of doing things, in that he appears to perceive an opposition between me and Eileen Joy.  Insofar as I am aware of Eileen's stance (critical theory over historicism), I think I'd be on her side - politically at least.

Interdisciplinarity is one of the most used words in our professional practice, sprinkled generously to season MA course and programme descriptions. At York some moderately serious thought has been devoted to what interdisciplinarity might mean, but, if one probes what it means in practice, it is not interdisciplinarity at all, but interdepartmentality, something rather different. In funding applications it is now more or less the law of the land to use the word interdisciplinary somewhere. No matter that one needn’t actually explain how this will be achieved in practice. I know; I have traded in this bankrupt stock for many a long year! And finally, as we all know, in modern British universities (especially my own, apparently), whenever two or more shall be gathered together, they shall form an interdisciplinary centre.

Interdisciplinarity is a cherished myth of medieval studies. In John Arnold’s handy primer, A Short Introduction to Medieval History the ‘interdisciplinarity’ of the topic is cited as a reason one should do medieval history, although ‘its practitioners fret periodically about what interdisciplinary might mean’.

I am going to do more than fret. I am going to argue that genuinely interdisciplinary exchange has had important results but has had its day – perhaps killed by its own hand; at least as far as it relates to relationships within medieval studies, the word interdisciplinary has now become meaningless and should be rigorously challenged at its every usage. Such challenges are, further, absolutely vital for the intellectual health of our studies; so-called ‘interdisciplinarity’, rather than being an enabling ‘jewel in the crown’, has in fact become a ‘Bad Thing’, which threatens to stifle approaches to the written and material remains of the so-called Middle Ages.

To be interdisciplinary one needs to have some idea of what constitutes a discipline. What, one might ask, differentiates a discipline from, say, a technique or a skill? There is I suppose a standard ‘obvious’ answer at a basic level, which would equate a discipline to the sort of thing that a modern university department is named for: English, French, History, Art History, Music, Philosophy, Archaeology and so on. But this brings a lot of problems.

Such is the demand nowadays to be considered interdisciplinary that one hears some very strange (if – in this context – nevertheless understandable) claims. Here are three, which I’ve encountered. If you study medieval literature in English and French are you being interdisciplinary? Can you claim to be interdisciplinary in History and Latin? If that is possible, then any literate historian is interdisciplinary, in history and whatever language or languages she reads, including that which she speaks! Can you be interdisciplinary in palaeography and English or history? Is palaeography a discipline? If so, you could be interdisciplinary in archaeology and pottery typology. When does a skill become a discipline? Archaeology has fought a long battle – whose outcome is still far from universally conceded – to be considered a discipline rather than an ancillary or auxiliary skill or science.

What we mean by discipline is, I suspect, those learnt skills, techniques, or mental disciplines, about how to extract information from a body of data, which I would agree are essential (I’m all in favour of method and technique). We could call this the internal means of defining a discipline – things that unify it from within. Of course there are many complex and difficult skills involved in understanding Latin (not just in terms of the actual language but in the rules, the metre etc. of Latin composition), or Old French (similarly), or palaeography, or pottery typologies; it’s not my intention to denigrate any skills or disciplines.

But then there are also difficult and complex techniques involved in studying the Prose Epic, or the Coroner’s Roll, or the Saint’s Life, or the grave, which differ (sometimes considerably) from those involved in the examination of fabliaux, charters, chronicles, or building plans. One could also add things like the historiography of the study of a period or type of history, and so on. The interpretative skills or techniques involved in studying early medieval history differ from those of late medieval history, let alone modern history.

Once one thinks like this, any body of evidence has its own discipline, stands at its own intersection of specialist knowledge, skills, traditions and historiography. When the idea of discipline retreats into skills-sets, then any of the supposed disciplines that make up our ‘inter-disciplinary’ centres begins to fragment fatally into myriad smaller subject areas and you can be meaningfully interdisciplinary in fabliaux and epic, or in chronicles and saints’ lives. Disciplines, by this definition begin to crumble from the inside. The only way to salvage much from this mess would be to limit the disciplines to those using radically different forms of data: material cultural, pictorial, or written. Even that poses problems.

Now, I should confess at this stage that I’m generally excluding those areas which don’t have a place as such within medieval studies; for an historian like me that means things like anthropology and sociology. These have played an important role in developing historical understanding but they do raise the question of what counts as genuine interdisciplinary credentials. Most putative interdisciplinarity comes in two forms. First, and best, is the person – an historian, for argument’s sake – who is interested in the work of a different discipline – let’s say anthropology – talks to its practitioners and incorporates it in her study. Is she really interdisciplinary, though? She is still working ultimately in one discipline, but borrowing, sometimes (but less commonly) exchanging, insights. This has had important results. I don’t deny that, although I would say that a series of other issues emerge, which there’s no time to discuss – the most significant is that of the outcome, to which I will return.

Second is the situation one frequently finds in archaeology. Here the researcher reads something of what people write in other disciplines and claims status within his own discipline by reporting on that – yet without actually engaging with the practitioners of the other discipline or, usually, using it in any work within his own discipline. This is not interdisciplinarity, this is interlocution.

The true interdisciplinary scholar is surely someone who is more than a borrower or an interlocutor, who actually works and publishes in two different disciplines, being recognised as a fellow-practitioner in both. This person is as rare as claims to interdisciplinarity are common but there are some. There are archaeologists who have carried out anthropological field-work, for example.

To return to the disciplines that make up Medieval Studies and thus the thrust of my argument, if disciplines do not, on close inspection, seem to have much internal cohesion, one might still maintain that there are ‘disciplinary’ lines drawn round groups of types of evidence that band them together into more meaningful, larger disciplines. One might call that an external definition, based on what is excluded and included.

This notion can be attacked from several directions. The bounds of disciplines are difficult enough to define when considering subjects as different (superficially at least) as history and archaeology, as I have written myself. When thinking about what one might call the textual disciplines – literature and history – the problems are multiplied endlessly, and it’s on these that I will concentrate. I’m also approaching the problem from the perspective of someone who knows immeasurably more about the development of the discipline of history than he does about the growth of the study of literature.

The canon of sources incorporated within a discipline is historically contingent. What constituted a historical source initially depended upon historians, for good or ill (for not everyone was agreed on this), differentiating themselves from the more literary/philosophical modes of Enlightenment historical production. Writing history wie es eigentlich gewesen ist meant only using the sources that told you wie es eigentlich gewesen ist; those serious documents that told you about high politics and religion. Many – legion – were those excluded on these grounds. At least, however, the canons of historical and (as far as I am aware) a literary ones were clear (leaving aside the large number of written sources considered insufficiently literary or historical!). Clearly, though, once one got into the twentieth century and reached the Annales School and Total History, the historical canon began to include anything and everything that was written down and many things that weren’t, as well. Even Trevelyan’s very un-annaliste Social History of England entitled its chapters ‘Chaucer’s England’, ‘Shakespeare’s England’ and so on. Similarly, movements in literary studies soon moved away from the nineteenth-century canon of ‘high literature’. I read on page 1 of Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature that ‘all attempts since the Renaissance to determine the difference between “literary” and “non-literary” language have failed.’ Thus defined, the boundary between ‘history’ and ‘literature’ has long been permeable, something only underlined by recent theoretical trends.

One could, alternatively, take a Foucaldian approach and look at how the disciplines emerged. Foucault thought that one of the defining things about the episteme of modernity, ‘the age of history’ as he called it. By ‘history’ he didn’t just mean the discipline, but ‘historicity’. This, in his reading was part and parcel with the creation of distinct histories of distinct things, with the rise of scientific method, of empiricism, with the creation of disciplines. But, in Foucault’s view (as I understand it) it also produced a concern with the inter-relationship between things, not just their classification. In those terms one could contextualise interdisciplinarity itself within the episteme of modernity, just as, as I would argue, the collapse of interdisciplinarity might be located within the episteme of post-modernity. This would underline the artificiality and contingency of these divisions and point the way to how and why they are no longer valid.

Alternatively again, you could take a Derridian philosophical approach and question those boundaries. It seems to me that the bounds between disciplines are subject to the same critique, on the same grounds, as genres were in his essay on ‘The Law of Genre’. The bounds of disciplines, like the bounds of genres, are only acknowledged as existing because they can’t actually exist. They cannot be policed or patrolled. Their very existence implies their own transgression.

To make the problem more acute, the developments of theory over the past twenty years have in any case removed whatever might have been left of any boundary between literature and history in terms of ‘focus’. Since the so-called linguistic turn, older ‘social science’ approaches to history have been on the back foot and even many of those who claim an opposition to so-called post-modernism have actually incorporated – or at least have had to pay attention to – ‘textual’ or ‘literary’ approaches to their written data. At the same time, especially in medieval studies – and here I must confess to not being as sanguine as the session’s organisers about the acceptance of ‘theory’ – pretty much all of the dominant – and even less dominant – approaches to literature are in one sense of another, historical: so-called ‘New Historicism’, Marxism, Post-colonialism, gender studies – even in some ways and to some extent Queer Theory. In my understanding at least, it looks to me as though the hard-core ahistorical, literary or philosophical approaches to medieval literature are as much on the defensive as old-style historical empiricism or cliometrics. In theoretical terms, the two disciplines often seem hardly different at all. This was where real literary/historical interdisciplinarity had its moment, its importance and – I concede – its valuable results. The upshot, though, is the eradication of the possibility of further such interdisciplinarity. One must ask what exactly a New Historicist from a literature department and a ‘post-linguistic-turn’ historian bring to the putatively interdisciplinary table, other than technique – charter diplomatic and poetics, say? Since data-specific technique – skill-sets – alone can’t, as we’ve seen, divide one discipline from another, then one really must question whether this is interdisciplinary at all. Is it different from the collaboration of two people from history departments with different specialist skills? I have nothing against collaboration, which is fruitful and important, but we should be honest about how we describe it.

The bounds of the disciplines collapse from the inside and the outside. There can thus be no such thing as interdisciplinarity.

Sharp-eared listeners might have concluded that, with the genuinely interdisciplinary scholar defined as someone who has published work within two disciplines, accepted as such by practitioners of both, and with real interdisciplinarity denied in the interplay between disciplines based on the primary written text, what is going on in this paper is just me staking a claim to be the rare real deal. I suppose, to some extent, that is right! But only in a very limited sense; it might be the case in a narrowly methodological way. I will now, however, completely undermine my own claims to be interdisciplinary at all.

We must consider the outcome of interdisciplinarity. If I take my own work, which adopted what I have called – no less problematically than any other term I’ve derided today – ‘multi-disciplinarity’, the analytical separation of different data-sets and the merging of conclusions at a higher level than is usual, then I still have to ask myself what I produced at the end of the day – if it wasn’t just good old-fashioned social history? What emerges from the literary approach to history or the historical approach to literature if not straight cultural history? Once ‘context’ is assigned importance, history, as I see it, always wins. Perhaps this is because in spite of historians’ claims, the Rankean empiricist ideal still underlies pretty much all historical work. There have – perhaps understandably – been no real moves to produce history in line with the pre-Rankean ideal of history as ‘philosophy teaching by example’. Furthermore, the kind of explanation or causation that contextualism implies is (in my view) unsatisfying even from a historian’s point of view.

So I wonder if, whatever one might say about method, whether it is even possible for the outcome of so-called interdisciplinary dialogue, to be interdisciplinary. Is it ever anything other than cultural history of one form or another? I’d even suggest that centres of Medieval Studies don’t teach interdisciplinarity at all, but a single discipline, of medieval studies, which means medieval cultural history.

Obviously, I have nothing at all against cultural history – it’s what I do – and at the level of method and approach, what is currently considered interdisciplinarity has produced enormous quantities of valuable and groundbreaking work; I’m not denying that. I don’t doubt that in some, perhaps many, areas of the study of the past, work using the ‘inter-disciplinary’ approach is far better than it would have been had it not used that method. But when it becomes the only approach, I start to worry. The dominance of interdisciplinarity has I think become pernicious. It has produced the requirement to assert interdisciplinary status that leads to the sort of vapid claims that I mentioned earlier. Even ignoring the problems with justifying the term, the ascendancy of historicist approaches and the ensuing de facto dominance of cultural history, jeopardises any approach which isn’t interested in this outcome. It is already the case that most funding bodies stress so-called interdisciplinarity and I suspect that successful bids are overwhelmingly those using this buzz-word. This endangers the funding of ahistorical approaches to literature or of historical projects that do not require the method, impoverishing both. The ubiquity of so-called ‘interdisciplinarity’ threatens to make the academy less, not more, diverse.

What is at stake here is how one draws and defines the dividing lines on the map of the academy, and what is involved in intellectual exchange. I suggest, might be a more meaningful way of thinking about the fruitful confrontation of difference – a more interesting way of drawing the lines that sub-divide academia – is the confrontation of theoretical approaches. This is why I offered this paper for these sessions. I can’t think of a single word for the confrontation of theoretical approaches unfortunately! But whatever it is, it renders disciplines/interdisciplinarity irrelevant. Discussion between a die-hard Lacanian and a historicist might involve people from different departments but if it did it would really, intellectually, be no different from debate between an ‘old-style’ social science social historian and a post-linguistic turn cultural historian within a department.

I do think that this would be a more fruitful way of dividing the field of medieval studies and giving credit to really intellectually difficult – challenging – discussions. There are two advantages to this, as I would see it. First, the difficulty – the challenge – of such confrontation opens far more the mind to what Derek Attridge calls the ‘alterity’ involved in the creation of work. He is talking about literature, but I think the point might stand more generally. Second, while so-called interdisciplinarity tends, as I have argued, to lead one way, however fruitfully in its own terms, to cultural history, the confrontation of theory might be conducive to more fruitful dialogue – two¬-way, as the word implies. If theory is – as it is – a way of seeing, rather than something to be applied, mechanically, it is something to be engaged with and refined, and this can be done from two points of view with an outcome, I suggest, that, as well as producing better theory, also reflects back, in different ways, on the areas whence those points of view started, rather than producing a single, merged, synthetic, effectively uni-disciplinary outcome.

So, my conclusion is not to outlaw or denigrate interdisciplinarity, as such, but to be much clearer about the what it is, its limits, and what it does – and the limits to that – and thus to challenge this ubiquitous demand for all scholars and all work to describe themselves/itself as ‘interdisciplinary’. On the one hand, I suppose, I do want to see value returned to work that isn’t interdisciplinary, but mostly I want to suggest a way forward which valorises engagement at the level of the development of theory, not under the empty rubric of interdisciplinarity.