Why Sixth-Century History Doesn't Matter (any more or less than any other history)

I'm a sixth-century historian ... and let me tell you I look good for my age.  Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.  I'll be here all week.  Now please welcome Miss Elaine Page.

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Be all that as it may, the VC of Queens University Belfast, Patrick Johnston (an oncologist) has recently said that 'society' (that thing that Thatcherites like him don't believe in, remember?) doesn't need people who specialise in the history of the sixth century.

"Society doesn't need a sixth century historian. It needs a 21-year-old who really understands how to analyse things, understands the tenets of leadership [ahem. Irony klaxon] and contributing to society, who is a thinker and someone who has the potential to drive society forward."

OK. There are a lot of things you can wonder on the basis of this interview.  One might ask why, given his utilitarian obsession, Johnston is running a University and not still working to cure cancer (might one assume that, like most university managers, he ran out of ideas in his area of academic specialisation and took the soft route to a £250,000 salary instead?); one might wonder whether Durham and Newcastle (QUB's partners in the 'Northern Bridge' post-graduate funding consortium) are not now asking themselves what kind of idiot they have got into bed with; one might seriously sit down and ask what this man really thinks education is about, or what mind-numbingly limited range of things he thinks can 'benefit society'; one might ponder what sort of grey, cultureless, dystopian hell his vision of a society 'benefited' and 'led' by his idea of Higher Education resembles*; and finally one would be forgiven for thinking on the basis of this interview that, if this is an example of the sort of people who manage (for they certainly don't lead) UKHE, the sorts of people, the sorts of intellectual second-raters (amongst whom there are more than a few historians), into whose hands British Higher Education has fallen, we should all just put our heads in our hands and weep.

Such is Johnston's staggering ignorance that one assumes he picked on 'sixth century history' (he doesn't actually specify BC or AD) because he thought it was a sort of obscure Dark Age topic that no one could possibly see as valuable and that no one would stand up for (that is, again, typical of the sort of bullying these people do).  In that, at least, he was wrong.  Various responses have sprung up which have led Johnston to issue a hasty statement clarifying how much 'respect' he has for history graduates. The details need not detain us; it is corporate bullshit.  It is a sort of superficial climb-down at least but he dropped the veil on his real opinions and, one assumes, his real intentions if push comes to shove. (And he already has form in cutting back on the arts and humanities.)

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Johnston's philistine, corporate dribblings are, however, no more than some of us have come to expect from University managers. It's the replies that I really despair about, for they give a pretty bleak indication of what historians think their discipline is about - or rather that, typically, they haven't got a clue what their discipline might be there for, other than as some sort of hobby or middle-class divertissement.  Charles West, to his credit, asks what history is about, if not thinking and analysis.  If one wants to be narrowly utilitarian, one can specify the ability to sift information critically, reach a conclusion and present that conclusion via reasoned argument in (in theory at any rate) cogent written or oral form, to a deadline.  Ideally that is what a history graduate should be able to do, and it is very important (maybe in practice it's the most important thing; I don't know), but it is not, of course, something that is limited to History graduates.  At that point, however, the serious argument for sixth-century history presented thus far fizzles out.

For where does it go after that, generally non-history-specific, justification?  Sadly, West retreats into an argument that important stuff happened in the sixth century that is, allegedly, 'relevant' today, and that knowing the history of these things gives them 'context'.  Do you really need to know about the rise of Islam to understand ISIS (other than, as here [and ff.], to refute the dangerous banalities of 'top historian' Tom Holland)?  What kind of meaningful context does a simple knowledge of the sixth century add to understanding the modern world?  The response to Johnstone from QUB's own Immo Warntjes, however, doesn't even get as far as West's.  All it is is a list of (to him at least) interesting things that happened in the sixth century.  Mostly they are things of some interest to me too, as you'd expect, but I would hesitate to ascribe to any of them an innate importance. But is that all history has to differentiate it from any other humanities discipline?  Knowing facts about the past?  Chronicling and antiquarianism?  Readers of this blog know full well that I do not accept that even knowing the 20th-century history of the Middle East helps you understand the rise of ISIS in and of itself.  That too reduces history to simple chronicling and raises some pretty difficult (I'd say insurmountable) epistemological questions about causation and narrative.

Does, however, the defence of history need to go anywhere beyond the intrinsic interest of things that happened in the past?  Is not knowledge for its own sake a valid defence?  Obviously I sympathise with that ideal but in practice it has severe limitations.  For, if just knowing about stuff is its own justification, then why not degrees in stamp-collecting, car-recognition, arithmetic or French vocabulary?  If knowing facts about the past is qualitatively different from being able to, say, identify the date, origin and value of any stamp, sufficient to justify the payment of university salaries etc, one needs to have a cogent argument as to why, which goes beyond mere intellectual snobbery.

I have set out why I think history does matter before and I don't want to repeat all that, but do please read that post if you have not read it before.  Suffice it to say that what matters about history applies to sixth-century history no more and no less than to the history of any other century.  Why does it matter to train 21-year-olds in history?  To help them critique sources of evidence - as Charles West says - and not just accept what they are told; to help them think about humanity and understand other human beings in other contexts too.  But these things are not unique to history.  What is (I propose)unique to history is not simply the knowledge of things that happened in the past, but the investigation of why they happened, of why people said they happened and of why they want you to think they happened; more so (perhaps) the knowledge of understanding why things happened involves the awareness of the other options that were available - the things that could have happened but didn't (and grasping why they didn't) - and of how no one historical state of affairs or set of outcomes is preordained to be the only, natural one.  It didn't have to be like that then; it doesn't have to be like this now.  This is the emancipatory potential of history, specifically.

To sum up, then, the history of the sixth century matters as much as the history of any other century not so much for the knowledge of all the things that happened so much as for the understanding of all the things that didn't.

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* This is what I imagine: a society in which disease is a thing of the past and businesses are all well led but in which no one has any capacity to create or critique culture or think sophisticated, questioning thoughts about the inevitable finitude of life, disease or no (there might, I suppose, be a core of characteristically pointless analytical philosophers providing cod-logically-truthful, cod-ethical arguments for the turning off of life-support systems, under the ironic banner of 'medical humanities'), or about whether business and capitalism are good things, or by what right people with 'useful' degrees claim to lead society, or whether 'driving society forward' is ipso facto a 'Good Thing', or by what criteria we judge what a Good Thing might be, or what the alternatives are; where no one has the sort of training that might help them improve the sophistication of that society's cultural life, or indeed do anything non-utilitarian except as some form of hobby. Or maybe that is what the 'non-leaders' do in their spare time, when not working zero-hours contracts for the businesses of the drivers and leaders or watching 1000 versions of strictly on the 1000 quality-free business- and utility-driven deregulated TV channels and getting their view of the world from the sorts of 'leaders' and 'drivers' that created Fox News and the Daily Mail.  A society stuck in this rut ad infinitum for lack of anyone with the wit or imagination to challenge it and its models.  That, I imagine, is the society that technocrats like Johnston and his ilk think universities are there to produce and maintain.

The Myth of Relevance (Part 2)

[Here is the next installment of the chapter.  As last time, it was mostly written a year ago.  It is very much a draft and most if not all of the 'facts' mentioned still need to be double checked!]

There are other arguments presented for limiting the time and place of relevant history.  These can be illustrated by a series of different examples.  Some of these are taken from John Tosh’s interesting and valuable Why History Matters.  I disagree quite seriously with the line that Tosh takes but I am profoundly sympathetic to his overall project and certainly find myself in the same general part of the political spectrum.  In other words, I think he is firmly ‘on the side of the angels’.  My disagreement concerns the argument he has chosen to make in defence of the discipline and its value, which I think is mistaken in that I hope to demonstrate, that there are better, stronger arguments available to serve his purpose.

One argument for the relevance of history in the present is that it helps us understand current situations in the world.  The middle east, Iraq or Afghanistan furnish potential examples but so too do the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland or the conflicts in the Balkans after the fragmentation of Tito’s Yugoslavia.  Here the argument goes that if one knows about the historical ‘chain of events’ in the area under discussion, then one will gain a better understanding of the problems in the present.  The situation in the Balkans – the tension between different ethnic groups – is to be understood as the product of a particular series of events. Again, though, this argument for relevance presents numerous problems in its implications about the nature and purpose of historical enquiry.  The problems should by now be familiar.  The current state of affairs is assumed to be the automatic, logical outcome of preceding events.  That, in turn, implies some problematic assumptions about the objectivity of historical narrative and about causation, which we have already discussed.  The narratives used to explain or justify current political action are no less chosen, no less artificial, than the ones employed to explain ‘who we are and how we got here’.  Those alluded to by politicians in modern conflicts are  often no more constructed – even if they frequently are less empirically accurate.  Our modern nationalists are not operating under compulsion from the Past. As I have already argued, the Past has no power; it’s dead and gone.  It cannot even be properly conceived of without the deliberate construction of narrative, and all the problems that that entails.  It cannot make you do anything.  These modern politicians and their followers are, like the people involved in the Northumbrian Feud or the hypothetical diarist of Chapter 2, choosing events from their understanding of the past to justify what they are doing or what they want to do in the present.

Here the argument for ‘relevance’ shifts ground to claim that historical study enables us to challenge the ‘abuse’ of history for political ends.  We can stop to think more closely about the underlying implications of this argument.  Obviously it should be stated at the outset that this argument is motivated by the best of intentions.  The problems occur in the nature of history that is assumed.  The   implication is, firstly, that history is first and foremost about the collection of empirical facts.  This  happened like this; that did not happen, or did not happen like that.  That is, as I have been at pains to argue, not only a pretty low level of intellectual expectation for an academic discipline; it is fundamentally not what history is about, as opposed to chronicling and antiquarianism.  The second point follows from this and is that this argument for ‘relevance’ assumes that there is a single, univocal object history that is capable of being abused.  The only level of abuse that can reasonably be encompassed within the argument is the telling or presentation of falsehoods.  A questionable, if factually reliable, reading of history, based upon the available data, cannot easily be called an abuse without implying that there is a finite array of acceptable, non-abusive interpretations.  The argument may then move to discuss the motivation for such presentations of history, claiming that using history for political purposes is abusive.  It assumes, therefore, that history is capable of being written without some element of the political, broadly defined, entering into the process.  Or it supposes that there is a range of acceptable non-abusive motivations for historical writing: the simple neutral disinterested furtherance of knowledge for example.  Even if this were possible it could only function  at fundamentally non-historical levels of antiquarianism and chronicling.  Then we might reasonably ask what this deployment of erudite, accurate, factual history (itself non-political? non-abusive?) might practically achieve.  What, for example, might be attained by pointing out the factual flaws in nationalist historical narratives?

Let’s look at the problem more closely. We can again draw some examples from modern trouble-spots where nationalism rears its invariably ugly head.  Let’s take, for example, a modern Ulster Unionist or Irish Republican, or a Serbian nationalist (or a nationalist from any other area). Does a knowledge of the history of Serbia or Ireland help us understand his actions (let’s assume it’s a he)? No it doesn’t. For one thing, we’ll soon discover that the ‘history’ that he uses to justify his case or actions is cock-eyed and wrong.  Does it help just to know the events he makes reference to, that he keeps harping on about – the Battle of Kosovo Pole or the Battle of Boyne, say? Does it help to know that in reality King Billy’s army was paid for by the Pope, or alternatively that Cromwell’s troops killed rather more English soldiers than Irish civilians at the sacks of Drogheda and Wexford? Does it help to know that for most of their history Serbs and Croats and Bosnians rubbed along together in their communities just fine (think about it; if they hadn’t, ‘ethnic cleansing’ wouldn’t have been ‘necessary’)? Does it help, when confronted by Greek nationalism (as represented by the neo-Nazis of ‘Golden Dawn’ for instance), to know that in the 1830s 80% of Athens spoke Albanian? That the reason that (allegedly) Socrates could still read a Greek newspaper if he came back to life is not the allegedly millennia-long continuity of Hellenic culture and language but that Greek was reinvented on more classical lines, and purged of Slavic and Turkish words in the late 19th century (as was Romanian, which is the only reason why it is as close as Italian is to Latin)? Would it avail you much to point out to a Scottish nationalist that the Declaration of Arbroath was copied from an earlier Irish letter and that (contrary to the impression one would get from visiting the battlefield memorial) it post-dated the Battle of Bannockburn?  No.  All of these things might get you punched in the face, or worse, but would not help you to understand why.

Obviously, a simple and entirely valid advantage is conferred by the collection of accurate historical information and that is the ability to see through the truth claims of others when these are based around an appeal to history.  The counter-arguments provided might be ‘true’, in that they are based upon empirically-demonstrable historical ‘facts’.  Yet, they carry little practical weight.  Although such factual correction might influence third parties and, with luck, cut the ground from beneath some propaganda, it is unlikely to change anyone’s mind.  Frequently the result will simply be to entrench the idea further that some vague power is controlling and distorting ‘the truth’ in order to further their oppression.  As Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly argued, using the psychoanalytical concepts of Jacques Lacan, empirical arguments rarely cut any ice in such discussions because the root of the problem does not lie in the register of the Symbolic (crudely, the factual; that which can straightforwardly be represented in language) but rather in that of the Imaginary (the ideal/idealised).[This last bit needs re-doing.]

A more positive impact might be to make political parties eschew any reference at all to the past.  This, one must admit, need not be a bad thing.  It might, especially, be no bad thing if it ended cheap demagogic appeals to a supposed national historical heritage (see above).  One might see an example of the cutting away of the grounds for such an appeal in the cross-party response to the British National Party’s employment of a picture of a Spitfire in its 2008 election leaflets.  It was rapidly pointed out that, such was the party leadership’s ignorance, they had picked a photograph of a Spitfire flown by a Free Polish pilot.  Indeed one could say that, rather than (as intended) symbolising the Battle of Britain as a fight against encroachment by foreigners, their picture actually illustrated the historical benefits of immigrant eastern European asylum-seekers taking ‘British’ jobs!  Had the ‘historical’ argument been developed, it might have undermined all future use of Churchill, the Battle of Britain and the Second World War by the xenophobic right – if the point had been made more forcefully that most of the Conservative Party in 1940 was in favour of a negotiated peace with Hitler, that Churchill’s biggest supporters in the ‘dark days’ of 1940 were members of the Labour Party and that certainly by the end of 1940 the war had ceased to be a national conflict and taken on some features of a ‘crusade’ for the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny – in other words for an engagement and involvement with Europe, not isolation from it.  None of this would have been without value.

Within this line of argument, it is clear, modern history does indeed normally have a prior claim to ‘relevance’; arguments against xenophobic nationalism that are based on the English ‘nation’s’ formation through the migration into Britain of Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans are, though not without use, easily enough dismissed as referring to something that happened ‘a long time ago’ or that was somehow ‘different’.  The longer ago that something happened, the less use one can make of it in discussing modern politics.  This is usually the case, but not always; the end of the Roman Empire, allegedly at the hands of invading foreign immigrants or because of supposed moral degeneracy is frequently deployed by right-wing commentators as a ‘lesson from the past’.

Nonetheless, as mentioned the key drawback with these arguments is its reduction of historical activity to simple chronicling; historical ‘truth’ means factual accuracy.  Wherever a claim cannot be refuted on straightforward factual grounds, as the element of interpretation involved becomes greater the value of historical argument to modern politics incrementally lessens.  When academic opinion is divided (no matter how unevenly matched the sides in the debate), politicians have repeatedly been able to bat away objections produced by professional expertise with a sort of relativist line that it represents ‘only one opinion’ (as for example even with the reality of climate change).  One could claim, and legitimately enough (see chapter 1), that a formal historical education – or at least the existence of a class of historical professionals – is unnecessary for the furnishing of this level of historical argument.  Non-academic writers about the past could fulfil the need for factual data every bit as well as ‘professionals’. 

Another weakness of the traditional line about the value of historical knowledge is that it is frequently somewhat essentialist.  Specific types of people placed in a particular context are likely to behave in the same (or similar) ways to those observable in the past.  Thus the key flaw in John Tosh’s argument that historical awareness might have led to an avoidance of the (at best ill-advised) invasion of Iraq in 2003.  A knowledge of the problems and parallels that could be extracted, interestingly enough, from the study of the British occupation of Mesopotamia in the 1920s not only represents, at the level of historical endeavour, the simple accumulation of facts (chronicling, again), as just discussed.  It also – if, to take a hypothetical counter-factual situation, wherein historians are called in to advise the leaders of Britain and the USA in spring 2003, deployed as a warning  – makes the implicit assumption that the inhabitants of the region would behave in just the same way as they had done eighty years previously.  It is not difficult to see how easily such arguments could have been refuted, logically and indeed reasonably, by a president and a prime minister already bent on launching the invasion.  The argument that things ‘were different’ after the First World War is reasonable enough; so would be an accusation of a form of essentialist orientalism on the part of the historical advisers.  So?  These things happened in the past.  If one moved on – as the true historian (as opposed to the chronicler) must surely move on – from the cataloguing of verifiable events to their explanation, one would soon find oneself in the midst of discussions of the precise context for the events following the First World War and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire.  Discussion of this context would rapidly differentiate the recorded events of the 1920s from the likely consequences of actions in the 2000s, unless, that is, one did assume a set of timeless Arab attitudes, grounded in a view of the Muslim culture or tribal structures of the area as fixed and unchanging.  Such a view, it would correctly be pointed out, would deny the people of Iraq any capacity to act as independent historical agents or to make their own choices.  Once these assumptions were (rightly) exposed and questioned, the ‘relevance’ of the historical knowledge to the present would be seriously compromised.  These arguments against the war could furthermore be deflected in slightly different, if all-too-familiar, less confrontational fashion by thanking the historian-advisors for their input and suggesting that the historical knowledge they had provided would help avoid the repetition of similar mistakes…

The Myth of Relevance (Part 1)

[I have, you might have noticed, been rather creatively 'blocked' for the past few months.  I am trying to get myself back into writing, especially my book Why History Doesn't Matter, of which I have posted draft elements in the past.  To try and help in the process here is part of a chapter I have just recommenced working on (chapter 4), with the same title as this post.  This section was largely written about a year ago.  As ever, all (constructive and polite!) comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome.]

Thus far my argument has been composed of elements which are quite familiar within discussions of historical practice.  Yet, it is has also become clear that these apparent commonplaces have had little effect either upon how history continues to be written or upon how historical study is justified.  Indeed, it would seem that the implications of the points made have either not been followed up carefully or have been ignored as inconvenient.  This chapter pursues the exploration of this crucial disjunction.

We have seen in chapter 1 that history us more than the simple chronicling or description of past events or facts.  Chapter 2 demonstrated that the narratives of the past are artificial constructions that were rarely if ever experienced in the way recounted.  Chapter 3 developed this point to argue that, therefore, the story of the past does not tell us who we are and how we got here.  All this cannot but have a serious and detrimental effect upon the usual arguments for the relevance (or otherwise) of history.  Obviously, this matters.  People ignorant of the subject often claim that History is irrelevant.  Their claim is far from justifiable but the usual defences of the relevance of historical study are, on the whole, equally weak.  That weakness means that those who wish to deny the importance of an historical education can easily bypass them.  The form that such defences take is profoundly damaging to the discipline of history itself.     

What kinds of history, in what periods or places in history, are relevant and to whom?  And why?  The usually-deployed arguments for historical relevance have a tendency to valorise some forms of history (usually modern, often very modern; sometimes specific regions or historical themes) over others (ancient and medieval, or unfashionable thematic areas like diplomatic history).  The problem is that, especially when combined with the academic politics to which I will return, this can lead to an ever-increasing concentration on ever narrower themes and time-spans.  One might say that this need not matter; that, although breadth of knowledge or awareness never did any historian any harm, the simple knowledge of a wide range of things that happened in the past is in itself fundamentally unimportant to the value of historical study.  That argument has some logical force.  However, range and diversity in historical endeavour need defending on different grounds from those usually employed.  If it is properly carried out, all historical study is of equal value and relevance (albeit in different ways from those usually proposed), whether one studies Hitler or the Hittites.  No period or topic has a greater claim to being more relevant than any other.  According to the criteria by which historical relevance is normally accorded, though, no history is actually relevant at all.  Judging history according to the usually-assumed criteria of relevance is a mistake; it perpetuates a myth.

Part of the problem with traditional justifications for history originates in the acceptance, castigated in the previous chapters, of the idea that each episode in a historical narrative finds its necessary and sufficient cause in those that precede it.  Using the metaphor of the snooker balls [A crib from Bertrand Russell, IIRC [actually Hume and billiard balls - with thanks to a Mr Danny Chaplin]: you can observe a sequence of events but not causation itself or whether the results are determined by intention: I hadn't actually written this bit up when I wrote this about a year ago and I stll haven't! So I can't remember quite what I had in mind!] we saw that this is a very poor way of envisaging historical cause and effect.  If this argument is accepted, then a critical weakness is exposed in the claim that, to understand how things are here and now we need to comprehend things that happened, here, immediately beforehand.  But, even if this critique is not accepted, one is left with the problem of how far back ‘relevant’ history goes.  If the events of 1945-2015 can only be understood in by reference to those since, say, 1939-45 then surely the events of 1939-45 can themselves only be comprehended by reference to those of 1914-39, which in turn can only be  grasped via study of the period 1870-1914, and those events make sense solely in the light of history between 1815 and 1870.  And so on, back to the earth cooling.

The only means of escaping this bind come through the simple exercise of academic power.  Most historians are specialists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and so have a vested interest in staffing their departments with ever more specialists in ever narrower and more specialised areas of modern history.  Once a critical mass is attained, the dynamics of university departmental politics make it increasingly difficult to change this situation.  As more members of staff offer increasing numbers of modern options then, logically inevitably, more students take modern history.  This fact is then read après coup to argue that modern history is what most students want.  When a particular era dominates school curricula and when the burden of fees and debt understandably reduces an undergraduate intake’s confidence in trying out new periods and places of history, the two points merge and a sort of cock-eyed market principle comes into play to underline departmental politics.  We must give our student-customers what they want.  As pre-modern history becomes more marginal, specialist staff are called upon to teach ever longer and broader stretches of history, usually well beyond their detailed knowledge.  This in turn underlines the idea among students and specialists in later eras that nothing much of importance changed or happened across these millennia and thus that a single lecturer can reasonably be charged with covering the entire period between the fall of Rome (or, in the States, ancient Sumer) and the Italian Renaissance.  And so the log-rolling continues apace.

I have witnessed these dynamics in action with modern historians but the attitude is contingent; it is not intrinsic to modern history.  Historians of other times and places are equally capable, when in positions of dominance, of justifying their own prejudices with high-sounding principles and using them to entrench their current superiority.  I have also experienced much the same dynamics in other institutions among medievalists and have seen traces of it among classicists and early modernists too.  This is well attested in the US as well as the UK.  Nor is this sort of academic politicking confined to history.  It is visible across many other disciplines.  Witness changes in subject matter and coverage    in modern language departments, again frequently to the detriment of the earlier periods taught, or the witch-hunt against continental thought in British philosophy departments.  The point is that what is presented as logical, natural or automatic is usually the product of specific, local operations of power.  Indeed I will be arguing that teaching and learning this point is one of the most important purposes of history.  Thus the arbitrary cut-off points used to determine when history ceases to be relevant are part of a battery of tactical ruses within the petty departmental politics of the university, not something that would emerge from serious historiographical theory.

One can isolate similar contingent political principles used to justify the arguments in favour of the history of a specific region being more ‘relevant’ than that of another.  Here, the pressures usually – though sadly not always – come from outside academia.  Typically they originate with politicians of a conservative bent who wish to present a particular national narrative to the schoolchildren of their country.  This has been a much-debated issue in the United Kingdom for some time but it is by no means limited to, or especially extreme within, British politics.  French history has been subject to analogous pressures and the political demands made of US public schools by conservative state governments are often much more disturbing.  The idea that one particular narrative is natural or represents ‘the truth’ is highly questionable.  Such narratives, as we have seen, are artificial constructs designed to make a particular point.  A key issue is the arbitrary selection of the geographical zone in question.  In the British example, the determination of a particular off-shore archipelago might reasonably be seen as a solid enough justification for the geographical delineation of a long-term historical narrative.  Of course, it is never so simple.  It is a commonplace that ‘British history’ all too often means ‘English history’, with Scots, Welsh and Irish playing only walk-on parts or, as I once put it, walked-on parts.  What is England or Scotland or Wales in a long-term context?  All these are specific units of the earth’s surface with no natural connection and, perhaps as a result, no very long-term social or political unity.  England has existed, as currently defined geographically, for under 1000 years and yet is, by that definition, the oldest of the four British polities by some margin.  Even then, the precise delineation of the Anglo-Scottish border was only fixed in its western reaches after  the Union of the Crowns in 1603.  As far as Berwick upon Tweed is concerned, the issue has been debatable even longer.  Although Berwick is currently located administratively in England, Berwick Rangers play their football in Scotland.  Scotland only acquired the isles at various points in the later Middle Ages.    Wales never had a unitary existence before English conquest and administration except, conceptually and inversely, as that part of southern Great Britain which was not ruled by an English king or kings.  Ireland has never been politically unified, and certainly was not before the Anglo-Norman landing in 1166.  All these points render questionable the idea that the history of these regions should naturally or automatically be relevant to all those who currently live within them.  And that leaves aside the even thornier issue of whether all those people who currently occupy these zones constitute any kind of unitary ‘nation’ in any case.  The issue, obviously, is not limited to the British Isles.  Exactly the same points could be made, usually with even greater reason, in more or less any other country of the globe.  The issues of the relationship between history and modern identity will resurface later. [In a chapter entitled '"We are not "them"; "they" were never "us"']

The only way to combat these points would be to use the history of the regions to question the usual assumptions, to show the historical disparity of the people who come to occupy England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland today, to show the fortuitous, accidental un-natural means by which these portions of territory or space have been thrown together as political units.  This might, one could reasonably argue, have a relevance to the modern population of a particular country.  At the same time, though, a couple of other points would be implicit.  One would be that the usual presuppositions according to which a regional history would automatically be more relevant to its modern population than the history of another area would be undermined.  The assumptions according to which the inhabitants of a geographical area naturally constituted a nation with a shared history would be – in the correct sense of the word – deconstructed.  Crucially, the value of history would be displaced, from the transmission of narratives of ‘who we are and how we got here’ to the critical questioning of claims to be able to say either who ‘we’ are or how ‘we’ got here.  The lesson would be quite the opposite of that which is usually claimed as relevant.  History would rather be concerned with how ‘we’ could have got somewhere else and how what ‘we’ mean by ‘we’ (and thus, implicitly, ‘them’) changed constantly through time.  ‘We’ have not always existed.  The exercise would be one of critically thinking through how the past is presented and manipulated.

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.

Why history *doesn't* matter: a new intro

[The piece linked to in the previous post inspired me to go back and rework the draft chapter 1 of Why History Doesn't Matter.  Here is the new opening.]

“We do not need ‘experts’ to tell us what to think any more”

- Conservative [Now UKIP] MP Douglas Carswell[1]

We don’t need no education

- Roger Waters[2]

In June 2009 the Observer ran a piece entitled ‘They’re too cool for school: meet the new history boys and girls.’[3]  Faintly ridiculously, it continued ‘[t]heory is a thing of the past for these hip [sic] young historians’.  So, it turned out in several cases, was any actual training in the discipline.  Two had left university after their first degree (which was not specified as having been in history); another was a geographer.  Four of the six were, at the time, under thirty but that had not stopped at least one from having turned out three books by then.[4]  As training for the role of historian, one had been features editor at Men’s Health magazine; another had been an actress.  One at least had been a ‘researcher’ on a television programme presented by right-wing controversialist and former-historian David Starkey.  None of this lack of training or qualification, however, got in the way of the presentation of this group as ‘historians’, who were ‘leading the fight-back’ against history’s decline in popularity. 

A year or so later, the then twenty-seven-year-old William Hastings Burke published a book about Albert Goering.  Like some of the glittering young things in the Observer article, Burke had no historical education at all.  This nevertheless did not prevent his publisher (presumably with his approval) writing his profile thus:  ‘Fed up with the stuffy academic approach to history, he is part of a new generation bringing history up to speed.’[5]  Who needs any training in the historical discipline?  Evidently, to ‘bring it up to speed’ history needs people who, in almost any other academic subject, would be regarded as ‘not knowing what they were talking about’.

In November 2013, the Daily Mail printed a piece entitled ‘The history girls: meet the women building a bright future from the past’.[6]  This piece shows an interestingly gendered variation on the theme.  For here, five of the seven women featured actually did have a higher degree in history and indeed three had proper University posts.  Self-confidently riding to the rescue of an apparently failing discipline, unencumbered by any actual training or qualification, turns out unsurprisingly to be a mainly male (and – even less surprisingly – a male Oxbridge) thing.  Also unlike the earlier Observer article, this piece was written by one of the ‘historians’ featured – if they want coverage, do women have to do it themselves?  The piece also had a number of less positive features.  There was objectification, a concentration on glamour, posed photos in nice outfits and – unlike any of the male historians – mention of their marital status and the number of their children.  Dwelling on an essentialist ‘women’s history’ the piece entirely avoided the feared word ‘gender’.  This was the Daily Mail after all.  Once again, two of the rising stars, who had ‘rescued studying the past from the clutches of fusty academia and changed our view of yesteryear for ever’, had no immediately evident historical qualification.

Let us look a little closer at the types of history being written by these rising stars.  Overwhelmingly it is descriptive narrative or, above all, biography, especially of high-status women: Emma Hamilton, young Queen Victoria, Mary Tudor, queens and consorts, the Wyndham sisters, or Henry VIII, Lord Castlereagh, the Plantagenets.  Otherwise it is the salacious (Victorian prostitutes, royal concubines, lonely hearts adverts) or the gimmicky (the private lives of saints [see also the salacious]; a visitor’s guide to Tudor England).  If this represents the way history is going it is time for us all to catch a bus in the opposite direction as soon as possible.  With the exception of a couple of the more academically-qualified female scholars, their comments on historical method are, as one might expect, at best naive.  “I think writing your books with specific political aims in mind is an old-fashioned approach”, opines Claudia Renton (with no qualification higher than a BA). “It's not particularly helpful. I think if you produce a good narrative history, which convincingly creates the world you're writing about, then people will read it and draw their own conclusions.”  Kate Williams appears to have been stuck in a time-warp since about 1970 (ironically given the article’s repeated allusion to time machines and time capsules): “Women’s stories have been neglected for so long – unless they were queens. Exploring the history of women is a way of redressing that imbalance.”  Sometimes the comments are simply bizarre: “Being male or female is important to us now but we shouldn’t assume it was important to people in the past.”   On occasion, however, they are more representative, if no more sophisticated.  Susannah Lipscomb (with, unlike most of the others – especially the men – a PhD and a prize-winning journal article to her name), declares that “History tells us the story of who we are and where we’ve come from; it reassures us that we aren’t the first to walk these paths.”  It is this distressingly widely-held point of view that the present book seeks to demolish.  This is precisely why history doesn’t matter.

---

[1] Quoted in http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-economy-is-desperately-in-need-of-more-productive-young-immigrants-8931222.html (accessed 10 Nov.2103).

[2] ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)’ (1979).

[3] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jun/28/history-starkey-historians-writers, accessed 7 November 2013.

[4] Five of the six were educated at Cambridge, the other at Oxford, illustrating neatly how class and cultural capital continue to function ahead of actual merit and experience in ensuring access to patronage, opportunity and resources.

[5] http://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/william-hastings-burke/, accessed 7 November 2013.

[6] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2479096/The-History-Girls-meet-women-building-bright-future-past.html, accessed 7 November 2013.

History Never Happened

[This is the next rough draft instalment of my work in progress, Why History Doesn't Matter, which (currently) follows on from the second part of 'The Siege' (here).  Essentially the argument in this section (which is hardly novel or original, I admit) is that history - as opposed to The Past - doesn't exist until we shape 'the past' into 'history' in the present and that there are some key issues involved in history-writing that differentiate it from chronicling or description of the past.  This will lead (in subsequent sections) to a dissection of common justifications for history and an exploration of the ethical and political demands that inhere in history-writing.  The issue of remembrance and mourning, or a confrontation with what might seem to be the implication of the argument in this section, which is a trivialisation of events like The Holocaust, will be dealt with later.

I've no idea why the font changes part-way through and then changes back again.  It's something to do with importing the file from my computer, but there you go.]

Thurbrand and Uhtred

To illustrate the difference between serious conceptions of history and popular presentations of the past, I offer a deliberately provocative-sounding epigram: history never happened.  To illustrate this, I will employ a tale written in twelfth-century northern England.[1]  It goes like this:  Once upon a time there was a powerful and energetic earl called Uhtred who saved Durham from the Scots.  Uhtred was married three times.  His second marriage was to the daughter of one Styr Ulfsson and was contracted on condition that Uhtred would kill Styr’s enemy, Thurbrand.  Alas, when Uhtred came to swear allegiance to King Cnut, his new ruler (and old enemy), in around 1018-20, Thurbrand and the king’s soldiers ambushed him and forty other chief men and killed them all.  Uhtred’s brother Eadwulf succeeded him in the earldom but when he died Ealdred, Uhtred’s son by his first wife, became earl and killed Thurbrand.  Thurbrand’s son, Carl, then campaigned against Ealdred until the two were prevailed upon to become sworn brothers and go on pilgrimage together to Rome.  Unfortunately, the ship upon which they were to sail was delayed by bad weather so whilst they waited, Carl entertained Ealdred at his home in Holderness in the East Riding of Yorkshire.  One day, whilst showing Ealdred around his estate Carl killed Ealdred in (to quote the source)

a wood called Risewood and still today the place of his murder is marked by a small stone cross.  Some time later, the grandson of Earl Ealdred, Earl Waltheof, who was the son of his daughter, sent a large band of young men and avenged the killing of his grandfather with the utmost slaughter.  For when the sons of Carl were feasting together at their elder brother’s house at Settrington, not far from York, the men who had been sent caught them unawares and savagely killed them together, except for Cnut whose life they spared because of his innate goodness.  Sumerled, who was not there, survives to this day.  Having massacred the sons and grandsons of Carl, they returned home bringing with them much booty of various kinds.

This is a fascinating story but what makes it relevant to my argument is the way that historians have read this story as the tale of a ‘feud’: a vendetta with each murder justified by the last and justifying the next.  In other words, they have seen the characters in this tale as impelled to act by the past events that weighed upon their shoulders.  In this way of seeing, individuals were bound to act in particular ways because of the demand of the ‘blood-feud’.  They had no choice; such was the burden of expectations about honour and duty weighing upon them.  They are prisoners of their history.  For these reasons, what we can call the Northumbrian ‘feud’ can stand as a useful illustration of common conceptions of the individual’s relationship to history.  A person is constructed by the events of the past; her identity is forged and defined by those events; membership of a group is determined by shared memories; actions are largely explained as brought about by specific historical inheritance, or heritage.  But let us look at this story more closely.

It illustrates beautifully the fact that history is only constructed after the event.  It is written as a story; English is perhaps the only western European language where the word for ‘history’ is not commonly also used as the word for ‘a story’.[2]  The account also shows that how we choose to tell that story is crucial.  This point is often associated with the ‘post-modern’ turn in historiography but it has actually been made since the very earliest days of what we might think of as modern history-writing.  People like the author of this story (known to scholars as ‘the Durham Anonymous’) select episodes from the past and link them together to make a single strand of narrative.  In this case it was the story of a feud.  But did it really happen like that or were the events simply written up in that way? 

As related by the anonymous author, the episodes in the story of the Northumbrian ‘feud’ sound unproblematic, linked by a straightforward chain of cause and effect unfolding through time.  They fit the model of early medieval man, caught within a web of relationships and demands, not of his own making but inherited from the past.  In fact, though, long gaps separated the acts of violence.  It took ten years for any violence to erupt as a result of Styr’s alleged injunction to Uhtred to kill Thurbrand.  Styr’s daughter had died and Uhtred had remarried in the interim, surely freeing him from Styr’s demand.  Furthermore, it was actually Thurbrand who did the only recorded attacking.  A further seven years or more must have elapsed before Ealdred exacted his revenge on Thurbrand.  The episode after that is interesting.  Thurbrand’s son Carl is not described as trying to find an occasion to carry out his vengeance killing.  Instead, he and Ealdred tried to do away with each other.  This period was another long one.  Carl’s killing of Ealdred dates to 1038, twenty-three years after his father had killed Ealdred’s father (the first event in the ‘feud’), and at least ten after Thurbrand’s murder (the second event).  The anonymous narrator proceeds from Ealdred’s death to say simply that ‘some time later, the grandson of Earl Ealdred, Earl Waltheof, … avenged the killing of his grandfather with the utmost slaughter.’  Some time later …  In fact, the Settrington massacre, the fourth and final episode of the Northumbrian ‘feud’, took place in 1073/4, thirty-six years after Ealdred’s murder.  Carl killed Ealdred four years before Waltheof was even born. 

These four acts of murderous violence were thus spread over fifty-eight or fifty-nine years.  Most were separated by at least a decade.  A fairly long list of other lethal episodes can be compiled for Northumbrian history in this period – several are mentioned by our source.  They involve some of the men and families involved in the story of the ‘feud’, largely because these were prominent families competing for political authority, but as far as we know they did not result in vendettas.  This casts doubt on the idea that eleventh-century people really were governed by the demands of blood-feud.  Furthermore, if blood-feud compelled individuals to act to defend family honour, as we are often given to believe, the Northumbrian events make even less sense; some of the people involved were almost as closely related to the people they were killing as to the people they were (allegedly) avenging.

A lot of selection is going on here, from a background of violence and killing, in order to create this story, this long, unilinear saga of murder and revenge.  Like all historians, the ‘Durham Anonymous’ chose which story to tell and how to tell it.  The history of eleventh-century Northumbria has thus come to be that of the ‘feud’ between the families of Uhtred and Thurbrand.  However, the events were not experienced like that that as they occurred, as the complex mass of events unfolded.  The hi/story of the Northumbrian feud was made after the event; it never actually happened.

When Waltheof slew Carl’s sons it is very likely that he said he was avenging his maternal grandfather, appealing to the notions of vengeance that existed at the time.  Similarly, when Carl killed Ealdred it is likely that he justified this in terms of avenging his father, Thurbrand’s, death at Ealdred’s hands.  Yet, each episode of the Northumbrian ‘feud’ can be explained according to the precise political circumstances that pertained when it took place.  Uhtred’s and Thurbrand’s families were important Northumbrian kindreds, members of which occasionally found themselves in competition for authority.  This region was distant from the power-centres of the eleventh-century kingdom of England so such rivalry was frequently resolved violently.  The principal aim of each act was to remove a rival, not to avenge the murder of a long-dead kinsman.  The deed was then justified by appeal to such a past wrong.  Put another way, the actors in the story played for very specific stakes grounded in the politics of the present but legitimised and explained their actions by selecting an event from the past.  This, they claimed (rather than the desire to own more land in Teesdale, for example), compelled them to do what they did.  The past, in their view, absolved them of responsibility for wrong-doing in the present.  They depicted their deeds as having been motivated by a higher principle. 

The so-called Northumbrian feud neatly illustrates how people relate to the past and how they connect their conception of the past to their actions in the present.  The past is used today not very differently, if at all.  The past is dead and gone and is (beyond the ‘aesthetic moment’ discussed in chapter 1) incapable of exerting any force or pressure on anyone.  That – perhaps rather obvious – point is the cornerstone of this book’s argument.  When we say we are defined by the past, let alone prisoners of the past, we are in fact saying that we choose to define ourselves, or to constrain our own actions, according to our conception of what happened in the past.  The past includes everything that happened between the Big Bang and a second ago: innumerable doings, sayings, thoughts.  The past is incapable even of being comprehended as such, except in the most abstract temporal sense of ‘stuff that has happened’.  Before it can properly be envisaged, it must be converted into a narrative, a hi/story.  So, in an important sense, history comes before the past!  To be comprehended, the past must be given a plot with a beginning a middle and an end (even if that end is not really an end but simply the present – a deferred ending). 

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away

A simple thought experiment may serve as a further illustration.  At any given time we can conceive of yesterday in general abstract terms as ‘the day before today’ but before we can have any real grasp of it, for example in writing up a diary, we have to decide upon what things happened that give shape to that general concept, in other words, the things that turn it into a narrative.  It may be that one simply selects the main structuring events of the day: got up; had breakfast; went to work; came home; watched TV; went to bed.  It might be that, as here, these things have no especially marked ‘plot’ to them; they are just the things that happened: a sort of bare chronicle (we will return to the issue of chronicling).  But even here the meaning of the events takes shape not just from their naming (‘breakfast’, ‘work’) but from their sequence.  ‘Came home, went to bed, had breakfast’ would not usually make much sense (unless of course one worked the night shift and had breakfast in bed). That record gives shape and meaning to the abstract twenty-four hours of ‘yesterday’ and turns it into the narrative of an ordinary day.  There has still been selection.  This is hardly a record, even a chronicle, of the whole day.  A selection of what, at the time, we thought mattered has been made.  All the conversations at work and at home, the details of the trip to and from work, what was on the telly, what was eaten for breakfast (and lunch and dinner have even been omitted) and many other things have been left out.

Now suppose that, having written our diary, we have breakfast, go to work and are summoned to see the boss.  We are then told that we’ve been made redundant.  Now yesterday goes from being a dull day, its hours frittered and wasted in an off-hand way, to being ‘my last day in the job’.  From being just another day those twenty-four hours now acquire an added, perhaps even a certain tragic, quality.  The diary could be amended accordingly.  Certainly, how our diarist saw that day would change importantly.  Let us continue the experiment.  Suppose that the person who asked you the time at the bus stop yesterday, and with whom you had a brief exchange of pleasantries, began to be a regular at the bus stop, someone you got to know, and who in time became your husband/wife/partner.  Something that didn’t even seem worth recording on the day it happened and possibly for some time afterwards becomes a major shaping event of your life.  The dull day has become ‘the day I met my partner’, possibly one of the most important days of your life – one would like to think so.  Yet, at the time that that event happened, at the time that that ‘history’ was made, you didn’t even notice it.  Only later does it become part of a history that ‘made you who you are’.  Any number of variations on this basic scenario are possible, turning a bland unit of time into a key structuring element of the history of a life. 

Note, though, that the events, the elements themselves, do not change; it is how one characterises them, how one selects them and positions them within the narrative, and how one casts that narrative.  Events rarely carry an inherent meaning– those that do are the really traumatic ones.   If we return to the diarist, losing her job that day may have been the beginning of a long period of years of unemployment and of being treated, in spite of one’s best efforts, as an idle scrounger by tabloid editors, journalists and their readers and by populist Conservative (and Labour) governments.  Every moment of that conversation with the boss, every vain attempt to keep the job, to talk the boss out of her decision might become etched on the memory; the last day at work becomes a poignant twenty-four hours.  Alternatively, though, the diarist might have gone home and applied for another job, been successful, risen to the top of the company, met her partner and lived a very happy period of her life.  In that case, one doubts that any especial elements of the redundancy conversation are remembered and the event itself becomes something of a happy moment of transition to something better.  And didn’t I show her in the end?  That ‘last day at work’ remains a boring, unremembered twenty-four hours.  But it happened just the same, in just the same way.  The historical Real, the un- (or pre-) symbolised mass of ‘things that happened’, the past, is always in its place.

Another variant future allows us to see the issue of how histories are made more clearly.  Suppose that, after a month or so on the dole the diarist gets a new job, similar to the last, and her life continues roughly as before.  How, and even whether, she remembers losing her old job is entirely a personal issue.  The act of being made redundant can be seen as a great personal affront or with equanimity as a hard decision that had to be made; the boss might become viewed as a personal enemy, even (or perhaps especially) if thought of in a friendly light earlier, or her standing in the eyes of the diarist might not change.  The diarist might still blame herself for not working harder, even though in fact she was a model employee, or retrospectively build herself up into a perfect company worker despite in reality having been a feckless slacker who was always likely to be first in line if job-losses had to be made.  And of course none of these histories is even capable of knowing the actual personal motivations of the boss herself, or the details of the company finances, etc.

These scenarios, at a micro level, illustrate the relationship between time, experience, record and the creation of history.  Such meaning that events have depends upon their place in a retrospectively constructed narrative.  The occurrences that matter have been chosen and placed in order (sometimes, of course, they are moved out of chronological sequence, whether deliberately or otherwise); their meaning depends on their juxtaposition with the other events selected within the type of narrative told; and that type of narrative depends entirely upon the contingent attitude of the narrator/rememberer.  However they are seen later on, though, at the time the events in the story were experienced in exactly the same way.  This is exactly how histories are made and written.  In the tale of Thurbrand and Uhtred, the ‘Northumbrian feud’, the exact same procedures were followed.  A selection was made (whether by the anonymous writer or his informants) from a vast number of different events and this was then arranged in a sequence to form the story of a feud, culminating in the tale of how Earl Waltheof avenged his grandfather.  Had the author or his sources been more inclined to support Carl’s family, one imagines that it would have been constructed in a very different way, probably from a different selection of past happenings.

The past, as the unity of all time, thought and action up until this very moment, here, now, happened and cannot be changed.  But, as I have just shown, it is absolutely meaningless in and of itself.  It only takes on meaning through the way its contents are selected and arranged in the present.  That history is something that can be and is changed.  Regularly.

None of the foregoing represents a startling new departure in ways of thinking about the past and history, although it still makes some people uncomfortable.  After all, a removal of responsibility for present actions through placing the blame upon an inherited history is fairly comforting.  What the discussion shows is that the past in itself has no weight.  Being dead and gone it is as light as air.  What weighs upon us is our own creation of a past, our own choices of how to see the past; our own decision to see ourselves and our actions as made by the past.  The purpose of this book is to show how we should liberate ourselves from these notions as a means towards a freer future.  This means rethinking why we do (or should do) history: ‘why history matters’. 

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[1] The story comes from an anonymous source called the De Obsessio Dunelmi – Concerning the Siege of Durham (a misleading title as the siege of Durham hardly features in this short but interesting tract).

[2] Compare Geschichte, histoire, storia, historía, etc.