Ethically-engaged Early Medieval History-writing. Why it matters and how (not) to do it ... or 'They was asking for it!'

Every year I do a session on 'History and Ethics' with the students on our Public History MA course.  As you know, this is a topic that matters a lot to me, and about which I have blogged before (see posts with the label 'the unbearable weight' and/or 'ethics of history'). 

I like to open these discussions with these two passages written by a well-respected and prominent early medievalist.(1)

The first comes in the context of a passage trying to minimalise the extent or severity of Viking attacks on ecclesiastical persons and property.

In 860 the monastery of St-Bertin was attacked but the community had plenty of warning.  According to the author of a translatio written a generation later ... all the monks fled save four 'intent on martyrdom, save that God had to some extent decided otherwise'.  ... [The Vikings] had been 'hoping to capture some monks' - after subjecting three of the four who were 'older', thin and wasted' to 'painful acts of scorn and mockery' (such as pouring liquid into the nostrils of one of them until his belly was distended) [they] tried to take away the fourth, 'more succulent than the rest'.  The idea was surely to take this one for ransoming.  He was the only one to be killed.  He refused to go quietly, throwing himself to the ground and insisting that he wanted to die on the spot, where he might be buried 'in the cemetery of his ancestors, and his name be entered on the commemoration lists of his brother monks'.  Apparently out of sheer vexation at his obduracy, his captors began to beat him with their spear-butts', then pierced him with spear-points' ... and the cruel game got out of hand.  [I have added emphasis.]

The second comment is in the context of alleged Viking 'pillage, plunder and rape':

Among all the Annals of St-Bertin's references to Viking plunder and pillage, there is no mention of rape, and this is significant, given these Annals twice mention the episodes when the followers of Christian Carolingian kings committed rape, in one case the rape of nuns.  It hardly follows that Northmen never raped: it does seem that they were not notorious rapists. [Emphasis added.]

The second passage in particular tends to shock the students; the first less so (though I think it is every bit as bad).

I am not concerned with the 'Viking atrocity' debate, within which this is situated and about which I have written before.  What concerns me is the ethical implications of this piece.  It is one thing to say that the Vikings were no worse than anyone else (an argument with which I would agree), but this goes far beyond that and into an ethical relativisation of violence, torture and rape.  That, as you might imagine, I find objectionable, offensive and irresponsible.

Let's look more closely at the first paragraph.  Here, above all, the blame is shifted onto the victims.  The monks allegedly had 'plenty of warning', so they should have got away.  Silly old monks!  It was after all the four monks' own 'decision' to stay behind.  Wouldn't they learn?  Then we essentially have the torture (including waterboarding) of frail old men passed over without any comment, other than to quote the description in the contemporary source, which in this passage is in any case explicitly being 'read against', of 'painful acts of scorn and mockery'.  Finally we come to the monk whom the Viking wanted to take away. 'Surely', says the author, this was to ransom him.  Why 'surely'?  If this intention was attested in the source, the term 'surely' would not have been employed.  Why was the intention 'surely' to ransom him, rather than - say - to torture him to death for fun, to rape him (he was after all 'more succulent than the rest'), or anything else?  [Note that rape is only envisaged in this passage in heterosexual terms, although 'painful acts of scorn and mockery' is a broad category.]  And then maybe ransom him?  That interpretation is the modern historian's assumption and that seems to me to be unwarranted.  Why, we are authorised to ask, make that assumption?  Anyway, the monk refused to 'go quietly' and this excuses the Vikings (driven 'apparently by sheer vexation at his obduracy'; why 'apparently?'  Again this begs serious questions) for their act of pig-sticking him slowly to death.  Just to add the icing on the cake, this lengthy and painful murder is described merely as 'a cruel game'.  Boys will be boys, eh?  What can you do?

The second passage requires little by way of commentary.  There is, apparently, rape and then there is 'notorious rape'.  We might call this the 'Ken Clarke view' of history.  Whether the relative mention of rape by Christians and pagans might have other explanations within early medieval textual strategies is not considered.  Here, frequency of mention equals relative notoriety.  Frankly, I don't think much else needs to be said.

So - why does this passage vex me so much (other than the fact that is written by someone who, one would like to think, damn well ought to know better)?

For one thing it raises the issue, which I have discussed before, of the historical 'statute of limitations': how far back in the past do events have to be before it becomes acceptable to write about them like this?  Let's leave the obvious 'limit case' to one side for now.  Would it be considered acceptable to consider the Austrian troops rather brutally occupying Serbia during the Great War in this fashion, playing down torture and rape because allegedly no worse than what the Serbians did?  At what point does it become acceptable to go beyond the sometimes necessary but nevertheless pretty vapid 'well they were no worse than anyone else' argument(2) to actively playing down violence like this - actively introducing victim-blaming and assumptions about (*relatively*) benign intentions to the aggressors?  When?  Those Serbian civilians: they had plenty of chance to escape you know.  If they didn't flee, well that was their decision.  If they didn't want to 'go quietly' who, I ask you, among us, can blame the Austrian soldiers for shooting or bayoneting a few of them?  At least they weren't 'notorious rapists'.  Transposed to that context, the nature of the writing really becomes apparent.  Don't ninth-century people (and these were, I assume, real people - at least the author assumes so) deserve better?  Don't they deserve the same respect?

When the historicising of violence goes this far - as far as to attempt to excuse the perpetrators - what is the logical implication?  The logical implication is that, in certain contexts (so, why only historical?  why not geographical, social or cultural?) violence - here, murder, torture and rape - can be relativized.  Whenever we are thinking of the public role of history, or of the socially-committed historian (something that the author of this piece not infrequently strikes postures about) it seems to me that implying this sort of thing is the very last thing a historian ought to be doing.  To call this irresponsible would seem to be saying the very least, but I would go further.  I will say, unapologetically, that I find it disgusting.  Why, therefore, we are entitled to ask, is this kind of writing considered unremarkable and acceptable in a book about the ninth century when it would more than merely raise eyebrows if found in a book on the twentieth?

---

(1) You can, if you are interested, find the passages on pp.28-9 and p.47 of this book.  I have not named names directly because, although there is certainly no love lost between me and the author, the point of this blog-post is the general issue of attitude and acceptable methodology - that this sort of writing is seen as generally unobjectionable by the historical profession - not an ad hominem/feminam attack.

(2) My own Viking piece was about why, when the Vikings did the same as everyone else, they got a worse press for it and had demonstrably worse effects.

We Were All in it Together. A Brief (and basic) further historiographical reflection on the Great War debate

The piece I wrote on interpretations of the Great War in January has become the second most popular post on this blog.  Since then I have been doing a fair amount of reading of Great War history, on which more anon, time permitting.   I may indeed update and add to this post in the following days.  For now, let me recommend Hew Strachan’s The First World War as an antidote to the sheer oceans of second-rate or worse tripe available.  In particular, allow me to draw your attention to the blurb on the back cover, which describes the mud, blood and futility, not as a ‘myth’ put as ‘only part of the truth’.  I think that alone serves to mark it out from the Haigiography.  OK, I think the conclusion drawn at the end, that it was not a war ‘without purpose and meaning’, is a tad ambiguous and the phrase ‘objective truth’ appears on p.xix without evident irony but it is a book that anyone taken in by the Haigiographers ought to read as a corrective.  It is subtle and aware of material and historiography in several languages, unlike the almost entirely Anglocentric and Anglolexic (to steal a term from the late Tim Reuter) Haigiography.  Indeed it goes some small way to reassure me that – at least on occasion - people with prestigious posts in the Oxford history faculty may actually indeed deserve their resources and prestige.

My point today is simply a very basic historiographical one.  The currently fashionable narrative sees the critical position taken towards the First World War as inevitably located in the liberal culture of the 1960s.  ‘The most disrespectful decade’, Gary Sheffield dubs it, in a comment which surely seems pretty revelatory of his own political stance.  Take the tooth-spitting, mouth-frothing ire directed at ‘Oh What a Lovely War’, a ‘fatuous burlesque’ one wargames writer calls it in a gratuitous comment.  These people seem incapable of either comprehending the concept of satire or of seeing the film version at least in context - as an anti-war production that drew a lot of its popularity from the fact that it was released during the Vietnam War.  Be all that as it may, there is one point that ought to give us pause when considering Haigiographic revisionism as somehow representing the Truth, correcting ‘myth’.  Take the following list of soi-disant revionist (reactionary) authors : Steve Badsey, Gordon Corrigan, Christopher Duffy, Paddy Griffith, Richard Holmes, Alan Mallinson, Ian Passingham, Gary Sheffield. What do they all have in common (apart from sharing historical capabilities ranging, in my estimation, from ‘poor’ to ‘not particularly good’)?  No?  They are all retired army officers and/or have at some time been involved in teaching army officers, whether at Sandhurst or Cranfield.  Another raft of work (including, and I am not making this up, a PhD that shows that even the cavalry was well handled and made an important contribution in the Western Front) comes from the same stable.  To be fair, Strachan also taught at Sandhurst, proving that such points cannot ever be taken as having automatic, predictive, formulaic validity.  But be that as it may, surely that ought to calibrate their work and its claims to represent the ‘truth’ at least as much as the vague claim that work critical of the conduct of the war was produced in the permissive, ‘disrespectful’ ‘sixties.

Pursue the point.  If it is relevant that critical work stemmed from a particular ‘progressive’ moment in British history, when the post-war settlement furthered the welfare state, free education, proper health care and a general sentiment that ‘patriotic’ national wars of the old type, led by the traditional ‘Old Etonian’ social elite, were rather less than desirable, is the historical context of Great War revisionism not also significant?  Is it irrelevant that this work, seeking to rehabilitate the officer class, the Edwardian social elite, while denigrating liberal politicians, should be produced when Thatcherite and sub-Thatcherite (New Labour) governments were unpicking that post-war settlement, attacking the welfare state?  Is it insignificant that a political attack on critical attitudes to the war should be led by the government that is promulgating an insidious ideology of ‘we’re all in it together’ while making the rich richer and the poor poorer, while distracting the working class by creating out-groups of foreigners, whether immigrants or ‘Europe’, while promoting the entirely misleading ‘blame the Germans’ reading of the war’s causes and trumpeting patriotism and British values?

The old lie.

I will have more to say on this.

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.

Professor Grumpy's Historical Manifesto

[This is an edited bit of my introductory 'briefing' lecture to my new second-years yesterday.  I didn't get the feeling it went very well - I think they were expecting a 15 mins 'here's the course book and my office hours are...' rather than a full-on manifesto.  But still, I got some decent feedback later on...  A Facebook friend asked how we justify medieval history not long ago, so here's my answer.  This section came after a section about why late antiquity had attracted my interest, personally, about all the big changes that took place around 600, and about why they might be important.  That concluded, though, by asking why it mattered to know any of that.  Now read on...]

 

Why does any History matter?

Think of the ways in which people – maybe you – justify the study of history. I expect two themes come up: relevance and ‘how we got where we are’. I’d say, though, that no history is relevant … or alternatively that all history is equally relevant.

What do people mean when they say that history is relevant?

It’s, let’s face it, usually a justification for modern history. To understand the modern world, the argument runs, we have to understand its history. So, to understand the problems, say, of Iraq, Afghanistan, or Ireland, or the Balkans, we need to know the history of those regions. Sounds reasonable, but actually we don’t. It’s no more use to study the modern history of those regions than it is to study the end of the Roman world.

Why? Well, let’s look at the problem more closely. Let’s take, for example, a modern Ulster Unionist or Irish Republican, or a Serbian nationalist (or a nationalist from any other area – including Scotland). 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 (such as there’s a lot of at the moment), to know that in the 1830s 80% of Athens spoke Albanian? That the only reason that (allegedly) Socrates could still read a Greek newspaper if he came back to life is 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’s as close as Italian is to Latin)? No. It might get you punched in the face but it won’t help you understand why.

Knowing 'what really happened in history' is Chronicling not history.  And it isn't much practical use outside pub quizzes*. 1: It reduces history to simple fact-finding; and simple factual recounting isn’t history. 2: It assumes that the simple course of events explains them, and thus that the course of events naturally, inevitably, led to particular outcomes (where we are today). 3: Our modern nationalists aren’t operating under compulsion from the Past. The past has no power; it’s dead and gone. It can’t make you do anything. These people are choosing events from their understanding of the past to justify what they are doing or what they want to do in the present. 
*Though it does provide a useful basis for undermining the claims of Nationalists and others, and that is important, it's not (and this is really my point) really history.

There’s another justification. If we’d only known more about Iraqi or Afghan history in the 20th century – so runs the argument in e.g. John Tosh’s Why History Matters – we’d have thought twice about invading because we’d have seen what would happen. What – because these people always act the same way in response to certain stimuli, according to some kind of timeless national characteristics? Isn’t that just a mite – well – racist? There are some general similarities for sure between Iraq in the 1920s and in the first decade of the 21st century but to assume that the latter state of affairs was predictable from the former is essentialist at best.

These arguments are usually deployed to bolster a claim that modern history is somehow more useful or relevant but, as I’ve just shown, they’re all a bit weak theoretically, relying on a pretty poor conception of history: history as only a collection of fact. Further they provide no justification for any sort of cut-off point in how far back we go. By their own logic, there’s no reason why, to ‘understand’ Afghanistan today you shouldn’t go all the way back to Mahmud of Ghazni in the tenth century, or to Sikhander himself, Alexander the Great, or further. For if the events of say the 1990s can only be understood by studying the events of 1900-1990, then the explanation is incomplete, because surely the events of 1900 can only be understood in terms of those of 1800-99, and the events of 1800 by those of 1700-99, and so on back to the earth cooling. A modern ‘relevance’ cut-off point is purely arbitrary and contingent and doesn’t at all follow from the logic of the argument.

So: let’s unpack the historical project and see what the really important – and relevant – elements of the analysis are. In looking at our modern nationalist and his/her relationship with the past, what are we, essentially, doing? First of all we’re showing an interest in understanding the world view of another human being – I’ll come back to that. Second, though, we’re adopting a critical stance to his or her thought or world view. Thus we’re recognising similarity in the sense of a shared humanity, but simultaneously acknowledging difference. We’re not taking the nationalist’s account as gospel truth; we’re questioning it, examining it critically. And that goes for all the voices from or about the past, or from the past about the past. History is about never believing what you’re told – taking a stance of radical scepticism. Put another way, slightly flippantly, the question we are always asking is not ‘is this bastard lying to me, but why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ (an adapted quote from a famous journalist.)

And that’s exactly it, because what we’re doing after that analysis of the evidence is trying to understand why people are acting like that. Why are they making that cock-eyed use of the past? These are questions that require not data but theoretical models, an analytical tool-kit if you like – and you can get that tool-kit from the study of any history. Thus all history is equally valid, equally relevant – or equally invalid and irrelevant if you prefer!

The true point of history, as I see it is as a basis for engaging with, and action in, the world, not a simple exercise of sitting in a library finding out stuff about the Emperor Maurice or Stalin or Philip V. That exercise of critical engagement with what you’re told is a key to that. But there are other key elements at stake.

Another key point concerns the idea that history had to be like that, that it had to have particular outcomes, that the world we know was the natural outcome of all that. But nothing is ‘just like that’. It doesn’t have to be that way. To understand change you have to see all the other possibilities that were open and that could have come about. It’s about ‘keeping faith with the impossible’. Many of the things we think of as natural ways of classifying the world aren’t natural at all: like race and sexuality. If studying late antiquity does have an advantage it is in making that very clear. Late antique people didn’t see colour as the basis for their way of organising the peoples of the world; they didn’t have concepts of homosexuality or heterosexuality. Their ideas of sexuality were quite different.

Which brings us back to understanding the other: seeing these people as humans, like us, and yet somehow different; listening carefully to their stories but critically examining them. Paying attention to alternatives and different ways of doing things isn’t about wishy-washy relativism; it’s not saying that all things are equally valid – it is about trying to understand them.

All that gives us enormously important skills in dealing with, and acting within, our world in the present. When the papers tell us that this or that category of people are doing this, or are like that, or are to blame for something else, historical analysis gives us the skills of source criticism; it also accustoms us to think twice before accepting a judgement; it allows us to try and see other possibilities, the other side of the story. If we make a judgement it will almost certainly be a more sophisticated and less extreme one, but wherever we end up it will be a more responsible and informed choice of opinion and action, and if we spread that, we do good.

There’s a humanity that permeates the entire process of historical enquiry; the critical questions we ask, the desire to understand, which we must bring from history to our everyday lives. They make it impossible in my view to cast human lives off to the demands of the market, or the nation, or the class struggle. That’s why I always say there’s a huge ethical demand involved in history. Huge. Unbearable in fact. But a good historian doesn’t switch off her critical faculties when moving from the seventh century to the twenty-first. There is a demand for commitment there. So I hope you see why I think my politics are the politics of history; they’ve after all grown out of twenty-odd years of being an historian, and I think being a pretty good one at that.

Now – all this, I am sure is making some of you a bit uncomfortable. Good. History is meant to make you uncomfortable. Clio, the muse of history, is like Jesus: she brings not peace but a sword. She will make you rethink everything you think you know; everything you think you hold dear; she will make you question everything. Everything you were brought up with; everything you thought natural. She’s not here to wrap you in cotton wool and say ‘there, there’ everything is just how it’s supposed to be. She’s not there to bring succour to your view of your country, or smooth over the bad stuff that it did, or to soothe your conscience about the massacres perpetuated in the name of your religion, or the slaughter committed by people who at least claimed to share your political beliefs. She’s there to make you uneasy. She’s there to stop you from falling victim to her evil twin, Myth. In a sense I want to free you from feeling like the past controls us; that we have to base our identities in the present upon myths. That means we don’t have to feel guilty or apologise, either – just to be aware; to understand.

Put another way, the historian is the ‘Internal Affairs guy’. This is a well-known figure in popular TV ‘cop shows’ and rarely a ‘good guy’. He or she is there to suppose that the hero has lied or done something wrong and that the villains might have been wronged or be telling the truth. The character rarely turns out to be as unsettling as that but it works as an analogy. For me, the historian is not there to provide comforting truths but to question them. The historian must always be prepared to wonder whether the ‘heroes’ of history are not, in fact, the villains,

If you believe anything at all, if you want your belief to be solid, in other words, it has to be on the basis of taking it apart and putting it back together on the basis of radical scepticism.

Politicians of all sorts – left and right - always want to control the teaching of history. History is a real political football, and in the light of what I’ve just been saying you can see why. It’s about not believing what you’re told without close scrutiny; it’s about trying to understand the other; it’s about trying to see and evaluate another point of view. That makes history potentially VERY dangerous. What a history degree should be is three years of thinking dangerously. And the sixth and seventh centuries are as good a thing to think dangerously with as any other era.

So, voilà. That’s my historical manifesto. You can read my views on this sort of thing at various stages of development on my blog. The main thing is that that’s what I want this course to do – to bring out this sort of critical ethical tool-kit through the study of an interesting, and important period of change.

A Picture Says (Several) Thousand Words

Have a look at this picture.  It is entitled 'Genseric's Invasion of Rome' (Нашествие Гензериха на Рим), painted in 1835-36 by Karl Briullov (1799-1852) and is the property of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.  It is a new one to me and I came across it today as a result of its reproduction in a very interesting article in the American Historical Review: 'Barbarians Ancient and Modern', by Norman Etherington (AHR 116.1, Feb. 2011, pp.31-57: if you have access to JSTOR you can read it here), for which reference I am very grateful to Alex Woolf (although I ought to have known about it before...).

Notice that, although Genseric (or Gaiseric as he appears in my own book) is depicted as fairly 'white' he is nevertheless shown in very Turkish guise (this, after all, is a painting from Tsarist Russia, old, old enemies of the Ottomans): n.b the helmet.  But look, too, at how Gaiseric's warriors are overwhelmingly 'black'.  Not merely 'black', but veiled and black.  Now, it is documented that Gaiseric had Mauri (Moors) in his army when he sacked Rome in 455 but, leaving aside the difficult issue of whether the Moors were 'black' or not, and indeed of whether labels like 'black' and 'white' are applicable to late antique history, these veiled north African Moors are depicted as Muslims (which - obviously - was impossible in 455!).  The veiled North African Moor is an image that dates from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when the Almoravid Moorish caliphate invaded Spain (fighting Andalusian Muslims and north Spanish Christians alike).  The Almoravids belonged to a particular Muslim sect which prescribed the veil for men as well as women, as a mark of distinction and superior religious purity.  It's more than likely, of course, that Briullov knew nothing of this and just depicted the Moors as he knew them from more recent history, rather than deliberately 'islamicizing' them.  The overall point, though, remains the same.

When one looks at the general 'swarthiness' of even the 'white' Vandals (all darker-skinned than the Romans, especially the fair maidens of the latter), one of whom is wearing a turban, the story told by this picture is clear enough to decipher.  Here, the barbarian 'other', that 'blot' or veil hung to obscure the fatal flaws in the political status quo - pretty necessary in earlier nineteenth-century Russia, ten years after the Decembrist revolt - has been clearly filled in, or inscribed with, 'the Turk'.  Turks with their North African auxiliaries to be precise.  The Vandals attacked Rome from the south and the Turks lay to the south of Moscow, 'the third Rome'.

Obviously, this is just another example of how the barbarian figure has been used to personify the contemporary bogey-man, although quite an interesting one at that.  But, especially when one considers the long history of abuse of the barbarian figure (and how that is very much alive, well and currently, as it happens, inscribed with Turks, Muslims and indeed the veil) it behoves us to think very hard about how we write about the Barbarian Migrations to avoid that inscription.  It does not take a great deal of thought to realise this, which is why I have been so shocked by just how thoughtless - to put it mildly - the products of supposedly elite universities and holders of handsomely-remunerated chairs have been in their writing on the subject: people you'd like, however mistakenly, to think were at least capable of serious thought.  How can one study the Barbarian Migrations and not be aware of the baggage that that accompanies it?  I have also been disappointed - not surprised, but disappointed - to see myself labelled, by the apologists of these people, as the person who made the discussion of the uses of this bit of the past 'tasteless', 'bitter' and, most recently, 'nasty'.*  That depends on the scale of values of the observer.  It is pretty revelatory, nevertheless, and more than slightly disappointing, that the paideia of politically-conservative, supine middle-class academe comes out as more worthy of defence than the modern treatment of immigrants. (A lame defence of politically-supine history can be found here, as indeed can my continuing vilification as The Nasty One).  More on all this anon.

***

* In this regard, you might want to compare the tone and nature of any 'engagement' (if it can be so called) with my own ideas in this book with how I treat the author of that book, to whom we refer as 'Gussie Finknottle' here at HotE, in my book: n.b. pp.xv, 18-19 (esp. n.46), 177 n.48, (most critically) 180-85, 332 n.46, 334-5, 472-3, 474, 477 n.82.  See what YOU think...  I'd be interested to know.

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.]

History and Rioting (The Inevitable 'Riots' Blog Post): Part 2

Living in Interesting Times
"May you live in interesting times" runs the Chinese curse (allegedly). Those of us in the UK (and in many other countries to an even greater extent) are getting to know exactly what that means at the moment. Sometimes I wonder whether people can ever really experience the making of history (a complex theoretical issue which I won't go into) but up until about a fortnight ago I was wondering whether, if things in the UK went on as they were, whether we might be experiencing the making of an historical conundrum, the sort of thing that will give rise to endless exam questions in future decades and centuries, all boiling down essentially to one question: 'how the hell did that happen?'  I was taken back to this pondering in the letter by David Parker to the Guardian, linked to in Part 1 of these thoughts. 

My thinking went along these sorts of lines.  Imagine that we were historians working at some point in the future and read this narrative:  Once upon a time, there was a huge economic crisis caused by the irresponsible actions of the super-wealthy elite.  A government attempted to right the situation and in fact it was handling the situation reasonably effectively.  However, it had done other ill-advised things, such as getting involved in expensive and unpopular wars, and handled many other issues very badly and it, and especially its leader, were widely disliked.  So people believed that its economic record was very bad and it was overthrown and replaced by another ministry led by a shiny-faced young aristocrat who played well on his dour old opponent's failure to get within waving distance of charisma.  This new government, however, was based upon a very slender and tenuous control of the political core of the country.  Yet, to the surprise of many of those who had backed it, once in power it launched a series of repressive measures, taking rights and resources away from the people, especially the poor - reducing their ability to find work, to acquire education, to subsist in times of necessity, and many other things besides.  They were supported in this by other ministers who had hitherto based their status on advocating quite the opposite point of view.  And so far from doing anything to restrain the super-wealthy aristocracy, they even mooted the cutting of their taxes.  In the middle of all this, they decided to hold a marriage for a prince and princess at huge cost to the tax-payers.

If the next part of the narrative went 'and so it was that the people rose in revolution and herded the unpopular aristocracy and their government off to the guillotine', no one, I think, would be very surprised - whatever you might think of the rights and wrongs of political violence (to which, as you know, I am opposed).  Up until very recently the conundrum seemed to me to be why, in early twenty-first-century Britain, nothing happened at all.  People swallowed the myth of the deficit, and of the Labour Party's economic mishandling of some of the elements that produced the crisis (sure it made mistakes, but ones that most other governments were making at the same time; mistakes that only emerged with hindsight, and as we now know, re. Coulson, the NotW, etc., saying that you'd have done things differently with hindsight forgives all).  Peaceful protests were slapped down with heavy-handed policing.  Very minor disturbances (occupying Selfridges or wherever) were reported as terrible anarchist outrages, and people actually believed this.  A government with no popular mandate carried out extreme ideologically-driven slash and burn policies, some at least of which were not even in their manifesto, supported by a minority party that had gone to the electorate espousing entirely antithetical ideas.  And - so it seemed - got away with it, as people swallowed their nonsensical stories. The people seemed to have been lulled into a kind of political coma.  Why had people sat idly by as the last traces of a welfare state, created on a wave of popular idealism after a huge costly war, were dismantled around them? This seemed to be the making of a knotty historical problem - a really counter-intuitive development that bucked any attempt a historian might have made to predict what happened next.  Why, in comparative terms, did this happen in twenty-first-century democratic Britain, with an educated electorate and mass-communication, when similar actions had toppled governments and, indeed, heads in earlier autocratic regimes with largely illiterate populaces living in small-scale communities?  Interesting indeed.

Then the riots happened.  And of course it is too simple to say that it is all down to The Cuts, just as it is too simple to lump together all the actions in all the different towns and either say that they were all political or that they were all criminal.  But there is no getting away from the fact that there were no riots like this under thirteen years of Labour government (whatever the latter may not have done actively to ameliorate the situation it inherited) and indeed none since the last Conservative administration, particularly the last one to launch cuts and attacks on the public sphere like this.  To say 'ah, but it was just that all these problems were stoked up by labour and just happened to break out now' won't cut it.

There are issues of course that need to be teased apart, of which the following are just a few:

• The initial causes of the violence in north London
• Subsequent violence, looting and so on
• The role of gangs in the background to the riots and in the activities afterwards
• The specifics of the different communities in the towns involved

Now, even this very short list ought to make it clear that no catch-all explanation is going to work. It also brings out one feature of discussions in the past week that has really concerned me and that is the sheer poverty of vocabulary in British political discourse. We are given two choices: either we condemn, or we condone the violence. These events brought out, as such things are wont to, the best and worst in human beings. In the best, we saw the father of one of the boys pointlessly killed trying to defend their property speak with great compassion and humanity; in the worst we saw an already assaulted East Asian visiting student helped up, only to be cynically robbed of his possessions. Extreme events have a tendency to produce the best and the worst. Great heroism took place during the London Blitz; so did considerably less heroic actions. When I wrote a book about warfare I commented that battles, concentrations of extreme emotions, produce great acts of self-scrifice and heroism, and of cowardice and cruelty.

Yet, the BBC (at its very worst here) and other media appear to have gone down the same route as it did with the - as everyone can now surely see - massively-exaggerated cases of window-breaking etc during the anti-Cuts protests: 'But surely you, X, must condemn this violence?' 'Well, I think it's a complex issue that cannot be judged so simply...'  'Aha, so you condone this sort of violence!'  This simple binary choice won't suffice.  People did do many things that must very obviously be condemned; they did many other things that are - I would say - deeply regrettable, not least because they hurt their own community more than anyone else's, and they did things (like stealing ice-cream cones) that frankly I don't give a monkey's cuss about, one way or the other.  I would not have a problem with the trashing or looting of multi-national companies' property were it not  for the fact that the costs of such actions won't be borne by the directors and principal shareholders but by the shop-staff and other workers at the lowest level.  The problem with the vocabulary of condemnation, when applied in blanket form as - naturally - the government wants it applied, is that it reduces the issue to the simple blaming of individuals without further analysis.

One doesn't have to look far for analogies.  Take the Metropolitan Police.  What events of the past few years have shown is that while the Met is very effective at blowing the heads off unarmed Brazilian electricians and at valiantly herding largely unthreatening middle-class school-children and young adults into cul-de-sacs and hemming them in there for hours (provided enough warning is given for them to get sufficiently tooled up and mob-handed), when a spontaneous outburst of serious public disturbance occurs it is - shall we say? - considerably less effective in 'defending the public'.  Does this mean I have no sympathy for the bobbies who find themselves in the front line faced by angry mobs, in the course of doing a job that is difficult and in its basic, founding principles entirely commendable?  Of course it doesn't.  But nor does it mean that I can condone white-washing or - and this is the important bit - dumping all the blame for the killing of Ian Tomlinson just onto the individual officer that carried out the actual actions that ended up killing him (any more than I 'condone' his action).  The problem goes, and the analysis has to go, further than that.  You do see, I hope, the analogy.  It's not direct or equivalent but it is about the similar problems that occur when you are simply given the choice between blanket condemnation or condoning of all the actions of individuals or even organisations, when it might be structures and context that need attention.  Historians are supposed to be able to look at the complex mix of individuals, motives, structures and contexts in the analysis of events.  Not that this means - as I have suggested before - that they should not pass moral judgement (or, perhaps better, at least present their account in such a way as to reveal a moral compass as well as the complexities).  In some ways this is an interesting contemporary case-study.

In some superficial ways our hitherto evidently aberrant historical narrative has returned to form.  We have had our 'peasants revolt' and the aftermath has been entirely in the usual mold.  Judges across the land have competed, so it seems, for the 'Judge Jeffreys Memorial Award' for absurdly harsh sentencing.  Plenty have compared the sentences dished out to rioters with the (lack of) sentences handed down to fraudulent, corrupt MPs, and the size of the sums of money illegally obtained in both cases.  The hypocrisy has been astonishing.  For trying to start a riot (on Facebook) - a riot that didn't happen - two lads get 4 years in jail.  Cameron divested himself of the cliche about justice needing to be seen to be done, while not heeding the first part of the phrase - that justice needs to be done.  This is not justice.   My new favourite historian can be seen as inciting murderous vigilante violence on his Torygraph blog, and nothing happens at all.  Inciting riotous violence - bad: inciting murderous repressive violence - good.  I suspect (indeed I hope) that the way the narrative does seem to have jolted back to some sort of historically 'normal' course (after all even Nick Clegg, in a show of political clairvoyance and perception that he has subsequently lost, it seems, predicted the riots himself, well over a year ago) suggests that this 'story' has some way to run yet.

I have wanted to break these thoughts up into more manageable chunks.  In the next I want to explore some of the issues involved in this violence from a historical perspective.