The history of History: Lyotard, Derrida and the menace of the metanarrative

The second in an irregular series on the development of Historiography: enter the postmodernists leaving a trail of deconstruction

“ … the commentator traces through the text certain zones of reading, in order to observe therein the migration of meanings … It’s all in the text! Find the text! … The lexia is only the wrapping of a semantic volume, the crestline of the plural text, arranged like a berm of possible meanings (but controlled, attested to by a systematic reading) under the flux of discourse: the lexia and its units will thereby form a kind of polyhedron faceted by the word, the group of words, the sentence of the paragraph, ie, with the language which is its ‘natural’ excipient.”- ‘Roland Barthes’, quoted in Laurent Binet, The 7th Function of Language, Harvill Secker, London, 2017 (translated from the French by Sam Taylor)

By DAVID MYTON

For a concise summary of postmodernism let us turn to the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare: “Words, words, words” - (Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2, Line 210).

Big words, little words, portmanteau words, compound words, signs, signifiers, conceptual constructs, discourses, narratives, whatever … Pomo has them all, delivered to your brain in books, papers, reports, monographs, lectures, posters, symposia, plays, and film. Which is ironic since most postmodernists do not trust words, regarding them as ambage - slippery, unstable, not to be trusted, not to be believed.

Thus, the paragraph above may not be trustworthy: It is all words.

This essay is not intended to be an anti-postmodernism diatribe. I don’t believe it is the root of all evil and I think it’s a bit of a stretch to blame it on Marxism as not a few commentators do.

Some postmodernists may have flirted with Marxism, may even have been adherents for a while, but Marxism at root is a Grand Narrative - which postmodernists abhor - dreamed up by a couple of middle-aged white European blokes (Marx and Engels). Marx in particular was influenced by another middle-aged white bloke, Hegel (1770-1830), from whom Marx lifted the notion of the dialectic:

“[For Marx] The dialectic involves the transformation of primitive societies into slave states, slave states into feudal societies, and feudal societies into capitalist states. The contradictions in these societies are resolved through class conflicts, which change the organization of economic relations. As Marx declared, ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” (The Communist Manifesto, 1848) - cited in The Collector, What do Marx and Hegel Have In Common.

Nor is this essay an apologia for postmodernism. I am seeking only to place it within its historical and historiographical context to identify some of its defining features. I will follow this up next month with a more specific examination, including the role of the Frankfurt School in its development.

Back to the future: enter the Enlightenment

My previous essay on the development of Historiography looked at the influence of the European Enlightenment on 18th-19th century historians.

These scholars – empowered by new knowledge revealed by science and feeling themselves free of religious and spiritual interpretations of the past – embraced the new rationalism and empiricism in their bid to discover the true nature of reality through the application of inductive and deductive reasoning, and then representing it accurately.

Unlike the Pomo philosophers, they believed it was “feasible to discover truths about the character of reality by the application of reason”. (Munslow, The New History p30 - see References below for details of works cited)

The work of the English polymathic scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) underscored the importance of informed scholarly investigation, an approach embraced, for example, by Edward Gibbon and revealed in his epic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789.

His and other Enlightenment scholars’ concern now was not with divine purpose or miraculous interventions, “but with the interplay of personality, ideas, conditions and events which can yield some description and explanation of the fascinating process of historical change”. (Thomson, The Aims Of History, pp 64-65)

These Modernists believed that with scholarly scrutiny and analysis of all the available sources, they could discover the probable/possible historical meaning of events and actions. Historical knowledge rested on beliefs about the past “reached on the basis of reliable causal inferences starting from certain knowledge of present matters of fact”. (Leon Pompa, Human Nature and Historical Knowledge: Hume, Hegel and Vico, p23)

But there was room to move within this framework – and, indeed, to challenge its notions of narrative.

The self-consciously theoretical

For example, in 1929 the French historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre – determined to be “self-consciously theoretical” - established the journal Annales d’histoire economique et sociale which advocated analysis of “the big structures underpinning surface events of historical change” utilising methodologies borrowed from the disciplines of sociology and geography. As Munslow writes, this led to “the first major confrontation with the reconstructionist way of doing history”. (The New History, p131)

Shortly after World War Two Fernand Braudel and associated historians conducted innovative research involving Braudel’s notion of “total history”, reflected in his book The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.

In a departure from standard narrative history, he applied three measurements of time – the long run (la longue duree), the medium term of social, economic and political change, and the short term of structural, social, economic and political change – in order to write his “total history” of that time and age.

This approach proved to be very influential on up and coming historians who were looking for new ways to encounter the past.

Meanwhile, a couple of books published in the 1960s-70s indicated a general shift away from the standard Western European narrative histories at this time.

The first is philosopher Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched Of The Earth (published in France as Les damnes de la terre in 1961) - a searing critique of nationalism, colonialism and imperialism told through a study of the Algerian revolution against French control of the country. It was very far from being a triumphant account of the onward march of Western progress:

“... Listen: ‘Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe … Who dares speak thus? It is an African, a man from the Third World, an ex-native … (op cit, p8)

Then there came Edward W. Said’s Orientalism: Western Conceptions Of The Orient (Penguin, 1978), a scholarly (yet palpably angry) controversial analysis of Europe’s dealings with African and Asian countries and cultures. Interestingly, Said thanks (then) up-and-coming postmodernist Michel Foucault for his scholarly input into this influential study.

Incredulity toward metanarratives

It is Jean-Francois Lyotard who provides us with a working definition of postmodernism in his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge. He writes that he uses the term “modern” to designate

“… any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse that an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth [… I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”

By metanarrative Lyotard means any totalising conception of the world around us - grand, overarching theories (such as Science, Economics, History, Geography etc) that enable us to make sense of our lives and the “reality” in which we live.

These metanarratives derive from the Modernist notion developed during the Enlightenment that humans can discover the “truth” about the world and its phenomena through rational, logical, scientific study and research.

Thus Modernism over time embraced rationalist conceptions of progress, science, secularisation - any philosophy or belief that presupposed forward movement, purpose and meaning. Many 19th century-early 20th century historians held such views.

The word postmodern, then, designates the state of especially Western culture following the transformations and disturbances which had unfolded since the end of the 19th century.

These included two World Wars, numerous regional, inter-state wars, revolutions, decolonisation, the end of empires, the rise and fall of some totalitarian regimes, the advent of nuclear weapons, and most recently fears surrounding climate change have provoked uncertainty and disbelief around the supposed achievements of science, technology, literature and the arts.

In regards to history, everything we know about the past comes to us from historians, and/or artefacts, “whose purposes or meaning are explained to us by other experts in the form of a narrative or story”.

But the past that historians attempt to describe “is solely a product of their and our [the readers’] brains”. It has no concrete reality. (Stuart Sim, Derrida and the End of History)

Narrative language itself “has the ontological status of being an object; that it is opaque, self-referential” and so the “criteria of truth and falsehood do not apply to historical representations of the past”. Ultimately, then ..

“the historical past is only the creation of present historians, rather than existing in its own right”.

Logocentricity … an illusion of Western culture

Another postmodernist Jacques Derrida rejected the idea that meaning could be understood in its entirety by humans - that the meaning of words are “present” to us in our minds when we speak or write them, such that they can be passed to others who will grasp them. Derrida called this “logocentricity” - which he declared was an “illusion of Western culture”.

“For Derrida and his deconstructionist disciples, there are always gaps in communication, and no way meaning can ever be present in its totality at any one point … [Instead] meaning is to be considered as a process in a constant state of change …”

So, as F R Ankersmit suggests above, the words that exist to speak about reality become that reality. (cited in Michael Stanford, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History, p232).

This is obviously problematic for historians. Says Ankersmit

“... the historical past is only the creation of present historians, rather than existing in its own right. In historiography, then, the representation is the reality - texts are self-referential; they do not refer to anything else”.

Ankersmit adds that historians need to register postmodernists’ claims “that the events, structures and processes of the past are indistinguishable from the forms of documentary representation, the conceptual and political appropriations, and the historical discourses that constitute them”. (Cited in Stanford, op cit, p234)

In The Idea of the Postmodern, A History the Dutch scholar Hans Bertens says that if postmodernism has a common denominator it is …

“... that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthetic, epistemological, moral, or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted”.

However, Michael Stanford (op cit, p8) notes that in the English-speaking world philosophical remarks about history have usually been made by historians rather than philosophers. He declares:

“There is nothing new in the problems of objectivity, of causality, of relativism, of explanations or of laws in history.”

Historian Beverley Southgate insists that a narrative can be constructed that “will show postmodernism itself seems to be a natural (if not inevitable) outcome from, or culmination of, a number of previous ideas”.

She adds …

“... our conceptions of the past are not the same as the past itself (whatever that could mean) … the past itself is gone, and forever eludes us, out of reach; we can never ‘know’ it. Yet we are, or can be, burdened by it - trapped in it, borne down by it …”

To be continued at a later date …

REFERENCES

Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern. A History, Routledge, London, 1995

Alun Munslow, The New History, Pearson Education, Harlow 2003

Michael Oakshott, What is History? And Other Essays (ed Luke O’Sullivan), Imprint Academic, Exeter, 2004

William H Shaw, Marx’s Theory of History, Hutchinson, London, 1978

Stuart Sim, Derrida and the End of History, Icon Books, Cambridge, 1999

Beverley Southgate, Postmodernism In History. Fear Or Freedom? Routledge, London, 2003

Beverley Southgate, What Is History For?, Routledge, Oxon, 2005

Michael Stanford, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Blackwell, Oxford, 1998

David Thomson, The Aims Of History. Values of the historical attitude, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969