CONTINUING CRISIS OF HISTORY: NEW ITERATIONS
Tomasz Wiśniewski in conversation with Kalle Pihlainen
TOMASZ WIŚNIEWSKI
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Tomasz Wiśniewski has studied history at Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań, Poland). In July 2023, he defended his PhD thesis, “Postsecular History: Knowledge of the Past between Science, Politics and Religion.” He is interested in theory of history, philosophy of history, intellectual history, and political philosophy. He is the author of “Hayden White: A Postsecular Perspective,” Rethinking History 24, no. 3–4 (2020), 388–416. His current book project is forthcoming in Cambridge University Press’s Elements in Historical Theory and Practice series, which is edited by Daniel Woolf; his project is titled Historical Thinking in a Postsecular Age.
Kalle Pihlainen is currently a university researcher in philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, History and Art Studies at the University of Helsinki (Finland). His research and teaching center on issues of historical representation and the uses of history in academic and popular contexts. Many of his articles and books, including The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past (New York: Routledge, 2017) and Parahistory and the Popular Past (New York: Routledge, forthcoming), explore these themes and their implications for writing history today. He edits Rethinking History and is active in a number of other organizations for the promotion of research in theory of history and historical culture.
Cite this post: Tomasz Wiśniewski and Kalle Pihlainen, “Continuing Crisis of History: New Iterations,” One More Thing… (blog), History and Theory, October 2023, https://historyandtheory.org/omt-poznan/wisniewski-pihlainen.
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Tomasz Wiśniewski: How would you define the status of historiography (inside and outside academia) today?
Kalle Pihlainen: My feeling is that history is losing influence, which is what I think I’ve wanted to see happen, theoretically—along the lines of some of the provocations from Hayden White, and especially following the thinking of theorists like Keith Jenkins or Sande Cohen, for example—[that is,] this idea of history as always being something in support of conservative values, control, and the status quo, as it were. Part of the conflict also comes from thinking that “history” is only what academic historians do, especially in this conservative, protective sense. And, in this way of thinking, there has long been the idea that any oppositional projects, projects of liberation and radical efforts, would come from what we could call popular or vernacular histories—something that I’ve recently tried to label “parahistory,” [1] following a suggestion by Hayden White in a famous essay on the modernist event. [2]
I think that the discussion about the past outside academia has increasingly come under the influence of consumer logic and the pressures of conforming to a supportive, entertaining role. I’m less sure about the potential of talking about the past in any form as capable of having the kind of radical impact that many, especially postmodern, thinkers at one time thought it might. Also, I’m not sure about the correctness of my impression that history is losing influence or breaking with this role of serving the status quo. Perhaps it’s just a reflection of the desire many of us have; I haven’t seen any detailed analyses to support this. So, while it seems to be the case that history oriented for public consumption is still a significant part of nonfiction reading and often reaches bestseller lists, I am not sure about the status of strictly academic monographs, for example. I think we can be sure that the discussion about the past still has a strong hold on the consumer imagination, but the question of how far it’s curated by academics and how necessary it is for it to be truthful or to follow any academic standards is a different one.
TW: How do you see the future of the theory of history? What are the essential new threats and new opportunities?
KP: It seems to me that turning attention to a broader understanding of history culture is crucial. The explosion of public history and the growth of general interest in questions of commemoration and remembrance are good indications of the importance of this. I wouldn’t expect the theory of history to be able to successfully continue to focus on academic history writing alone or even primarily. Instead, a good understanding of how and where “historical” meanings are created and how they permeate and move around history and parahistory (if I may use this division here) is something we sorely need, even if just to get some more insight into how the discussion about the past is organized and generated, and how it relates to our use of history culture today. There’s also a longer-standing question underlying this that we should try to tackle in more theoretically satisfying ways: this is the tension between what I would label a “romantic” attachment to the past, with its valorization of “pastness,” and a more “pragmatic” orientation to the world. A fairly common phenomenon is also the confusion of the historical past with one’s personal past in terms of relating to it. I think Frank Ankersmit provides a good example of this with his Sublime Historical Experience [3]—for some people, there’s something inherently valuable and deeply intimate about the past, even when it’s not a directly experienced, personal past. I find some of this same romantic orientation in Paul Ricoeur. To understand this kind of professedly general human sentiment toward history is a challenge for theoreticians, and investigations into “historicity” as a broader human condition are sorely needed in theory of history today.
As for the threats, there is a danger that we will continue to repeat the same debates about representation versus reality that have occupied center stage for so long. It seems to me that we always go back to these questions at the same basic level. History is partisan, history is objective, history is fiction as opposed to being true, and so on. Part of the reason for the fact that these debates repeat in such basic form is just the nature of academia: new generations come along and rediscover the same questions and launch into debates with a great deal of enthusiasm and confidence, thinking they have the answers. Perhaps this also has to do with what seems to be an increasingly important factor: there’s ever greater pressure to produce papers and, following the capitalist logic that undergirds this pressure, to be “innovative” and come up with new ideas. When you combine not having time to read and reflect enough on previous debates and existing literature with the demand to innovate, you get people presenting the same ideas over and over, just because they haven’t come across them previously. The way the incentive system pushes us to produce more and more seems unhealthy to me. So, the threats I see have to do with shallow work, repeating previous lines of thought unknowingly, and with how even the humanities are being reshaped based on short-term impacts.
And new opportunities? I feel that, in the theory of history, one direction for new opportunity would be to slow down and try to establish at least some terminological clarity regarding the ongoing controversies so that, at the very least, we would all be talking about the same thing when we use words like “relativism,” “(anti)realism,” “narrativism,” and so on. This seems like a minimal demand, but it’s strange how even such central terms are understood differently. I feel more optimistic regarding the possibility of bringing theory closer to “real” historical research in a helpful manner. There is so much great work on contemporary, particularly justice and welfare-related, issues where it’s easy to justify the usefulness of specific history expertise. The same goes for public history and popular uses of the past.
TW: Which recent historical readings do you find most interesting and inspiring?
KP: Personally, I’ve returned to reading earlier work relating to language and rhetoric. Regarding the theory of history, I’ve been rereading Martin Davies’s work this year. [4] Martin was such a brilliant, overlooked thinker in our field, and his writing is so rich that there’s always something new to be found. In terms of articles, there’s always lots of fresh and exciting stuff, also in the contributions we receive for Rethinking History. Still, many also seem to tackle theoretical discussions with quite narrow interpretations of their scope. I get the feeling that we are at a point where theory is taken more as a guide, a methodological instrument, or just as something for scholarly study, rather than something to actively engage with. On the other hand, there is a wonderful turn in empirical investigation to issues that really need resolution—transitional justice, human rights infringements, and reparations, for example. I hope the decades of radical theory saying that we can and should use history to engage with such issues has had some small impact on this focus too.
TW: You are the author of the book about constructivism, [5] which deals primarily with issues of narrative truth, representation, and fictionality. Do you think constructivism (widely understood) still is an efficient approach in historical thinking and writing? Do you see some novel faces of constructivism in the field, after narrativism? And finally, what about its political commitment?
KP: I still fail to see any other alternative that makes sense—not just in relation to history but to how we understand our relation to reality. Whether it’s “efficient” or not, I don’t know. For me, this is almost like asking if the visual system is a helpful way of engaging in seeing. Sense-making is a process that we’re all engaged in whether we like it or not, and anyone who says they have some unconstructed, unmediated access to reality, and especially to meaning, should be the one to shoulder the burden of showing how that can be achieved. So, yes, I think constructivism is still the only way to think about any kind of practice of sense-making and is especially important when it comes to complex and suasive referential representations like history writing. Seeing these forms as transparent and innocent is problematic and sometimes downright dangerous. And the political component is precisely the key point here. If we go around our everyday lives naively thinking that values are out there in the world to be discovered, independent of someone establishing and constructing them, if we take values as natural and innocent, then we fail to take any political—by which I mean what Jacques Derrida has labeled “ethical-political” [6]—responsibility. It’s fundamentally an existentialist tenet that carries through to poststructuralism and the kind of constructivism I defend after White. We have to choose what we believe and be conscious of why we choose it. That certainly has great importance in history writing. If, as historians, we pretend that the complex emplotments we call history are somehow created naturally and innocently, that they easily stem from the materials we have, and that they are thus objective or apolitical, then whatever values we introduce in those emplotments are not revealed as the choices that they are. This is close to the old Humean argument against entailment: there’s no way to innocently transition from what is to what ought to be. [7] When we make that move, we’re always adding our own valuations to the equation—or valuations that we take for granted because of whatever beliefs we hold.
This is the core point of constructivism. Everything else is just an elaboration on how we can better understand the meaning-making processes involved, which is not to say that there isn’t a lot there too. And that’s where I see the challenge for “narrativism” and for analyses of history writing in the future. There’s still so much to unpack in the actual textual processes of meaning-making that we haven’t even begun to tackle. For me, this involves questions relating to the very particular textual nature of referentially committed writing like history. It was largely ignored in the early provocations where history was compared to fictional writing by White, among others.
TW: What do you think about the current condition of narrativist philosophy of history? Do we really need a transition to “postnarrativist philosophy of historiography,” as claimed by Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen? [8]
KP: It’s a good way to keep the conversation going, but the terms shouldn’t be read too literally. For Jouni-Matti, so-called postnarrativism is not a complete break from narrativism but an acceptance of what he calls “the narrativist insight.” The “post” in “postnarrativism” doesn’t indicate that we should completely forget about narrativism. So, I agree with him in many ways, but he sees the kernel of narrativism in a much narrower way than I do, relating only to stories following a clear, simplistic Aristotelian structure and being somehow innately complete. I think that these ideas come more from the work of Frank Ankersmit and don’t match up with those defended by people like Hayden White, Hans Kellner, Nancy Partner, and Keith Jenkins, for instance, who see narrative theory of history as a much more general condition for understanding what history writing is all about. Understanding narrative as something so reductive and technical leads us to lose the whole point of the linguistic turn and constructivism. Suppose you go back to the work of Richard Rorty, Derrida, or even Ricoeur. In that case, you will see that the idea of “argument” as defended by Jouni-Matti as something undiscussed and distinct from narration is, in fact, a key component of rhetoric, metaphor, and narration as defined by these sophisticated analysts of representation. So, I’m happy that we continue to engage with these issues, but I do feel that it would be good to go back to those classical readings. Ricoeur’s Rule of Metaphor [9] might be a good place to start. I don’t think we can or should “transition” before we really understand the ideas that we already have available.
TW: Do you think it is still reasonable to talk about the “crisis of history”? What faces of this crisis do you recognize, and what possible remedies do you see?
KP: This is a timely and important question for me. I recently published an article where I returned to Andreas Huyssen’s formulation of the “crisis of history” because it seems that we are facing another iteration of it today. [10] This new iteration affects historians’ professional identification and their reasons for wanting to engage in history production. Unlike Huyssen, I no longer describe it in terms of challenges brought by “memory culture” but rather by popular history—vernacular histories, digital history, and so on. In those fields, the question of who controls history has become even more contested since the curatorial function of professionals is ever more tenuous. Tony Judt put this beautifully in his assessment of the situation some years ago. [11] He said that the place of the historian continues to be crucial but is also obscure. I think this obscurity continues, but it is important to note that this may be more a crisis for academic history than for broader history culture. So, we don’t need to think in terms of remedies. It could be, as Keith Jenkins has been claiming for so long, that the time for academic history is simply coming to an end. White posited this as the key challenge for historians already in the 1960s—and if one doesn’t have a particular personal or emotional reason to value history as an academic pursuit, it’s hard to see the possibility as necessarily a terrible thing. At the same time, academic history still has an institutional place and clear societal role and support—at least for now; hence the idea of a “continuing crisis.”
TW: During this Congress you talked about “materiality” of history and the concept of embodiment. Can you share more details about the importance of this concept for historical writing and reading? Should embodiment be considered as a “mean” (tool) of representation, or rather its “end”? Or, maybe, in some way, embodiment goes beyond representational thinking?
KP: For me, the core question regarding embodiment is how it’s always a fundamental part of language use. We can’t communicate without it, but it has been almost totally ignored in debates within the theory of history. What I’ve tried to do recently is to remind us of the way embodiment and language are inseparable. I find many examples, even among many poststructuralist thinkers, who are so readily accused of being “purely” textualist. Think of the critique of Derrida’s statement regarding our linguistic condition. Some prominent historians and theorists of history still interpret his claim as a simple argument for antirealism, for the nonexistence of reality, despite all the wonderful elaborations. Yet Derrida’s work on Jean-Luc Nancy, [12] say, exemplifies the way embodiment should be understood in relation to language in poststructuralism. So, embodiment is not a means or an end, and nor do we need to separate it from representation if we take representation seriously and comprehensively. And it’s easy to find this broad understanding of representation in the existential-phenomenological tradition and a large swath of poststructuralism built on it, and all the way to people like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, for example. Thinking of representation and language without the embodied component is the problem, and that is part of what leads to a narrow understanding of textual meaning-making in many current critiques.
What I tried to do during our roundtable here in Poznań was to remind that this fundamental embodied component undergirds all communication and to show how “material” ties and commitments shape referential texts. The other parts of that “materiality,” which I feel we need to pay more attention to, involve the interruptions that commitments to refer create in referential texts as opposed to fictional ones, as well as the way these interruptions and textual components also direct readers to keep the referentiality (“materiality”) of such texts in mind. This is what I have also tried to describe as a “resistant materiality” in an article in História da Historiografia. [13]
TW: You are the editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, one of the leading international journals in the field of theory of history. How do you perceive Rethinking History’s specific identity and/or intellectual profile, especially when compared to History and Theory and other similar journals?
KP: Yes, I edit Rethinking History together with my coeditor Patrick Finney from Aberystwyth University in Wales. We work well together, and there is a very natural division of labor as our interest in theory is similar, but while my background is in literary theory and cultural history, Patrick is engaged more with international history and politics. Naturally, these personal interests affect also what we publish, and we also try to follow Alun Munslow’s footsteps in being open to risk—so, if there’s a paper we think has good potential but is not necessarily a “safe” bet in terms of being along established lines of thought, we usually publish it. As an editor for twenty-two years, Alun was also incredibly generous with his time and would go out of his way to work on promising articles with authors, especially younger scholars. I also benefited from it when I was starting out, and this is something that Patrick and I have wanted to continue. Part of this is trying to involve more non-native English speakers too, even if the way academia is currently positioned doesn’t make things easy in that respect.
Traditionally, Rethinking History has had a lot of experiments in creative history writing. Earlier US editors—Robert Rosenstone, David Harlan, and James Goodman—systematically developed this, and we want to continue this direction of “experimental history” too. In line with that thread, we receive a lot of submissions focusing on alternative media, which poses a challenge to the conventional journal format, so we have been negotiating with our publisher on how to better host these kinds of interventions. And we also want to offer opportunities for more dynamic engagements in textually based work. That is why we have a slot for “Conversations,” [one] for experimental “Miniatures,” and one for “Invitations to Historians.” The idea is that these can help us be nimbler in tackling issues of the day as well as displaying what people in the field are working on more broadly. To further develop this, we try to solicit “local” overviews of particular traditions, especially of non-English national and thematic debates. But so far, this last area has not taken off to the extent we had hoped, even if it could really help better unify the field internationally. Of course, in the current climate and pressures, there is a professional cost for authors to write things that don’t “count” in the same way as original articles, but I hope that is something we can slowly help change too.
Notes
[1] See Kalle Pihlainen, “History and Parahistory: A Complex and Delicate Relation, ” 26 May 2022, Centre for Philosophical Studies of History, uploaded 31 May 2022, YouTube video, 1:52:09, https://youtu.be/1_KnBR5ONAY.
[2] Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 17–38.
[3] Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
[4] See, in particular, Martin L. Davies’s Historics: Why History Dominates Contemporary Society (London: Routledge, 2006) and How History Works: The Reconstitution of a Human Science (London: Routledge, 2016).
[5] Kalle Pihlainen, The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past (New York: Routledge, 2017).
[6] See, for example, Richard Bernstein, “Serious Play: The Ethical-Political Horizon of Jacques Derrida,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, n.s., 1, no. 2 (1987), 93–117.
[7] For detailed interpretation of Hume’s guillotine, see, for example, Charles R. Pidgen, ed., Hume on Is and Ought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
[8] Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
[9] Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, transl. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ (London: Routledge, 2003).
[10] Kalle Pihlainen, “‘History Culture’ and the Continuing Crisis of History,” Faravid 52 (2021), 17–35, https://faravid.journal.fi/article/view/112682/66290.
[11] Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).
[12] Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, transl. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
[13] Kalle Pihlainen, “The Possibilities of ‘Materiality’ in Writing and Reading History,” História da Historiografia 12, no. 31 (2019), 47–81, https://www.redalyc.org/journal/5977/597770442004/597770442004.pdf.
