Hayden White, traumatic nationalism, and the public role of history

History and Theory

Volumn 44, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 311-332

  Moses, A Dirk ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33748667374     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2005.0326a.x     Document Type: Review

References (146)

1. Hayden White, "The Politics of Contemporary Philosophy of History," Clio 3 (1973), 40. This article was first delivered as a lecture in 1969.
2. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 432.
3. Geoff Eley made this observation in "Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later," in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 207.
4. Hayden White, "The Absurdist Moment in Contemporary Literary Theory," Contemporary Literature 27 (Summer 1976), 378.
5. White, Metahistory, 37f. : "It tends to engender belief in the 'madness' of civilization itself and to inspire a Mandarin-like disdain for those seeking to grasp the nature of social reality in either science or art. "
6. Similarly, "When the world is denied all substance and perception is blind, who is to say who are the chosen and damned?": idem, "The Absurdist Moment in Contemporary Literary Theory," 403.
7. White, Metahistory, 378.
8. Carlo Ginzburg, "Just One Witness," in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution", ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1991), 82-96.
9. For similar arguments, see Vinay Lal, Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 68, 117-120;
10. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000);
11. Gyan Prakash, "Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism," American Historical Review 99 (December 1994), 1475-1490.
12. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998);
13. Nicholas Dirks, "History as a Sign of the Modern," Public Culture 2 (1990), 25-32. I thank Adrian Carton for pointing me to these references.
14. Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace &World, 1963), 18.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, "History in the Service and Disservice of Life," in his Untimely Observations, ed. William Arrowsmith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 95, 102f.
16. According to Theodor Herzl, a Jewish state would provide "the solution of the Jewish Question after eighteen centuries of Jewish suffering": Herzl, The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question (London: Henry Pordes, 1993), 30.
17. Hayden White, "The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation," in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 80. Emphasis added.
18. I discuss them in A. Dirk Moses, "Revisionism and Denial," in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, ed. Robert Manne (Melbourne: Black Inc. , 2003), 337-370.
19. No sooner had the "wall come down" than Ralf Dahrendorf warned that ethnic nationalism would fill the void of meaning left by the demise of communism: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (New York: Time Books, 1990);
20. See also Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (London: BBC Books, 1993).
21. A. Dirk Moses, "Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the 'Racial Century,' 1850-1950: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust," Patterns of Prejudice 37 (2002), 7-36;
22. Zdenko Zlatar, "The Poetics of Slavdom: The Mythopoeic Foundations of Yugoslavia," paper presented to the Special Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Warsaw, July 18-21, 2004. The book of the same title is currently in preparation.
23. Ilan Gur-Ze'ev and Ilan Pappe, "Beyond the Destruction of the Other's Collective Memory: Blueprints for a Palestinian/Israeli Dialogue," Theory, Culture and Society 20 (2003), 93f.
24. This question for historians generally was the subject of a special issue of this journal: Historians and Ethics, History and Theory, Theme Issue 43 (December 2004).
25. Donald Ostrowsky, "A Metahistorical Analysis: Hayden White and Four Narratives of 'Russian' History," Clio 19 (1990), 215-235;
26. C. Lorenz, "Can Histories be True? Narrativism, Positivism, and the 'Metaphorical Turn,'" History and Theory 37 (1998), 309-329;
27. Perez Zagorin, "History, the Referent, and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now," History and Theory 38 (1999), 1-24;
28. Elizabeth Tonkin, "History and the Myth of Realism," in The Myths We Live By, ed. Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (London: Routledge, 1990), 34;
29. Lloyd Kramer, "Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra," in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 97-128.
30. Paul A. Roth, "Hayden White and the Aesthetics of Historiography," History of the Human Sciences 5 (1992), 26.
31. Inexplicable is Sande Cohen's observation that White actually seeks to defend the historical tradition: Cohen, Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 81.
32. Wulf Kansteiner, "Hayden White's Critique of the Writing of History," History and Theory 32 (1993), 273-295;
33. Michael Roth, "Cultural Criticism and Political Theory: Hayden White's Rhetorics of History," Political Theory 16 (November 1988), 636-646.
34. Hans Kellner, "A Bedrock of Order: Hayden White's Linguistic Humanism," in Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
35. Originally published in History and Theory, Beiheft 19, Metahistory: Six Critiques (December, 1980), 1-29.
36. Roth, "Cultural Criticism and Political Theory," 644.
37. An exception here is Dan Stone, "Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, and Holocaust Historiography," in Metageschichte: Hayden White und Paul Ricoeur, ed. Jörn Stückrath and Jürg Zbinden (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 1997), 254-274.
38. Russell Jacoby, "A New Intellectual History," American Historical Review 97 (April 1992), 405-424;
39. Gene H. Bell-Villada, "Criticism and the State (Political and Otherwise) of the Americas," in Criticism in the University, ed. Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons. Triquarterly Series on Criticism and Culture 1 (Evanston, Ill. : Northwestern University Press, 1985).
40. Cf. his early work with "Between Science and Symbol," Times Literary Supplement (January 31, 1986), 109f.
41. and "Writing in the Middle Voice," Stanford Literature Review 9 (1992), 179-187.
42. See also idem, "The Burden of History," History and Theory 5 (1966), 111-134;
43. idem, "The Politics of Historical Interpretation";
44. idem, "The First Historical Event: A Rhetorical Exercise," Colloquium, Department of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley (October 13, 1995).
45. idem, Figurai Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
46. White, "What is a Historical System?," in Biology, History and Natural Philosophy, ed. A. D. Beck and W. Yourgrau (New York: Plenum Press, 1972), 242.
47. Hayden White, "Storytelling: Historical and Ideological," in Centuries' End, Narrative Means, ed. Robert Newman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 78. White may have made this concession in reading Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which he discusses in this essay. It is in this famous text, after all, that Marx writes that "Men make their own history, but not just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. " In other words, there are processes inaugurated by the unintended consequences of individual choices.
48. White, "The Burden of History";
49. idem, "The Tasks of Intellectual History," Monist 53 (October 1969), 606-630;
50. idem, "The Politics of Contemporary Philosophy of History";
51. idem, "The Culture of Criticism," in Liberations: New Essays on the Humanities in Revolution, ed. Ihab Hassan (Middletown, Conn. : Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 55-69;
52. idem, "What is a Historical System?";
53. idem, "Interpretation in History," New Literary History 4 (Winter 1973), 281-314.
54. Nietzsche "History in the Service and Disservice of Life," 143: "And here I recognize the mission of this youth, this generation of warriors and dragon-killers who presage a more felicitous, more beautiful culture and humanity, without experiencing anything more than an auspicious presentiment of this future happiness and beauty. "
55. White, "The Culture of Criticism," 65.
56. Hayden White, "An Old Question Raised Again: Is Historiography Art or Science (Response to Iggers)," Rethinking History 4 (2000), 401.
57. White, "Writing in the Middle Voice. "
58. White, "Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth," in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Friedländer;
59. idem, Figurai Realism. This intention has been appreciated by Richard T. Vann, "The Reception of Hayden White," History and Theory 37 (1998), 143-161.
60. White, "The Culture of Criticism," 67. The middle voice, of course, is to parataxis what the active and passive voices are to syntaxis.
61. Hayden White, "The Westernization of World History," in Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate, ed. Jöm Rüsen (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), 115.
62. For a brief discussion of this distinction, see Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory after May '68 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 6.
63. On the left generally, see Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
64. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1989), part one.
65. White's debt to Nietzsche has been explored in Hans-Peter Soder, "The Return of Cultural History? 'Literary' Historiography from Nietzsche to Hayden White," History of European Ideas 29 (2003), 73-84.
66. White, "The Culture of Criticism," 56.
67. sHayden White, "Historical Pluralism," Critical Inquiry 12 (Spring 1986), 487;
68. idem, "Storytelling," 59-62.
69. Hayden White, "Between Science and Symbol," Times Literary Supplement (January 31, 1986), 109.
70. Hayden White, "Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination," History and Theory, Beiheft 14 (1975), 48-67.
71. White, "What is a Historical System?" 236; cf. 238: "Once constituted and accepted by a group as a genetically provided past, this past is the past for that group as a socio-cultural entity. And no amount of 'objective' historical work pointing out the extent to which this chosen ancestry is not the real ancestry can prevail against the choosing power of the individuals in the system. " Emphasis in the original.
72. White, "Politics of Contemporary Philosophy of History," 51.
73. See also "Droysen's Historik: Historical Writing as a Bourgeois Science," in idem, The Content of the Form, 99f.
74. White, "What is a Historical System?," 241 f: "Historians try to provide both the sufficient and the necessary reasons for any achieved socio-cultural complex being what it is and not something else. They put 'life' . . . where formerly there was only chaos. They do this by establishing putative genetic connections between an achieved present and past socio-cultural systems. "
75. White, "The Westernization of World History," 116.
76. White, "The Politics of Historical Interpretation," 74.
77. idem, "An Old Question Raised Again," 405.
78. idem, "The Suppression of Rhetoric in the Nineteenth Century," in The Rhetoric Canon, ed. Brenda Deen Schildgen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 21-32.
79. Metahistory, 433, 65-67: "He who approaches history as a field of cause-effect relationships is driven, by the logic of the linguistic operation itself, to the comprehension of that field in Ironic terms. "
80. See also idem, "Criticism and Cultural Politics," Diacritics (Fall 1976), 13.
81. White takes the term "metahistory" as a synonym for "speculative philosophy of history" from Northrop Frye's "New Directions from Old," in Frye, Fables of Identity, 52-66.
82. Metahistory, 65f. Here White anticipates the arguments of postcolonial critics listed in note 5.
83. White, "Interpretation in History," 283.
84. idem, "The Politics of Contemporary Philosophy of History," 53. Compare these statements with the last sentence in the preface and conclusion of Metahistory.
85. Frye, Fables of Identity, 17.
86. Frye takes this distinction from Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture [1935] (London: Routledge, 1968).
87. White, "Politics of Contemporary Philosophy of History," 44, 47.
88. Hayden White, "Method and Ideology in Intellectual History: The Case of Henry Adams," in Modern European Intellectual History, ed. Dominick LaCapra and Stephen L. Kaplan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 289;
89. see also idem, "Droysen's Historik," 86-88;
90. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in his Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 160.
91. White, "Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination," 52f. Emphasis added.
92. "Modern literary theory . . . directs attention to what is most obvious about historical discourse, but has not been systematically taken account of until recently, namely, that every history is first and foremost a verbal artifact, a product of a special kind of language use. And this suggests that, if historical discourse is to be comprehended as productive of a distinctive kind of knowledge, it must be first analyzed as a structure of language": idem, '"Figuring the Nature of the Times Deceased': Literary Theory and Historical Writing," in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (New York: Routledge, 1989), 22. Emphasis added.
93. White, "Interpretation in History," 310, n42.
94. White, "Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination," 64.
95. White, "New Historicism: A Comment," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 296.
96. idem, Metahistory, 20, 438f.
97. See esp. White, '"Figuring the Nature of the Times Deceased. '"
98. See also Roth, "Hayden White and the Aesthetics of Historiography," 27.
99. Dominick LaCapra, "Tropisms of Intellectual History," Rethinking History 8 (December 2004), 513.
100. Kellner, "A Bedrock of Order";
101. cf. David D. Roberts, Nothing but History: Reconstruction and Extremity after Metaphysics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 254;
102. and William H. McNeill, "Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians," American Historical Review 91 (February 1986), 1-10.
103. Roth, "Hayden White and Aesthetics of Historiography. "
104. Frank R. Ankersmit, "Hayden White's Appeal to Historians," History and Theory 37 (1998), 182-193.
105. White, "Method and Ideology in Intellectual History," 289: "The more interesting question is . . . not what Freud, Foucault, etc. , assert, allege, argue, and so on, but how do they establish, through the articulation of their texts, the plausibility of their discourse by referring the 'meaning' of these texts . . . to a complex sign system that is treated as 'natural' rather than as a code specific to the praxis of a given social group. "
106. White, "An Old Question Raised Again," 397.
107. Allan Megill acknowledges the presence of explanatory dimensions while defending the integrity of description and interpretation: "Recounting the Past: 'Description,' Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography," American Historical Review 94 (1989), 627-653.
108. White, "Historicism, History and the Figurative Imagination," 65: "And because these modes [tropes] correspond to the readers' modalities of language use (and therefore to their ways of conceptualizing the world), they provide the ground for the communication of understanding and meanings between specific 'schools' of historians, on the one side, and specific publics, on the other. "
109. White, "The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact," Clio 3 (1974), 301.
110. White, "The Structure of Historical Narrative," 18f. ;
111. idem, "Historicism, History and the Figurative Imagination," 65-67;
112. Cf. Frye, Fables of Identity, 22, 54.
113. See the illuminating discussion in John Zammito, "Koselleck's Philosophy of Historical Time(s) and the Practice of History," History and Theory 43 (February 2004) 124-135;
114. Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
115. Jörn Rüsen, Studies in Metahistory, ed. and intro. Pieter Duvenage (Pretoria: Humanities Science Research Council, 1993).
116. An English-language discussion of his work is Henk de Jong, "Historical Orientation: Jörn Rüsen's Answer to Nietzsche and his Followers," History and Theory 36 (1996), 270-288.
117. A sympathetic rendering is Georg G. Iggers, "Historiography between Scholarship and Poetry: Reflections on Hayden White's Approach to Historiography," Rethinking History 4 (2000), 373-390.
118. Rüsen, Studies in Metahistory, 6.
119. White, Metahistory, 433: "When it is a matter of choosing among these alternative visions of history the only grounds for preferring one over another are moral or aesthetic ones. "
120. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 140.
121. An excellent explication is Wilhelm Hennis, "The Meaning of 'Wertfreiheit': On the Background and Motives of Max Weber's 'Postulate,'" Sociological Theory 12 (July 1994), 113-125.
122. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985);
123. Edward Said, "Michael Walzer's Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading," in Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, ed. Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens (London and New York: Verso, 1988), 166;
124. see also Jonathan Boyarin, "Reading Exodus into History," New Literary History 23 (1992), 523-554
125. and William D. Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (Cambridge, Eng. : Cambridge University Press, 2000).
126. I owe this biblical trope to Carla Hesse, "After Exodus: AHistory Lesson for Generation X," unpublished ms. , Department of History, University of California, Berkeley, May 1996.
127. A recent discussion of these historians is Neil Caplan, "Zionism and the Arabs: Another Look at the 'New' Historiography," Journal of Contemporary History 36 (2001), 345-360.
128. For details on Palisad, see http://www. palisad. org, accessed February 7, 2005;
129. Ilan Pappe, "Humanizing the Text: Israeli 'New History' and the Trajectory of the 1948 Historiography," Radical History Review 86 (Spring 2003), 108f.
130. Jamil Hilal and Ilan Pappe, "Introduction," in Talking to the Enemy (London: 1. B. Tauris, forthcoming).
131. Edward Said, "Bases for Coexistence," Al-Hayat (November 5, 1997)
132. reprinted in idem, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 205-209;
133. Pappe, "Humanizing the Text," 110;
134. Gur-Ze'ev and Pappe, "Beyond the Destruction of the Other's Collective Memory. "
135. Said, "Bases for Coexistence";
136. idem, The Politics of Dispossession (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 34.
137. idem, The Politics of Dispossession, 167.
138. Richard T. Vann, "Historians and Moral Evaluations," History and Theory, Theme Issue 43 (2004), 3-30.
139. Edward Said, "New History, Old Ideas," Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, May 21-27, 1998 (http://weekly. ahram. org. eg/1998/378/pal2. htm, accessed February 8, 2005).
140. John E. Toews, "Historiography as Exorcism: Conjuring up 'Foreign' Worlds and Historicizing Subjects in the Context of the Multiculturalism Debate," Theory and Society 27 (1998), 550, 557.
141. Thomas McCarthy, "Doing the Right Thing in Cross-Cultural Representation," Ethics 3 (1992), 644;
142. cf. Jörn Rülsen, "How to Overcome Ethnocentrism," History and Theory, Theme Issue 43 (2004), 118-129.
143. Martin Jay, "For Theory," Theory and Society 25 (1996), 167-183.
144. Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004).
145. Weber, "Science as a Vocation," 153.
146. Julien Benda, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (Boston: Beacon, 1958).