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The Future of the PastHistory, Memory and the Ethical Imperatives of Writing History

Gabrielle M. SpiegelKrieger-Eisenhower Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University

[email protected]

Abstract

The article examines revisions to theories of “linguistic turn” historiography in order to show the ways in which those revisions have created a path for a return of the analysis of individual agency and experience in history, changes that, it is argued, constitute a form of neo-phenomenology as the governing philosophical orientation in historiog-raphy. To the extent that this is correct, it establishes a philosophical and theoretical basis for the integration of memory and memorial testimony into the study of the past. The article proceeds to investigate the methodological, historiographical and ethi-cal implications of the rise of memory studies in contemporary history. Memorial lit-erature, as Berber Bevernage has so compellingly demonstrated, relies on a certain haunting of the present by the past. It thus deploys a conception of historical tempo-rality significantly different from the modernist assumption of the death of the past as the basis of historical understanding. In that sense, as Michael Roth has argued, the “acknowledgement of the past in the present is a necessary ingredient of modern his-torical consciousness.” Yet, to incorporate “memory” and trauma into historical repre-sentation will mean acknowledging and accepting as historiographically viable the differing status of analytically recuperated “facts” and victim testimony. This will require, in turn, that we find a way to theorize, as has yet to be done, the materiality and reality of “voices” from the past, without assuming the necessary truth of what they convey, at least in terms of the factuality of its content. In the end, however, what is at stake in not the epistemological question of “truth” but an ethical response to the catastrophes of the last century. At the same time, it is clear that memory is no longer the sole vehicle for the promo-tion of a new ethical orientation in history, as recent work by Hayden White, Keith Jenkins and Frank Ankersmit, among others, suggest. Precisely how these different approaches to history, memory and ethics can be combined to constitute a viable and coherent mode of historiography remains an open, and debated, question.

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journal of the philosophy of history 8 (2014) 149–179

Keywords

history – memory – agency – experience – temporality – ethics

Historians’ traditional understanding of the nature, epistemological ground-ing, truth-value and goals of research and writing faced a significant chal-lenge beginning in the late nineteen-sixties and seventies with the adoption of developments in linguistic theory grounded in the notion that language is the constitutive agent of human consciousness and the social production of meaning and that our apprehension of the world, both past and present, arrives only through the lens of language’s precoded perceptions. Moreover, language, once understood as a relatively neutral medium of communication, sufficiently transparent to convey a reasonably accurate sense of reality, itself had been reconceptualized with the emergence of structural linguistics or semiotics, a movement that began with the publication in 1916 of Ferdinand Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. For Saussure, language was not a transparent mode of referentiality but was, instead, a “system of differences with no positive terms.” Thus, far from reflecting the social world of which it is a part, language, he believed, precedes the world and makes it intelligible by constructing it according to its own rules of signification. Since for Saussure such rules are inherently arbitrary, in the sense of being social conventions implicitly understood in different ways by differing linguistic communities, the idea of an objective universe existing independently of speech and universally comprehensible despite one’s membership in any particular language system is an illusion. It was this belief in the fundamentally linguistic character of the world and our knowledge of it that formed the core of the “semiotic challenge.”

To be sure, Saussurean linguistics was not the sole influence promoting the new concern with language, a movement aided by the rise of structuralist anthropology as advanced by Lévi-Strauss, the theory of discourse articulated in Foucault’s early notions of epistemic regimes, the narrativist school of his-tory indebted in various ways to Hayden’s White’s Metahistory – hence textually based and rhetorical in orientation – as well as to Derrida and Deconstruction, though in a less thorough way. Additional stimuli came from cultural studies and from the Annales school’s continuing development of the concept of men-talities. Moreover, it is worth remarking that, at the time these developments were making their way into the historian’s field of view clear, critical distinctions between them tended to get lost in the rush to embrace the new epistemolo-gies and methodologies they encompassed, eventually grouped under the label of the “linguistic turn,” a term first coined by Gustav Bergmann but pass-ing to historians via a 1965 article on “Metaphysical Difficulties of Linguistic

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Philosophy,” by the pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty1 and generalized to various disciplines throughout the course of the seventies and after.

Although borrowing the term from Rorty, historians rarely, if ever, bothered to read the philosophers who were shaping the notion in the fields of philos-ophy of language and philosophy of history and, instead, used it as a “term of art” that covered a wide variety of movements, not all of them coherently integrated or even necessarily compatible, and deployed by historians quite independently of what was developing in philosophy. Thus, for example, labels such as “postmodernism” and “poststructuralism” tended to be used inter-changeably with that of the “linguistic turn” and to be conflated with the sym-bolic anthropology being developed by Geertz. While all the “schools” shared a fundamental belief, derived from Saussure, that language operated to mediate the relationships between subjects, texts and reality, the difference between cultural analysis and the “linguistic turn” tended to be occluded. Small wonder that a recent volume of the American Historical Review devoted to the ques-tion of the validity and utility of “Historiographic Turns” largely concluded that its influence was more harmful than helpful.2 For the purposes of this article, I use the term only because it dominated debate at the time, whether appro-priately or not, and without attempting to establish its ultimate validity as a description of what historians were doing, although it remains the case that

1 As an aside, it might be worth pointing out that even Rorty, whose 1965 article is generally credited with having introduced the notion of a fundamental “linguistic turn” in philoso-phy and related disciplines, has retreated from his original position on its significance. In a recent retrospective essay, “Twenty-five Years Later,” Rorty confesses that the importance that he attributed to the phenomenon of the “linguistic turn” seemed to him already in 1975 – the date of an initial retrospective essay (“Ten Years Later”) – “to have been little more than a tempest in an academic teapot” and now strikes him as “positively antique.” Indeed, he asserts, his earlier assumption that “the problems of philosophy are problems of language strikes me as confused,” primarily, he explains, because he “is no longer inclined to think there is such as thing as “language” in any sense which makes it possible to speak of “prob-lems of language.” See Richard Rorty, “Twenty-Five Years Later,” in Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn Essays in Philosophical Method with Two Retrospective Essays, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 371. For Rorty, in a statement that appears to me to be deeply symptomatic of a much broader response to the question of the “linguistic turn,” what now counts as philosophically interesting and legitimate are “problems connected to what [Ian] Hacking calls “interfacing.” These are problems about “the relation of mind and reality, or language and reality, viewed as the relation between a medium of representation and what is purportedly represented.” Ibid., 371.

2 See especially the article by Judith Surkis, “When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy”, AHR Forum on “Historiographic ‘Turns’ in Critical Perspective,” American Historical Review, 117 (2012), 700–722.

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the widespread acceptance of Saussure at the time deeply influenced histori-cal practice, especially in the field of cultural history.

The embedded confusions notwithstanding, it seemed to me that at stake in the debate occasioned by what I earlier called the “semiotic challenge” were a number of concepts traditionally deployed by historians in their attempts to understand the past: “causality, change, authorial intent, stability of meaning, human agency and social determination.”3 One inference common among his-torians dissenting from the “linguistic turn” was, as John Toews maintained in a highly influential article, that “the creation of meaning is impersonal, oper-ating ‘behind the backs’ of language users whose linguistic actions can merely exemplify the rules and procedures of the languages they inhabit but do not control.”4 In that sense, the objectivity of the linguistic model in a Saussurean scheme remains essentially virtual, yet paradoxically is hypostatized in the analytic priority and realism granted to the structure.5

Thirty-five years after the adoption of “the linguistic turn” there is a growing sense of dissatisfaction with its overly systematic account of the operation of language in the domain of human endeavors of all kinds. To that extent, it is fair to say that the “semiotic challenge” has been addressed, absorbed and – most important – is currently undergoing a process of alteration, at least with respect to the ways in which those who accept its basic premise of the social/linguistic construction of the world construe its relevance to, and operation in, the past understood both as an object of study and a subject of practice. As William Sewell points out, “the past decade and a half has witnessed a perva-sive reaction against the concept of culture as a system of symbols and mean-ings, inclining rather to the belief “that culture is a sphere of practical activity

3 See Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History, Historicism and the Social Logic of the Text,” Speculum, 65 (1990), 59–86. Reprinted in The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

4 John Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review, 92 (1987), 882.

5 For the ways that this virtual understanding of structure leads to its hypostasization, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of A Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72. See also the remarks of William Sewell, Jr.: “If we insist that structures are virtual, we risk lapsing into the de facto idealism that continually haunts structuralism, however much its exponents . . . protest their materialist credentials and intentions.” In “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology, 98 (1992), 12.



shot through by willful action, power relations, struggle, contradiction and change.”6

Among historians who have engaged in these debates, one response to the success of the semiotic/linguistic view of culture and society has taken place via a refocusing on precisely the categories of causality, change, human agency and subjectivity, experience, and a revised understanding of the master category of discourse that stresses less the structural aspects of its linguistic constructs than the pragmatics of their use. Thus practice and meaning have been at least partially uncoupled from the impersonal workings of discursive regimes and rejoined to the active intentions of human agents embedded in social worlds. Rather than being governed by impersonal semiotic codes, his-torical actors are now seen as engaged in inflecting the semiotic constituents (signs) that shape their understanding of reality so as to craft an experience of that world in terms of a situational sociology of meaning, or what might be called a social semantics.7 This shift in focus from semiotics to semantics, from given semiotic structures to the individual and social construal of signs, in short, from culture as discourse to culture as practice and performance, entails, I submit, a recuperation of the historical actor as an intentional (if not wholly self-conscious) agent. From a historiographical point of view, what results is the restoration, albeit in a now de-essentialized form, of a ver-sion of phenomenology akin, although not identical, to that phenomenology against which the generation of French theorists who articulated the basic premises of poststructuralism struggled. Although it is premature to say that his-torical writing has managed, through this refocusing, to “save the phenomena,” that is, to return to a notion of history as an objective science capable of describing past reality “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” it has nonetheless, I believe, reached a point where it is on the verge of “saving the phenomenological,” of restoring the historical actor and his or her consciousness of the world, how-ever thoroughly mediated by discourses of one sort or another, to the center of historical concerns.

A notable shift in recent years is the highly visible role that social historians have assumed in current debates, in contrast to the seventies, when those most strenuously engaged in importing “French theory” broadly construed tended to draw on literary theorists and to ponder the immediate impact of semiotics

6 William Sewell, “The Concept(s) of Culture,” Beyond the Cultural Turn New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds.), (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1999), 44.

7 “Semantics” here would pertain not only to “ meaning” or “signification” as such but would include the relationship of propositions to reality.

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in transforming the fields of intellectual and, ultimately, cultural history (as in the work of LaCapra, White, Jay, Harlan, Megill et al., to mention only historians). Thus, the original phase of the “linguistic turn” in the social sci-ences revolved around issues of “textuality” and the application of Geertz’s semiotically-inspired “text analogy” to a wide range of historical questions and domains. This literary phase in the reception of French theory seems now to be over and historians are turning more to social and sociological theory for inspi-ration. Indeed, the prominence of social historians in the on-going reconfigu-ration of the place of theory in historical writing suggests the degree to which the deepest challenge posed by the “linguistic turn” had been to the practice of social history and discloses the extent to which the rise of cultural history (and its socio-cultural cognates in anthropology and sociology) was governed by discontents arising from the then dominant practice of social history, Marxist and non-Marxist alike.

Yet, it could be argued, that in rejecting the overly systematic nature of social history, the “linguistic turn” itself in some ways merely inverted the structural location of history’s determination, locating it instead in language – discourse and culture – rather than material conditions. Marshall Sahlins, him-self heavily influenced by structuralism and remaining faithful to some of its fundamental postulates, concurs, believing that “poststructuralism, postmod-ernism and other afterological studies developed a sense of cultural determin-ism so oppressive, an idea of social order so totalizing, as to conjure up the ‘superorganic’ notions of culture produced in the 1950s.”8 In Sahlins’s view, dis-course, when viewed as the embodiment of linguistic structure, is “the new cul-tural superorganic – made even more draconian as the expression of a ‘power’ that is everywhere, in all quotidian institutions and relations.”9 In a similar vein, William Sewell has complained that “structures,” in a structuralist vocab-ulary, tend “to assume a far too rigid causal determinism in social life . . . while the events or social processes they structure tend to be seen as secondary, and superficial.” Structures appear “as impervious to human agency, to exist apart from, but nevertheless to determine the essential shape of the strivings and motivated transactions that constitute the experienced surface of social life.” A social science, which relies on a notion of structure, he argues, “tends to reduce actors to cleverly programmed automatons.”10

8 Marshall Sahlins, “Introduction” in Culture in Practice Selected Essays (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 11.

9 Ibid., 12.10 Sewell, “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation,” 2.



In my understanding of the current situation in history and theory, a large part of the revisionist critique of “linguistic turn” historiography and cul-tural history and the attempt to move “beyond the cultural turn” is taking its stance on a neo-phenomenological approach that seeks, as Bourdieu explains (although dissenting from its analytic utility) “to make explicit the primary experience of the social world, i.e. all that is inscribed in the relationship of familiarity with the familiar environment, the unquestioning apprehension of the social world, which, by definition, does not reflect on itself and excludes the question of the conditions of its own possibility.”11 Insofar as they share this view, many historians are deploying a (largely implicit) concept of “social phe-nomenology” in which, as the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz explains,

The aim of social analysis is to take over the “subjective perspective,” i.e. to reconstruct the sequence of mental acts of consciousness, which are located “inside” and are directed in the form of phenomenological “intentionality” at outward objects to which the consciousness ascribes meanings. The social then is . . . the subjective idea of a common world of meaning . . . The aim of social-as-cultural analysis from the point of view of social phenomenology is to describe the subjective acts of (mental) interpretations of agents and their schemes of interpretation.12

Among historians, the reinsertion of the agent as an effective social actor has been achieved by highlighting the disjunction between culturally given mean-ings and the individual uses of them in contingent, historically conditioned ways. Work done in this vein tends to focus on the adaptive, strategic, and tac-tical uses made of existing cultural schemes by agents who, in the very act of deploying the elements of culture, both reproduce and transform them. Historical agency, from this perspective, represents the individual’s relation-ship to the cultural order, “the embodiment of collective powers in individual persons,” as Marshall Sahlins puts it.13 The ground for this view of historical agency is a conception of experience as that through which “structure is transformed into process and the subject re-enters into history.”14 It is this

11 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 3.12 Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist

Theorizing”, European Journal of Social Theory, 5 (2002), 247.13 Sahlins, “Introduction” in Culture in Practice: Selected Essays, 25.14 See Ronald Grigor, “Back and Beyond: Reversing the Cultural Turn?” American Historical

Review, 107 (2002), 1479. The quote is from E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). But subsequent to Thompson’s work, a variety of scholars, including

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actor-centered perspective, a belief in individual experience and perception as the agent’s own source of knowledge about, and action in, the world – a per-ception mediated and perhaps constrained but not wholly controlled by the cultural scaffolding or conceptual schemes within which it takes place – that I see as the return of a modified phenomenology. If most historians have no desire to return to an “objective” social science model of history, that is, to “save the phenomena,” many, nonetheless, are engaging in a widespread attempt to save the phenomenological.

Attendant on this shift is a new emphasis on semantic as opposed to semi-otic constructivism, in which meaning occurs not on the level of code or structure, but on that of the semantics of ordinary language use, construct-ing the world through its continual and practical creation and recreation over time, since no past use of a term determines its application to the next case. By focusing on the adaptive, practical enactment of cultural constituents by individual agents, the varying modalities of use account for how culture is sus-tained, mediated, replicated and changed. Hence neo-phenomenology gives rise to a theory of “practice,” which emphasizes both the mental and bodily acts undertaken by historical actors, in which, as Richard Biernacki argues, “agents call on bodily competencies that have their own structure and coordi-nating influence, incorporating corporeal principles of practical knowledge.”15 In this way, everyday practices combine to construct the “socially informed body” which, in its incorporated state, possesses “the instruments of an order-ing of the world, a system of classifying schemes which organizes all practice and of which the linguistic scheme . . . is only one aspect.”16

In this view, culture emerges less as a systematic structure than a repertoire of competencies, a “tool kit,” a regime of practical rationality or a set of strat-egies guiding action, whereby symbols/signs are mobilized to identify those

Gareth Stedman Jones, William Sewell and Joan Scott, sought to analyze experience itself as constructed and discursively articulated, thus inflecting it in the direction of the cultural and linguistic. Only recently has the notion of experience as prior to interpretation returned, notably in the work of Frank Ankersmit. Writing about the historian’s experience of the past. Ankersmit has maintained that “we experience the truly great events of the West’s history before obtaining cognitive access to them; and we experience them since they weigh upon us like a heavy burden from which we find no relief.” F.R. Ankersmit, “The Ethics of History: From the Double Binds of (Moral) Meaning to Experience,” History and Theory, Theme Issue, 43 (2004), 93. See also his Sublime Historical Experience (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005).

15 Richard Biernacki, “Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History,” in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds.), Beyond the Cultural Turn, 75.

16 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 124.



aspects of an agent’s experience which, in this process, are made meaningful, that is experientially “real.” Culture, thereby, is recast as a “performative turn,” one realized only processually as “signs put to work” to “reference” and inter-pret the world. Historical investigation, from this perspective, would take prac-tices (not structure) as the starting point of social analysis and practice itself assumes the form of a sociology of meaning, or sémantique des situations” as Bernard Lepetit calls it.17 Thus one strand of the current revisionist thrust to much historical theorizing is collecting itself under the banner of a neo-phenomenological approach, latterly grouped, at least by Reckwitz, under the rubric of “Practice Theory”. Drawing on diverse – and often incompatible – congeries of theories that include Bourdieu’s project of a “praxeology” and its semiotic variant found in Michel de Certeau,18 Anthony Giddens’ “theory of structuration,”19 the “ordinary language” investigations of Wittgenstein, a deeper understanding of Foucault’s late work on governmentality and bio- politics, which intersects with theories of the body, both feminist and socio-logical; combined with a neo-hermeneutical model of embodied agency that derives much of its force from the ethnomethodological models supplied by eth-nographers like Garfinkel,20 “Practice Theory” asserts the continuing relevance of semiotic insights proffered by the turn to language, yet re-interprets them in favor of a rehabilitation of social history by placing structure and practice, language and body in dialectical relation in historical systems. In that sense, as Bonnell and Hunt have argued, it would appear that scholars are engaged in a redefinition and revitalization of the concept of the “social” that had been weakened by poststructuralism.21 To the extent this proves true, the “linguistic turn” is giving way to a “historical turn”, since historicism – understood as the acknowledgment of the contingent, temporally and socially situated character of our beliefs, values, institutions and practices – subtends both the retention of an attenuated concept of discourse as that which creates the conditions of possibility for, and the constituents of, a given culture, and the revisionist emphasis on practice, agency, experience and adaptive uses of historically specific cultural resources. It achieves this primarily by (re-) adopting an

17 Bernard Lepetit, “Histoire des pratiques, pratique de l’histoire,” in Bernard Lepetit, (ed.), Les Formes de l’Expérience (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 14.

18 Above all in his The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).

19 As set forth in Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).

20 Harold Garfinkel. Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 1984).21 Beyond the Cultural Turn, Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds.), 11.

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actor-centered perspective that necessitates an understanding of the social as well as symbolic ground from which texts and behaviors of all kinds are generated, and through its attention to the ways in which practice continually modifies the system within which it operates.22 From this perspective, it seems clear that any “return to reality” will include a consideration of the ways in which individual and collective social actors operate, based upon their percep-tions and understandings of both the social and symbolic systems that govern behaviors and endow them with socially significant meanings.

Similarly – and almost as a prerequisite to the rehabilitation of agency – there has emerged a revised understanding of subjectivity as something more than the discursively constituted “subject positions” famously framed in the early (pre-genealogical) work of Foucault,23 but also something other than a wholly re-centered humanist subject. Rather, what Amanda Anderson has called the “post-poststructuralist turn to subjectivity” seeks to approach the human actor in both past and present, she argues, by means of a “post con-ventional” understanding of identity and its formation.”24 In her account, this takes the form of a rationally governed and continually refashioned sense of self, informed by self-reflective and self-critical understandings arrived at through dialogue with both the self and others. Such an approach seeks to restore to human agents the depth psychology, self-awareness and rationality capable of governing behaviors, but it also includes “a recognition of the his-torical conditions – including the discursive – “out of which beliefs and values emerge, as well as the possibility for the ongoing recognition of the many forces (psychological, social and political) that can thwart, undermine, or delay the[ir] achievements.”25

22 For a fuller discussion of these and related theories, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ed. with an Introduction, Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (London: Routledge Press, 2005).

23 For the early Foucault “discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined.” The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. Allan Sheridan (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 55. Hence Foucault’s famous pronouncement concerning the “death of man,” who, in the closing lines to The Order of Things, Foucault predicted would soon disappear “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” In The Order of Things An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Allan Sheridan (New York: Vintage 1973), 386.

24 Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 172.

25 Ibid., 122.



These attempts to modify the totalizing grasp of discursive regimes on social behavior from the point of view of subjectivity, agency, experience and practice seem to me indicative of the theoretical negotiations inherent in what I am tempted to call an “accommodationist” strategy governing much of the critique of the “linguistic turn. Inevitably, such an “accomodationist” strategy, although largely unacknowledged in the literature, entails the deployment of two very different epistemologies at play in an empirically grounded social history and/or a linguistically mediated cultural history. The former implic-itly reverts to that “noble dream” of an objective basis for historical investiga-tion, one that, as Peter Novick so ably demonstrated,26 is no longer shared by most historians, however much we respect and insist on the empirical basis for all historical investigation. The latter entails at least a partial reliance on a semiotic understanding of the constructed nature of our apprehension of that very social reality. This is not to argue that history as a discipline is nec-essarily confined to the use of a single epistemological framework as it shifts its foci of attention and objects of research. At a minimum, as Jacques Revel so compellingly demonstrated, the play of scale as one moves from micro- to macro- (or global) analyses of historical phenomena often involves changing epistemological frameworks.27

Perhaps the most interesting attempts to achieve the kind of dialecti-cally balanced analytic that historians now advocate, one that embraces the insights of the linguistic turn while modifying them so as to include a sense of the significance of the social and its instrumental (functionalist) force in human history and thought, are coming at the moment from historians like William Sewell. Sewell argues on behalf of a dialectical understanding of culture as the interplay between system and practice in social life, the for-mer understood structurally but modified in its effects by the contradictory, contested and constantly changing ways in which it is implemented in the latter.28 Hence he approaches questions of the role of events and individual and collective behavior in phenomena such as the taking of the Bastille – and the revolutionary consequences that followed upon it – by understanding

26 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession, (Ideas in Context, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

27 One of the few works to systematically investigate this problem that I am aware of is Jeux d’échelles: La micro-analyse à l’expérience, Jacques Revel, (ed.), (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).

28 See his “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn, Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds.), 53ff. See also his new book on The Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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them as participating in a dialectic of system and practice through which the existing cultural order is rearticulated and transformed. To engage in any form of social, political or cultural behavior means drawing upon a set of socially conventional, thus commonly shared, meanings in order to be understood and to be consequential. In that sense, symbolic interpretation, Sewell insists, “is part and parcel of the historical event” since actions have meaning only in rela-tion to the cultural order within which they occur.29 At the same time, the sys-tem, as such, exists solely in the continuity bestowed upon it by the succession of practices that bring it to life. But every practice inflects and changes the sys-tem upon which it draws and which it instantiates. In an event as momentous as the taking of the Bastille, the result is a transformative rearticulation of the underlying conceptual structures that had guided French society in the Ancien Regime, creating novel systems of signification among which “the Bastille,” the “revolution” “despotism” and the like take their place.30 Critical to this process is the notion that inherited languages (or discourses) can never fully encom-pass or adequately describe the vast variety of empirical realities or experi-ences presented to the social actor for categorization and interpretation and that, in that sense, life outruns the capacity of culture to account for it.31

As Geoff Eley points out, there is a body of recent work by younger scholars which “specifically refuse[s] the polarized division between the “social” and the “cultural,” vesting recognizably social and political topics with a cultural analytic, responding to the incitements of cultural theory, and grounding these in as dense and imaginative a range of sources and interpretive contexts as possible.”32 It is doubtful that this work will ever again seek the totalizing goal of “grasping society as a whole,” given the wholesale dissolution of what Eley has called “social history’s totalizing aspirations.”33 However, an explora-tion of the theoretical bases, both epistemological and methodological, on which to generate the logics of history (to borrow Sewell’s terminology) and historiography intrinsic in this movement doubtless will prove important to its ultimate shape. It remains for me an open question whether or not such revi-sionist moves are likely to succeed, that is to offer a persuasive modification of

29 See Sewell’s “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing revolution at the Bastille,” Theory and Society, 25 (1996): 861.

30 Ibid., p. 861.31 For a discussion of this see Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago and London:

University of Chicago Press, 1985), 147–8.32 Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 2005), 201.33 Ibid., 193.



the “linguistic turn,” and whether this recent turn in historiography represents a final – exhausted – phase in the reception of linguistic turn historiography or a genuinely novel initiative that strikes out in new directions.

In contrast to Sewell and Eley, Joan Scott, one of the earliest and most force-ful advocates of the “linguistic turn” in the United States, sees the revival of claims about the validity of empirical methods as a conservative reaction generated by a yearning for certainty, security and stability. For historians, she believes, this search takes various forms:

a renewed emphasis on empiricism and quantitative analysis, the reha-bilitation of the autonomous willing subject as the agent of history, the essentializing of political categories of identity by the evidence of “experience”, the turn to evolutionary psychology for explanations of human behavior, the endorsement of the timelessness of universal val-ues and the trivialization and denunciation of the “linguistic turn” – an attempt to deny it a serious place in the recent life of the discipline.34

Scott is correct insofar as a great deal of recent work by younger historians, at least in the United States, appears to be dedicated to a revival of materialism and the wholehearted embrace of empiricism as history’s governing method-ology. As one young scholar, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, who participated in the American Historical Review forum on “historiographic turns” put it, “younger scholars seem to be taking positivist stances towards their sources and in some cases even believe themselves to be reconstructing the objective reality of the past.”35 Gary Wilder concurs, identifying the current moment in (American?) historiography as witness to “the untimely return of elements of the ‘doctrinal realism’ that Hayden White identified with the legacy of Leopold von Ranke: doc-umentary evidence, descriptive particularism, and “explanation by narration” in the service of a reconstructive history of ‘what actually happened.”36 For

34 Joan Scott, “History-Writing as Critique,” in Manifestos for History, ed. and introduced by Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 20. See also the review of this volume by John E. Toews, “Manifesting, Producing and Mobilizing Historical Consciousness in the ‘Postmodern Condition’ ”, History and Theory, 48 (2009), 257–275.

35 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, “Comment: Generational Turns,” American Historical Review, 807. 36 “From Optic to Topic: The Foreclosure Effect of Historiographic Turns,” Ibid., 723. However,

it should be pointed out that Rosenthal believes this “supersessionist” view is wrong. According to him, “the emergent work does not reject the preoccupations and insights of the previous generations. It executes instead two subtle but crucial shifts of emphasis in subject matter and approach. First, while the emergent scholars emphasize the study of

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Wilder, this return to descriptive realism and archival objectivism is all the more striking in that if follows what we had earlier believed was an episte-mological break initiated by the linguistic and cultural movements in histo-riography. Yet Perl-Rosenthal believes that when younger scholars write about “material practices,” the “practice of politics” and “cultural practice” they “use the term to denote what lies between pure constructivism on the one side and hard-core methodological realism or materialism on the other.”37And this does not even begin to take account of the new range of topics that are coming into focus, which include, as Michael Roth suggests, “intensity, Postcolonialism, empire, the sacred, cosmopolitanism, trauma and animals,”38 to which might be added concerns with transnationalism, diaspora, global economic develop-ments, environmental history and “deep history”, or what is beginning to be called “neurohistory”39 to name only the most obvious.40

One extremely powerful movement, not centrally in play in these discus-sions of cultural and social history but significant nonetheless for the ways

acts or behaviors rather than discursive texts and statements, they do so not to reject the study of meaning but in order to give a different account of the relationship between acts and culture. The languages of practice, process and networks that they employ focus our attention on the power of habitual action and symbol – poor practices to create meaning. Second, in part because of the central role it gives to process and practice, this scholarship emphasizes the physical and social factors that constrained how early modern people made meaning in their everyday lives.” Ibid., 808.

37 Ibid., 808. From a French perspective, one might be tempted to see this as a return to the original notions and methods developed for the study of mentalités as formulated by Bloch, Febvre, and their successors. As Perl Rosenthal notes, a focus on practice offers an avenue to understanding how meaning-making in the past occurred through ordinary habitual behavior. This was, he believes, “a key insight of the Annales school nearly a century ago” which has been “a mainstay of social and cultural history ever since.” Ibid., 808.

38 Michael Roth, “Ebb Tide, Review of Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience,” History and Theory, 46 (2007), 66.

39 See, for example, Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) and Deep History The Architecture of Past and Present, Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, (eds.), (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011). For an interesting discussion of how the temporal extension of history accompanies current understandings of globalization, see the “AHR Conversation: How Size Matters: The Question of Scale in History,” American Historical Review, 118 (2013), 1431–1472.

40 For a general discussion of these developments see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “The Task of the Historian,” Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, American Historical Review, 114 (Feb. 2009), 1–15.



in which it is changing the conceptual, methodological and ethical impera-tives that guide the writing of history, is the growing, indeed now massive, attempt to incorporate memory into the field of history. So powerful has been the concern with memory in diverse quarters that more than a few historians consider it, in the words of Andreas Huyssen, “a cultural obsession of monu-mental proportions,” and even, as Jay Winter has proclaimed, “the historical signature of our own generation.”41 To be sure, memory, as Jacques Revel has noted, became with the work of Pierre Nora a “focal point of considerable investment” in French historiography during the late eighties and early nine-ties through Nora’s study of the construction of the French past as embod-ied in lieux de mémoire.42 But as Nora himself indicated, lieux de mémoire, to the extent that they are grounded in a sense of rupture with the past – in this case the passing of a traditional agrarian regime in France – signify that “our relation to the past is no longer that of retrospective continuity, but the illu-mination of discontinuity.”43 Lieux de mémoire, as Nora defines them, result precisely because of a conscious break with the past, one bound up with the sense that memory has been torn.44 Thus the moment of lieux de mémoire occurs at the same time that an immense and intimate fund of memory dis-appears, surviving only as a “reconstituted object beneath the gaze of critical history.”45 “What we call memory today,” Nora insists, “is therefore not memory, but already history.”46 The contemporary study of memory, in contrast, privi-leges living testimonies of people, in particular those who have experienced traumatic events. Thus, as in the case of the rehabilitation of agency, individ-ual, personal experience provides the ground for the valorization of memory, a point already made in the philosopher Maurice Mandelbaum’s “doctrine of immediacy,” which argued that “related to the assumption that our experi-ence has authenticity is the further assumption that our memory does also, and that memory’s authenticity amounts to a species of validity, overriding any

41 Both cited in Gavriel Rosenfeld, “A Looming Crash or Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the Memory Industry,” The Journal of Modern History, 81 (2009), 125.

42 Jacques Revel, “Introduction” Histories French Constructions of the Past: Postwae French Thought, eds. Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (New York: New Press, 1995), 50.

43 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, 26 (1989), 16.

44 Ibid., 7.45 Ibid., 12.46 Ibid., 13.

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problems of accuracy arising from an original misperception or from distor-tions introduced in the lapse of time.”47

Clearly central to the rise of memory studies over the last several decades has been, as Gavriel Rosenfeld points out, the “worldwide proliferation . . . of pub-lic controversies over divisive historical legacies,” legacies both global in scope and traumatic in nature. It is the presence of these “unmastered pasts” – most frequently noted in relation to Germany and the Holocaust but no less ger-mane in Asia (Korea, China et al.), Russia, South Africa, Africa (e.g. the Congo), Argentina and the like – that bequeathed legacies of atrocities and resent-ments as a result of state-sponsored violence and genocides that could not be ignored forever, even though there tended to be considerable delays (indeed initial repression and silence) to their appearance within historical writing proper.48 Also at work on the global scale of these developments was decoloni-zation and its bitter heritages, the emergence virtually everywhere of identity politics and multiculturalism after the 1970s and 1980s, which took part of their impulse from the quest to redress past grievances concerning oppression and discrimination, and – some argue – the loss of the kind of “future-oriented” societies so central to the uses of traditional history, one of whose functions was to serve the future. From this perspective, Kerwin Klein has argued, the proliferation of memory studies might be seen as a conservative search for cul-tural compensation for the ravages of modernity and globalization.49

Indeed, so massive has been the focus on memory, and in particular Holocaust memory, that it has called forth a large literature of criticism, begin-ning with Charles Maier’s 1993 essay on the “surfeit of memory,” to which, he maintained, we had become addicted.50 Today, one hears more about the dangers of excessive memory than the limits of representation. In Maier’s view, modern American politics “has become a competition for enshrining grievances. Every group claims its share of public honor and public funds by

47 For a fuller discussion of Mandelbaum’s “doctrine of immediacy” see Allan Megill, “History, Memory, Identity,” History of the Human Sciences, 11 (1998), 37–62. The quote is from page 47.

48 Rosenfeld, “A Looming Crash or Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the Memory Industry,” 123, 126–7.

49 For a discussion of the various strands that contributed to the emergence of memory studies and the multiple forces that led to its prevalence in historical discourse, see Klein’s “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations, 69 (2000), 127–50.

50 Charles Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial,” History and Memory, 5 (1993), 141.



pressing disabilities and injustices.”51 “Victim envy,” it seems, has become a cultural practice among a broad array of populations, and claims to victimiza-tion a means of negotiating social recognition and political rights, creating a “culture of victims” that has become central in many contemporary contexts. In the view of sociologist John Torpey,52 there is worldwide “fever” for reparations and apologies [that has] largely supplanted the elaboration of visions of the future and contemporary politics in our age of genocide and mass criminality.53

And yet, even at the height of the focus on victimization, traumatic mem-ory, and the centrality of memory to the recuperation of the experience of catastrophic events, there were scholars who insisted that memory must be understood as a socially mediated, hence historically grounded, phenomenon. Thus Laurence J. Kirmeyer, in an article on “Landscapes of Memory, Trauma, Narrative and Dissociation,” argued that

The distinctive qualities of traumatic narratives can . . . be understood as differences in the culturally constructed landscapes of memory, the met-aphoric terrain that shapes the distance and effort required to remem-ber affectively charged and socially defined events that initially may be

51 Ibid., 147.52 Cited in Berber Bevernage, History, Memory and State-Sponsored Violence Time and Justice

(Routledge Approaches to History, New York and London: Routledge, 2011), 76.53 François Hartog has argued forcefully that the loss of a vision of the future and a

corresponding neglect of the past has created a pervasive sense of presentism, one that he believes is the characteristic “régime d’historicité” of our times. As he argued in the paper “The Future of a very old name” presented to a conference on “The Future of the Theory and Philosophy of History,” organized by the International Network for Theory of History, that took place in Ghent in July, 2013: “It is as if the present – of finance capitalism, the information revolution, the Internet, globalization, but also the crisis in 2008 – has absorbed the (more or less obsolete) categories of the past and future. It is indeed as if the present has become its own horizon, has withdrawn into a perpetual present.” I would like to thank Professor Hartog for sending me a copy of his paper. For a more general articulation of his notion of regimes of historicity and the growing presentist orientation of our period see his Régimes d’Historicité Présentisme et expériences du temps, (Paris: Le Seuil, 2002). Younger scholars have built on Hartog’s notion of the primacy of presentism to argue that “a presentist regime of historicity . . . implies a new way of understanding time, an abandoning of the linear, causal and homogeneous conception of time characteristic of the previous, modernist regime of historicity.” On that basis, they argue for a new form of historiography “beyond history and memory,” to which they give the name of “mnemohistory,” a term originally offered by Jan Assmann. See Marek Tamm, “Beyond History and Memory: New Perspectives in Memory Studies,” History Compass, 11 (2013), 458–473.

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vague, impressionistic, or simply absent from memory. Landscapes of memory are given shape by the personal and social significance of specific memories but also draw from meta-memory – implicit models that influ-ence what can be recalled and cited as veridical. Narratives of trauma may be understood, then, as cultural constructions of personal and his-torical memory.

What memory, even traumatic memory, registers according to Kirmeyer, “is highly selective and thoroughly transformed by interpretation and semantic encoding at the moment of experience.”54 If Kirmeyer is correct, then memory is a thoroughly social and cultural phenomenon that cannot be divorced from the historical contexts that shape not only how it is narrated, but also how it is constructed in the first place. From that perspective, one might argue that it takes a rightful place beside cultural history.

An interesting transitional example of what I am tempted, in this context, to call the “return of history” in memory studies is offered in a recently published work by Berber Bevernage on History, Memory and State-Sponsored Violence Time and Justice.55 Bevernage investigates the operation of what he calls “tran-sitional justice” – that is, “justice associated with periods of political change, characterized by legal responses to confront the wrongdoings of repressive predecessor regimes.”56 Such legal responses often took form in judicial tribu-nals like the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that sought to address past grievances as nations such as South Africa, Sierra Leone, Argentina and others underwent the transition to new “beginnings,” but could not do so success-fully without addressing the injustices of the past and the persistence of griev-ances and traumatic memories of that past. In that sense, there was a felt need, as a matter of public policy, to manage the legacy of violent pasts. At stake in the operation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions was the hope that, in rehearsing past grievances by creating a forum for memory, reconcili-ation between the need of the past to be voiced and the need of the country to move on could be reached, thereby avoiding the simple declaration of an amnesty based on amnesia, on forgetting. In effect, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions became fora for the adjudication of competing political impera-tives, one centered on past injustice, one directed to future development. Thus imbricated in these differing foci were two conflicting visions of the past, one

54 In Tense Past Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, (eds.), (New York and London: Routledge, 1996) 175.

55 Routledge Approaches to History, (New York and London: Routledge, 2011).56 Bevernage, History, Memory and State-Sponsored Violence, 6.



that insisted on its persistence in the present – an unmastered past that would not pass until and unless the burden of history was addressed – and another that sought to declare the past absent, a transient or fleeting past of that which has already taken place and is no longer (i.e. our traditional understanding of history). As such, they entailed not only two different ways of figuring the relationship between past and present but, as Bevernage seeks to demonstrate, two different, and competing, politics of time.

Drawing on the work of the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, Bevernage invokes an analytical distinction between what Jankélévitch calls “irreversible” time and “irrevocable” time. Although I find the term “irrevocable” awkward, what Jankélévitch posits is an essential difference between these two temporal categories. “Irreversible” time is a concept central, indeed defining, for modern conceptions of history in the work of scholars such as Michel de Certeau,57 for whom modern Western history essentially begins with a deci-sive differentiation between the present and the past and all historical work depends on acknowledgment of this rupture. In contrast, “irrevocable” time, like our normal understanding of the past, refers to something that has taken place and can no longer be “revocable” – that is recalled or brought into the present – but nonetheless breaks with the idea of a temporal distance between the present and the past.”58 Instead, it sees the past as persisting in the present, not physically “there” but like trauma, “stuck” in the present as a haunting past.59 For Bevernage, the notion of a “persisting past does not simply deconstruct the notions of absence and distance; rather, it blurs the distinction between past and present and thereby questions the existence of these temporal dimensions as separate entities.”60 Since the “irrevocable” past exists only in the minds of those who insist on its persistence, one might simply call it memory, and hence we return to the question of the relation between history and memory.

What is illuminating about Bevernage’s discussion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and cognate institutions in Argentina cre-ated to deal with the question of the “disappeared,” is the fact that history –

57 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

58 Beverange, History, Memory and State-Sponsored Violence, 4.59 In light of this, one might compare Laurence Langer’s conviction that “when memory

imprints on us the meaning of the presence of ‘absence’ and animates the ghost that such a burden has imposed on our lives, then the heritage of the Holocaust will have begun to acquire some authenticity in our postwar culture.” Cited in Dan Stone, “Memory, Memorials and Museums,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, Dan Stone, (ed.), (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 510.

60 Bevernage, History, Memory and State-Sponsered Violence, 5.

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“irreversible” time – is consistently invoked by these institutions in order to lay the past to rest in the interest of achieving national unity and reconcili-ation. Apparently even Mandela himself initially defined reconciliation as a state of affairs in which the “injustices and grievances of the past would be buried and forgotten and a fresh start made.”61 In contrast, victims cling to the notion of an “irrevocable” time. Thus, the “Madres” in Argentina (the mothers of the disappeared) generate a notion of memoria fertile “that not only resists oblivion, but also opposes all forms of “historical’ remembrance that conceive of the past as a closed entity that is removed from the present and only can be conserved by archiving its traces.”62 This is because they fear the presump-tively inferior ontological status of the ‘dead’ past – in comparison with the ‘living’ present – on the grounds that it facilitates neglect and forgetting. But it is precisely the ontological inferiority of the past that makes the turn to his-tory attractive to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, which seek to move on to the future and leave the past definitively behind, and thus it is the commissions that engage in historical discourse in order, Bevernage indi-cates, “to have it restore or impose irreversible time and (re)enforce the mod-ernist delineation between past and present that is threated by a (particular) memory that resists chronology and refuses to let the past go.”63 Thus, in the context of transitional politics, history does not represent continuity, but is used performatively to provoke a rupture in time and a sense of discontinuity, thereby creating a present free of a haunting past. In that sense, the politics of time and history deployed by the Truth Commissions, whether consciously or not (and Bevernage suggests that it may not be conscious), serves the interests of the perpetrators, a fact no doubt sensed, if not always articulated, by victims such as Jean Améry, who insisted upon the ethical relevance of “resentment” and refused to allow it to pass into oblivion. One of the tasks of history, as Mark Philips has shown, is to “manage distance”64 and for the Truth Commissions,

61 Ibid., 54. It is interesting to compare Mandela’s view with Friedländer’s suggestion that the public memory of the Shoah, as enacted in set rituals and organized presentations ranging from textbooks to museums and other monuments to civic commemoration, “demands simplicity as well as clear interpretation; its aim, unstated and maybe unperceived, is the domestication of incoherence, the elimination of pain, the introduction of a message of redemption.” “History, Memory and the Historian: Facing the Shoah,” in Disturbing Remains: Memory, History and Crisis in the Twentieth Century, Michael Roth and Charles Salas, (eds.), (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 272.

62 Bevernage, History, Memory and State-Sponsored Violence, 45.63 Ibid., 47. 64 Mark Salber Philips, “Distance and Historical Representation,” History Workshop Journal,

57 (2004), 123–141.



historical distance – with its assumption of the “death of the past” – serves the forward-looking interests of the nation. This is because, as Pierre Nora already declared, “the thrust of history, the ambition of the historian, is not to exalt what actually happened but to annihilate it.”65 But the contemporary position deriving from memory studies such as those of Jan Assmann, suggests, on the contrary, that “the past is not simply ‘received’ by the present.” The present is “haunted by the past and the past is modeled invented, reinvented and recon-structed by the present,”66 a position clearly indebted in significant ways to the influence of the linguistic turn.

If transitional justice offers one example of the way in which memory and history are intermingled in contemporary discourse, the social and political dimensions of the “memory work” it performs clearly indicates, as does the so-called “culture of victims” noted above, that memory is no longer seen as an exclusively individual phenomenon but has a collective dimension that, in its emphasis on social groups, and varied forms of intentionality and political strategies within the competitive arena of memory politics, makes the study of collective memory one of the avenues by which history returns to the cen-ter of historians’ attempts to deal, both substantively and methodologically, with unmastered pasts. To be sure, collective memory is not history, as Wulf Kansteiner insists in his important article on collective memory studies,67 but it necessarily draws upon historical material and takes a fundamentally histori-cal approach in its focus on the sociological base of representations of the past.

Not surprisingly, those interested in collective memory, like Kansteiner, Assmann and others, have rehabilitated Halbwachs, who argued as early as 1925 in Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire, that all memory is social in nature, a point reiterated in his Collective Memory, written in response to critics of the earlier book, where Halbwachs continued to insist that “Our memories remain collective, and are recalled to us through others even though only we were participants in the events or saw the things concerned. In reality, we are never alone. Other men need not be physically present, since we carry with

65 Pierre Nora “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” in Realms of Memory The Construction of the French Past, vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3.

66 In Moses the Egyptian, cited in Richard Berstein, “The Culture of Memory, Review Essay of The Ethics of Memory by Avishai Margalit,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 43 (2004), 166.

67 Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” History and Theory, 41, (2002), 179–197.

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us and in us a number of distinct persons.”68 And like present -day historians, Halbwachs was interested in the imagery of social discourse and the ways in which it shaped remembrance, a part of his work more amenable to historians than what Kansteiner has called his “determined anti-individualism.”69

In Kansteiner’s view, collective memory should be seen as the product of the interaction of three types of historical factors: the intellectual and cul-tural traditions that frame all representations of the past; the memory mak-ers and bearers who selectively adopt and manipulate these traditions, and the consumers of memory – the audiences that perform the reception of the memories proffered – who “use, ignore, or transform such artifacts according to their own interests.”70 For it is through the reception of collective memories, Kansteiner argues, that their embedded representations of the past acquire use-value and become incorporated as part of historical tradition.71 Like Halbwachs, Kansteiner stresses the social nature of individual remembering and forgetting and seeks to unpack the social dynamics of collective memory as the product of the changing interrelationship between the three factors outlined above, recasting collective memory, thereby, “as a complex process of cultural production and consumption that acknowledges the persistence of cultural traditions as well as the ingenuity of memory makers and the subver-sive interests of memory consumers.”72

To be sure, Kansteiner fully acknowledges that memory as such is produced by individuals, and that, therefore, collective memories have no “organic basis and do not exist in any literal sense.”73 But he nonetheless remains com-mitted to the notion that collective memory is more than a metaphor. For Kansteiner, “collective memory” emerges from the negotiations and contesta-tions of historical agents “within the competitive arena of memory politics.”74 What makes Kansteiner’s conception of collective memory so thoroughly

68 Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 23.

69 Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” 181.

70 Ibid., 180.71 Ibid., 184.72 Ibid., 179. For additional arguments concerning the importance of studying reception

along with construction in the creation and interpretation of collective memories see Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” AHR Forum American Historical Review, 102 (1997), 1386–1403.

73 Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” 188.

74 Ibid., 179



historical in nature is his insistence that “all memories, even the memories of eyewitnesses, only assume collective relevance when they are structured, represented and used in a social setting,”75 thus are bound to social groups and their understanding of the past. As a theory of memory saturated with the social, this version of collective memory represents a melding of history and memory that ultimately sees the particular historical dimension of the indi-vidual’s remembrance of social experience as its determining force.76 Aleida and Jan Assmann, along with others, have made similar arguments on behalf of cultural memory.77

The “historical evidence” generated by collective and cultural memory, along with the individual memorial testimony to genocide, atrocities and trau-matic events of all kinds, has long been banished by the protocols of historical epistemology and evidence by reason of its obvious fallibility and unreliability, something not contested even by the most strenuous advocates for the place of memory in historical studies. One attempt to deal with the epistemologi-cal conundrums posed by the relationship between individual memory and the constitution of historical knowledge can be seen in the recently published

75 Ibid., 190.76 It should be emphasized that not all students of collective memory agree with

this interpretation. Susan Crane, for one, prefers to see collective memory as a “conceptualization that expresses a sense of the continual presence of the past, as opposed to “historical” memory” – i.e. that generated by historians – which represents, rather, the “objectification” of past lived experience in narrative form. Susan Crane, “Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory,” American Historical Review, 102 (1997), 1373. For Crane, they constitute two separate forms of historical consciousness – akin in their temporal dimensions to Bevernage’s distinction between “irrevocable” and “irresistible” time. Given this distinction, Crane argues on behalf of a “revised notion of collective memory” that could “provide a theoretical basis for imagining a different kind of historical memory, which would focus on the way individuals experience themselves as historical entities.” It would thus,” she avers, “avoid the pitfalls that the concept of collective memory suggests to those who fear its national, revisionist temptations.” Ibid., 1375. Involved here is precisely the politics of memory that Kansteiner sees at the core of memory’s production and reception, elevated to the national level, a phenomenon increasingly prevalent in today’s contested world, as Nikolay Koposov and Dina Khapaeva have recently argued. Presented in their proposal for a European Center for Studies in Memory Politics, (unpublished). I would like to thank the authors for sharing this with me.

77 See Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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article by Verónica Tozzi in History and Theory. In it, Tozzi seeks to set forth what she describes as a new epistemology of testimony,” one akin to collective approaches to memory. Tozzi adopts what she calls a “pragmatist” approach that combines accounts by Hayden White about witness literature78 with the “generative-performative” method articulated by Martin Krush,79 one that sees knowledge as created through a process of communal performance, hence an on-going practice of constitution and re-constitution. Given this pre-sentist orientation, Tozzi’s epistemology looks at the testimony of witnesses not, as she says, “as a journey to the past but as action in the present.”80 In doing so, she makes clear, we must “move beyond considerations of testi-mony as evidence for testing cognitive interpretations, that is, as belonging to the empirical base”81 and “abandon any notion that testimony constitutes a mere document.”82 Instead, we should see survivor testimonies as socially constructed forms of present consciousness, ones that can and do participate in the communal creation of legitimate knowledge about the past, but have no foundational relationship to that process.

The goal here is to erase the usual epistemological distinction between mem-ory and history, with the former traditionally seen as the bearer and transmit-ter of direct knowledge, experientially acquired and essentially uninterpreted, and the latter a deferred, interpretative and socially generated understanding of that past. Instead, both history and memory participate on the same basis in framing a social and communally shared representation of the past. Thus Tozzi would reject the essential demarcation between history and memory so crucial to Friedländer and other historians of the Holocaust in favor of inves-tigating how memory and testimony, to the same as extent as history, “play the game of cognitive construction,”83 thus drawing attention to “the linguistic conventions of testifying and to its performative character.”84

To make this argument, however, is to undermine precisely the distinction that scholars of traumatic and catastrophic events consider most crucial by drawing memory completely into the orbit of history and, in its presentist

78 As described by Hayden White in “Figural Realism in Witness Literature,” Parallax, 10 (2004), 133–124.

79 In Knowledge by Agreement: The Programme of Communitarian Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

80 Verónia Tozzi, “The Epistemic and Moral Role of Testimony,” History and Theory, 51 (Feb. 2012), 3.

81 Ibid., 15.82 Ibid., 5.83 Ibid., 15.84 Ibid., 16.



orientation, diminishing its impact as, precisely, witness to a past otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to retrieve via the normal protocols of historical investigation. As a “new epistemology of testimony,” therefore, Tozzi’s formu-lation of what she rightly recognizes as a significant problem in framing the relationship between memory and history seems inadequate in addressing the central issue of the inherent difference between testimony and historical evi-dence as conventionally understood, even as it seeks to move the problem to a new level. Moreover, in moving the force and authority of testimony from the past to the present, she seems to locate memory in a culturally mediated and historically generated realm of the performative that, on a theoretical level at least, makes it indistinguishable from any other form of historical knowledge and therefore diminishes what would seem to be memory’s special claims to attention. Indeed, it is interesting to note that John E. Toews, one of the earliest and most influential historians to engage with the “linguistic turn” in contem-porary historiography, believes that “it is at least arguable that the “linguistic turn” in historical studies lost its momentum because it lost the capacity to listen, to open itself to the voice of the other, to recognize the tangibility, mate-riality, and presence of “difference” and the ways in which the absent past still operates experientially in the present and can be reanimated through tech-niques that imaginatively conjure up other worlds and the voices that inhabit them.”85 To be sure, scholars of traumatic memory are not the only historians who have insisted on the “presence of the past” as a perduring element, as the recent work of Frank Ankersmit on the “historical sublime” and that of Eelco Runia and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstrates.86 Yet as Toews himself rec-ognizes, the turn to presence, to the tangibility and “reality” of the past in the present “can function productively only when it emerges as a supplement, as an addition or dialogical partner to the persistent unmasking and unmaking of ordering codes and structures of historical identities in the processes of critical reflection.”87

85 Toews, “Manifesting, Producing and Mobilizing Historical Consciousness in the ‘Postmodern Condition,’ ” 269.

86 See for example Frank R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, and Ibid., “ ‘Presence’ and Myth,” History and Theory, 45 (2006), 328–336; H.U. Gumbrecht, Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004) and Ibid., “Presence Achieved in Language (With Special Attention Given to the Presence of the Past), History and Theory, 45 (2006), 317–327 and Eelco Runia, “Spots of Time,” History and Theory, 45 (2006), 305–316; Ibid., “Presence,” History and Theory, 45 (2006), 1–29; Ewa Domanska, The Material Presence of the Past,” History and Theory, 45 (2006), 337–348.

87 Ibid., 269.

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Nor do I believe that we should redefine history as a task of mourning or that “mourning is constitutive for historical thinking in general in principle,” or even that “historical thinking should become a procedure of mourning as soon as it meets the traumatic character of historical experience of the last century,” as Jörn Rüsen has recently advocated.88 Still, the time has clearly arrived in which to grant the possible legitimacy of reconfiguring the rela-tionship between past and present via the persistence of memory, without necessarily accepting a claim that the only posture of history in the face of the catastrophic is to assume the burden of mourning. As Michael Roth has commented, “acknowledgment of the past in the present is a necessary ingre-dient of modern historical consciousness and hence of modern freedom,”89 a position that would seem to entail the integration or melding of history and memory. But even Roth retreats when he stipulates that “there is no recupera-tion of the immediate, and trauma is not a foundation for historical theory.”90 The historian is not the guardian of memory, but a critic of the past, whether recent or distant, and to abandon historiography as a critical enterprise would be to give away the game in its entirety.

So what are the methodological and, ultimately, historiographical questions raised by studies of memory for writing history, assuming that they have had, like poststructuralism, a lasting, if only partial, effect on how we understand and practice it? The questions involved operate on several levels, including the philosophical, epistemological, evidentiary and temporal, and finally raise ethical questions long rejected for consideration in the context of professional historiography. The most obvious challenge posed to “positivist” (and, indeed, poststructural) notions of historiography posed by the “memory paradigm” and the differential temporality that it embraces resides in the belief in the persistence of the past or, more generally, the ongoing “presence of the past.” For in seeking to keep alive a sense of the experiential, affective dimensions of past traumatic events and catastrophes, historians of these subjects defy the very logic of history, which depends on the death of the past and its necessarily mediated re-presentation in the present, the one place where historicism and poststructuralism meet, at least from an epistemological perspective.

To incorporate “memory” and trauma into historical representation will mean acknowledging and accepting as historiographically legitimate the

88 Jörn Rüsen, “Mourning by History – Ideas of a New Element in Historical Thinking,” Historiography East & West, 1 (2003), 15–38.

89 Michael S. Roth, The Ironist’s Cage, 211.90 Michael Roth, Memory, Trauma and History Essays on Living with the Past (New York:

Columbia University Press, 2012), 154.



differing status of analytically recuperated “facts” and victim testimony. As Roth argues, “appeals to memory are not subject to the same criteria of adjudication as appeals to historical evidence. They claim an unmediated authenticity not subject to academic critique,” even though he simultaneously recognizes that in the wake of critiques concerning the legitimacy of history, “memorial ges-tures have become ever more important.”91 Yet for many historians “history’s obligation [is] to offer a critical perspective on memory.”92 Historians’ open-ness to memorial testimony, Roth believes, should be seen rather as an “ethical response to the fragility of representation” and he questions whether attempts to find a place for traumatic events within historical consciousness “can ever be more than an aspiration.”93 From this point of view, to equate memory and history as equally valid and cognitively comparable would completely revise the evidentiary standards operative in the profession.

This in turn, would require that we find a way to theorize, as has yet to be done, the materiality and reality of “voices” from the past, without assuming the necessary “truth” of what they convey, at least in terms of the factuality of its content. David Harlan, in “Historical Fiction and the Future of Academic History” has already suggested that what we seek in the past are voices with whom we can engage in our struggles to make sense of our lives and recom-mends the reading of novels. For Harlan “voice is primary; everything else – life and times, setting and background, motive and reason, sense and sensibility – is driven by and follows from the voices we hear in the novels we read,”94 and it is in attending to these “voices” that “history comes into its own as a mode of moral reflection.”95 But what, in fact, are these “voices” we hear, and how do we hear them? Interestingly, those most concerned with traumatic memory have tended, instead, to emphasize silence, beginning with Lyotard, for whom “Holocaust” and “Auschwitz” represent the names of a silence.96 The ethical responsibility owed to the dead lies, therefore, not in seeking to represent the horror but rather to ensure that it forever haunts us.97 Similarly, Paul-André

91 Disturbing Remains: Memory, History and Crisis in the Twentieth Century, Michael Roth and Charles Salas, (eds.), 3.

92 Roth, Memory, Trauma and History Essays on Living with the Past, xv.93 Disturbing Remains: Memory, History and Crisis in the Twentieth Century, Michael Roth

and Charles Salas, (eds.), 3.94 David Harlan, “Historical Fiction and Academic History,” in Manifestos for History, 117.95 Ibid., 119.96 Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).97 See the discussion of this in Keith Jenkins, “Ethical Responsibility and the Historian:

On the Possible End of a History ‘Of a Certain Kind,’ ” History and Theory, Theme issue,

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Rosental has argued that silence is a classic theme in the literature of survivors and the conditions of transmission or non-transmission of memory, whether one is speaking of the Shoah or, more generally, of other major traumatic events, individual or collective.”98 But rather than considering silence as a fail-

43 (2004), 43–60. For Jenkins, to be precise, historians as such – that is, as professional historians – have no ethical responsibility to the past. But if they aspire to be intellectuals of the type he finds desirable, they will have to abandon their current practices. Thus, as he states, “to be ‘ethical’ . . . perhaps signals the possible end of a history of a certain king and, as the inevitable corollary, the end of a historian of a certain kind too.” Ibid., 43. It is symptomatic of this “ethical turn” in current historiography that Hayden White, always a good barometer of forces within the profession, has recently take to advocating the notion of a ‘practical past’ in place of the ‘historical past’ as professionally and conventionally understood. Hayden White, “The Practical Past”, Historein, 10 (2010), 10–19.

Drawing on the distinction between these approaches to history first articulated by Michael Oakeshott in the 1930s and revisited by Oakeshott in the early fifties and again in the sixties, the “practical past” for Oakeshott, as David Harlan has shown, was the past “we create in order to make valid practical beliefs about the present and the future, about the world in general.” David Harlan, “The Burden of History forty years later.” In Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, Hans Kellner (eds.), Re-Figuring Hayden White (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009), 173. What the notion of a ‘practical past’ seems to offer White is not only the crucial ability for people to locate themselves in time and hence make history available in a post-metaphysical world, but also access to memory, that which, in Oakeshott’s initial formulations, makes up the fragments and traditions upon which people draw in crafting a practical, hence personal, past. This is in line with White’s lifelong belief that “We choose our past in the same way that we choose our future. The historical past, therefore, is like our various personal pasts, at best mythic, justifying our gamble on a specific future, at worst a lie, a retrospective rationalism of what we have in fact become through our choices. . . .” See Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory, 5 (1966), 122–3. Like Jenkins, White now doubts the ability of professional historians to meet the challenge of an ethically responsible approach to history. As he stated in a debate with A. Dirks Moses: “Moses says that I challenge ‘the role of professional historiography in policing the way in which the past is invoked in the present for political projects.’ I certainly do. I not only deny the authority of ‘professional historians’ to police anything. I also deny that historians, in their current professional capacity, possess the resources necessary for rendering ‘ethically responsible’ judgments on whatever it is we mean by ‘history.’ ” See Hayden White, “The Public Relevance of Historical Studies A Reply to Dirk Moses, History and Theory, 44 (2005), 355. On this aspect of White’s recent positions, see Gabrielle M Spiegel, “Above, About and Beyond the Writing of History: A Retrospective View of Hayden White’s Metahistory on the Fortieth Anniversary of its Publication,” Rethinking History, 17 (2013), 492–508.

98 Rosental, “Généalogies mentales à l’épreuve de la Shoah La distribution du silence comme source de l’histoire familiale,” in Pour une microhistoire de la Shoah, 19.



ure of transmission, Rosental frames it as an “act of symbolization, a mode of reformulating the past, and thus as a possible source for the historian.”99

It does appear that, at the moment anyway, ethical claims for “justice” embedded in testimony and traumatic memory are sufficiently powerful to justify their admission into normal historiographical discourse, despite the notorious vagaries of memory, not to mention its culturally and socially medi-ated character. Yet to the extent that the “linguistic turn” has already modified our understanding of the truth claims embedded in historical work and more or less laid to rest the notion of “objectivity” as an illusion, epistemological revisions to traditional historiographical pursuits have long been in place. If we can agree that history is the product of contemporary mental representations of the absent past that bear within them strong ideological and/or political imprints – and it seems unlikely that any historian would today disagree with this, whether framed in terms of discourse, social location, or some other form of the historian’s fashioning – then it seems logical to include within the deter-minants of historical practice the impress of individual psychological forces in the coding and decoding of those socially generated norms and discourses. And thus the historian is as imbricated in the cultural and psychological forces at play in the construction of the past as the victim.100

In the end, what is at stake in these discussion is not an epistemological question of “truth” but an ethical response to the catastrophes of the last century and, in a more general sense, a turn from epistemological to ethical commitments in the study of the past, creating a place (and a plea) for a new historical ethics that need not – and probably cannot and should not – mean the abandonment of the search for evidence, the responsibility to seek to “get it right” in our investigations of the past, or the insistence on a critical approach to knowledge in all its manifest forms as the fundamental practice of the historian.

99 Ibid., 19.100 The inevitability of a transferential relationship to the past, and to the Holocaust in

particular, has long been a theme of the work of Dominic LaCapra, most pertinently in his Representing the Holocaust History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) and, more recently, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore and London; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

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Postscript

The preceding discussion is based on a normal – and to some extent normative – view of history and historiography as practiced by contemporary historians. But if those who study the impact of digital technology on the creation of historical consciousness are correct in their predictions, ours will be the last generation to practice history in this way. As early as 1979, Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, signaled the ways in which digitization was trans-forming our understanding of scientific knowledge. But he was writing at the inception of the digital revolution, at a time when its interactive capabilities were not yet in play. Recent articles by theorists such as Mark Poster and Wulf Kansteiner predict that nearly universal access to the knowledge available on the Internet signals, as the very least of its effects, the end of academic con-trol over the production of historical knowledge. In Poster’s view, what is entailed is a complete reconsideration of the forces and agents at work in the production of history, which need to be taken into account if we are to under-stand how historical knowledge is apt to be generated henceforth. Computer technology, with its global and virtually instantaneous reach, will reconfig-ure our understanding of geography, temporality and historical agency, with machines emerging as historical agents comparable to and as consequential in their actions as humans. Moreover, Poster believes, networked computing will completely re-shape the understanding of “identity” and “agency”, since “in chat rooms and games, “identity” becomes not a given figure of the self but a practice of self-fashioning, not a natural attribute but a manufactured result, not a permanent center of individuality but a temporary and changing aspect of personal development.”101 Hence, Poster believes, a new kind of agency or identity is in the process of emerging, in and through media practices. Rather than the autonomous, private stable individual of modernity, “the subject posi-tion of digital culture appears as a node in a network, a relay point, changeable in time and space, amorphously defined, internally inconsistent.”102

According to Kansteiner, the same lability, fluidity and impermanence will apply to the formation of historical consciousness itself, which in the future will be shaped primarily in the course of playing interactive media games whose ostensible subject matter are historical events and phenomena. But the very fact of their interactivity means that players can shape both events and their outcomes in any way they elect. As he states: “For the first time, narra-tive competency and historical consciousness will be acquired through fully

101 Mark Poster, “Manifesto for a History of the Media,” Manifestos for History, 43.102 Ibid., 47.



interactive media which will provide consumers of history products with an unprecedented degree of cultural agency. Historical culture can and will be radically re-written and reinvented every time we turn on our computers.”103 For Kansteiner, a student of collective memory, the “communities” formed by playing interactive media games, though virtual – and indeed, it is not always clear that the opponent in the game is an actual person, rather than a machine function – will constitute an entirely novel form of collective historical con-sciousness, with wide-ranging consequences that he defines in the following manner:

Now we might have to realize that historical consciousness can be invented and reproduced independently of any social context. In the past, the smallest unit of historical consciousness was a group of two individuals; in the future the smallest unit will be only one person and a computer. That seemingly small adjustment in scale will have radical consequences for the evolution of human consciousness, including his-torical consciousness.104

We can perhaps hope that this proves to be wrong.

103 Wulf Kansteiner, “Alternate Worlds and Invented Communities History and historical consciousness in the age of interactive media.” In Manifestos for History, 132.

104 Ibid., 136.

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