Coda

The reader who left Historics with the idea that history was finished would be mistaken. History [crg] puts a finish on things, on its objects – Historics doesn’t. If Historics recognizes one thing, it’s that history continues. After all history perpetuates and authenticates itself. Society can’t help being historical, its managers, directors, technical experts, opinion-formers, can’t help their mental reactions defaulting to history. Everyone and everything ends up being historicized. It’s this ‘‘can’t help’’ syndrome history induces, that Historics has tried to get behind and get at. It wanted to find out what kinds of mental and behavioural habits constitute history, what history does – what you have to do to do history, and when you do history, what you end up doing: what intellectual stance you must take, what ideological principles you must swallow, what thought conventions you must observe. And this enquiry is imperative. The world, now, suffers from severe problems of political and social justice, scandalous inequalities of opportunity and the distribution of wealth and resources, alarming and irreversible environmental damage. This is how the world has, in historical terms, turned out: this is the historicized world. Historians, those who are quick to demonstrate how ‘our world got to be the way it is’ (Cannadine 1999: 8), those who make history by representing the ‘‘real reality’’ of things, what really happened, those who teach others how history is made and how to make history, thus equipping them with marketable, technical-managerial skills – they are uniquely implicated in the way the historicized world is now. By their very function, their formal, social position, historians furnish the intellectual justification for its perpetuation and reproduction, for constantly symbolically re-enacting the historical changes throughout history that always perpetuate the same old thing. History is tempting. Whenever cultural contradictions emerge, the

social fabric gapes, a political crisis breaks, an economic catastrophe

erupts, history comes ready with sets of soothing, already recognized values, skeins of traditions and habits, narratives of origins and causes, accounts of precedents and outcomes, successes and failures. History works as the all-purpose ‘‘filler’’ for a heterogeneous, fragmented, historicized reality. But it’s deceptive: it’s the ultimate reality fix, but only because of its drowsy, an-aesthetic side-effects. In reality, it’s ‘the absence of being, the negation of everything, a rupture of the living amongst the living’, something alien to our ‘intemporal nature’: there’s no reason to go along with it. Certainly, it can erase us regardlessly. Still, nothing stops us inverting the normal continuities. Nothing stops us seeing the whole of time ‘coming to visit us, one last time, before disappearing’. Certainly this ‘eternal present’ seems as phantasmic an idea as ‘normal continuities’ and just as empty. But, Cioran insists, does not this ever-present emptiness dispense a plenitude far more real than all of history put together (Cioran 1987: 146-7)? At least, it’s a reminder, a pang of apprehension. One may not be

able to help being historical. One might not be able to help living in a historicized world, confronting daily the demoralizing heterogeneity of all historical things. But one can, however, help what one thinks, how one thinks. One should just think – and not just go along with the readily available historical, historicized concepts, ordering, reordering, and recoding knowledge already known. One should think, because thinking is where it’s always at. Only usually, historically, thinking defaults to knowledge already known. History de-intellectualizes, prevents alternative thinking, ‘encourages a consciousness that is never able to arrive at criticism’ (Cohen 1988: 1, 77, 230). One can’t help living in historical world: that doesn’t mean having to adopt a historical or historicizing thought-style. The melancholy, ruined, historicized world must be confronted daily: that doesn’t mean routinely resorting to historical categories to deal with it. In getting behind the history thought-style that sustains the thought-collective not just of historical disciplines in the human sciences, but also of historicizing as an entrenched social practice, Historics aims to subvert the compulsion to historicize. It thus endorses the true social-critical function of philosophy: i.e. ‘to prevent people succumbing to the ideas and forms of behaviour that society as it is currently organized encourages them to adopt’ (Horkheimer 1976: 283). Thinking obeys its own, always interruptive imperatives. It is anachronistic and, in Nietzsche’s sense, ‘untimely’ [unzeitgema¨ß]. It urges reflection on what needs to be thought – not just on how things are, but on what’s behind how things are. It makes its own demands, such as the practice of selfdistanciation, the observance of its own logical, and grammatological

proprieties. It means that, whenever, wherever the historical past, the historicized world are confronted intellectually, the opportunity arises – for reflection, for backing one’s own sense of things, for choosing one’s own attitude in the given circumstances (cf. Bettelheim 1986: 158). One should just think and for one good reason: it brings us to our

senses. The capacity for reflection that defines the human creature as human is nothing historical. History may well be able to catalogue what has been thought about; but cataloguing is merely a technical procedure, the dull housework, after the party’s end. Thinking offers ‘a domain where the whole of one’s life and its meaning . . . where this ungraspable whole can manifest itself as the sheer continuity of the Iam, an enduring presence in the midst of the world’s ever-changing transitoriness’. For this reason, ‘the primacy of the present, the most transitory of the tenses in the world of appearances’ is ‘an almost dogmatic tenet of philosophical speculation’ (Arendt 1978: 211). In a heterogeneous, historicized world, the disruptive potential of

thinking that brings out the human presence, is underwritten by human creativity in the aesthetic dimension, both in its transfigurative potential and in the practice of discrimination it fosters. Hannah Arendt emphasizes ‘the strange survival of great works, their relative permanence throughout thousands of years,’ which (she says) ‘is due to their having been born in the small, inconspicuous track of non-time which their authors’ thought had beaten between an infinite past and an infinite future’. In imposing their own perspective on this past and future, these authors established ‘a present for themselves, a kind of timeless time in which men are able to create timeless works with which to transcend their own finiteness’ (Arendt 1978: 210-11). Few may be able to create timeless works – but one can live with

them, extract ‘good things’ from them, and, in so doing, venture into the infinity in one’s own finiteness. That’s reason enough for not letting oneself be lulled into living an illusory life in history.