ABSTRACT
The already historicized world is a world not just dominated by history, but dominated by history as knowledge already known, as the same old thing – as the dominant idea of our time. ‘There is no telling what history will encompass next’, says Nietzsche in The Joyful Science, surely ironically: it was always clear what the development of history as a human science would mean (Nietzsche 1988: III, 404, x34). The historicizing mentality would absorb everything. Everything would go down in history: everything would be historicized, everything acquire a historical finish. The fabric of experience would dissolve into history, the particular textures of ordinary days irretrievable without it. History does dominate the public mind: its hold over the social
imagination is total. History is a ‘mass activity’ that ‘has possibly never had more followers than it does today, when the spectacle of the past excites the kind of attention earlier epochs attached to the new’ (Samuel 1994: 25). Virtually anyone can contribute to historical consciousness – philologists and musicologists, bibliographers and archivists, librarians and collectors, popular illustrators and cartoon animators, stand-up comics and the impresarios of open-air museums, do-it-yourself enthusiasts and the directors of television costumedramas, so ‘history . . . is rather, a social form of knowledge; the work, in any given instance, of a thousand different hands’ (Samuel 1994: 8). Professional, academic historians, however, have doubts about this
public interest. Certainly, when humanities disciplines need to prove their social value, they gladly affirm history’s popular resonance. They can talk of making history ‘‘relevant’’, of aligning academic and social interests. But they are also sceptical about the depth of public knowledge. They can point to public ignorance of dates, incidents, or
personalities in national history, to the mass media distorting history by going for dramatic, photogenic, or human interest appeal, or to the political manipulation of social memory. In terms of content, these deficiencies in public knowledge simply indicate that, on a routine level, history is not a distinctive value, but one value amongst many others. But precisely for that reason, their prevalence only reinforces history professionals’ expertise as indispensably corrective, as the vital guarantee of society’s self-knowledge. However, the historicization of social interests creates a blind
spot. Once ‘‘historical’’ and such associated epithets as ‘‘traditional’’, ‘‘period’’, and ‘‘heritage’’ are applied to anything (e.g. from monographs and ruins, homes and interior design, recipes and fashions, ancient woodlands and Victorian warehouses, latrines for Roman soldiers and National Trust properties) by anyone (e.g. from radical nationalists to unreconstructed communists, New Age ecologists and corporate public-relations managers, wealthy land-owners and redundant coal-miners, property-developers and countryside preservationists), ‘‘history’’ itself actually means specifically nothing (cf. Samuel 1994: 205ff., 259ff.). In an already historicized world, the qualitative distinction between academic and public historical interests collapses. They’re just different versions of the same generalized historical consciousness. Dominating the public mind, dominating public institutions, history
also has a total hold over knowledge. Particularly in the university, in the human sciences, it is synonymous with the research mentality. Professional history can encompass a wide range of different knowledge practices (e.g. learning ‘‘dead’’ languages, other alphabets, palaeography, statistics, econometrics, etc.). A wide range of professional knowledge practices, based on sources and evidence (e.g. genetics, archaeology, medicine, biology, zoology, climatology, astronomy, etc.), feed into history (cf. Pomian 1999: 392-3). No wonder it is consecrated as the pre-eminent university discipline. No wonder either that it can claim to be the ‘ultimate humanistic discipline’ (Southgate 1996: 137). Structuralism tried to challenge it, but from that struggle it emerged victorious and extended its empire over the natural sciences (with, e.g., cosmology becoming a history of the universe, geology a history of the earth, etc.). The twentieth century will surely have been even more significant for history than the nineteenth (Pomian 1999: 9-10). But here too it’s easy to miss the trick. Professional historians
celebrate history’s manifold ‘‘varieties’’, its comprehensive ‘‘pluralism’’. But they’re just euphemisms for history’s ‘incurable
heterogeneity’ (Pomian 1999: 404). Certainly, it may be explained by the inevitable ‘historicity of history’ – by history as a discipline having evolved in history through various historiographical practices and functions. But this explanation only compounds the problem: history must be heterogeneous because history’s history was heterogeneous. It exemplifies the identitary thinking, the ‘‘tautological redundancy’’, that typifies historians’ disciplinary self-reflection. Consequently, the call for a ‘history of history’ intended to link ‘the history of knowledge with the different purposes it serves’ is the ultimate conceit (cf. Pomian 1999: 159). The intention is unexceptionable, because its result would be heterogeneous. History is so much the case, there’s no case it could ever exclude. ‘History is the way in which we conceive the world sub specie
praeteritorum . . . the attempt to organize the whole world of experience in the shape of past events.’ (Collingwood 1978: 152). This is the dominant feature of an already historicized world: experience cannot be conceived except in the shape of past events – except as knowledge already known, as the same old thing. Historics confronts both this social domination of historical heterogeneity and the mentality that legitimizes it. It attacks the arrogance of a social practice that not only organizes the world in the shape of past events, but imposes its practice as the sole, exclusive way of organizing it. It rejects the claim, typical of history in an already historicized world, that history ‘‘naturally’’ organizes human reality. Instead, Historics starts with the realization that, containing everything, history can be anything, hence its organizational capacity is fundamentally spurious. It recognizes it has no special cognitive virtue. Or rather it perceives that history’s special virtue is precisely its lack of virtue: that being heterogeneous, it is a repository of promiscuous meanings. Consequently, Historics treats the public predisposition towards
history as symptomatic of a world already historicized. The already historicized world is made by the past. It is also made by all the historical knowledge of that past and by all the historians working in, and now still working on, it. Hence, all knowledge reverts to being historical knowledge. Being known in the past or in relation to the past, all historical knowledge is knowledge already known. The public, therefore, can’t help being disposed towards history. It has no option: history dominates. History comes at it 24/7 in news bulletins, in the press, in fashion, on TV in films, docu-dramas, and documentaries, let alone in novels, biographies, and erudite monographs. It fosters sociability through local history associations, membership of the National Trust or English Heritage, or family
outings to living museums. It crops up in a host of local and national ‘‘sites of memory’’. It imposes its rituals of commemoration: e.g., a few months ago the bi-centenary of the death of Immanuel Kant, more recently the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, last week the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, just now the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day. Further, in the already historicized world knowledge is already
known because it ensures the continuance of the same old thing. Talk to any historian, he or she always comes up with an antecedent to show that this latest thing is actually the same as the same old thing. In history the latest knowledge is by definition old knowledge, because it comes from and concerns the past (i.e. what was already, or could have been, known then). The already historicized world, imperious with inherent historical precedence, inevitably engulfs the latest thing. (The modern motor-car with safety air-bags, electronic enginemanagement, satellite navigation-system still only does now relatively what the Model T Ford did then. Both only constitute in their own time the latest thing in the history of transport.) In an already historicized world, historical self-consciousness thus creates affirmative, diachronic identities. The latest thing, superseded by a still later thing, is transformed into the same old thing. The terrorist trainbombing in Madrid (March 2004), referred to as ‘‘Europe’s 9/11’’, thus becomes the ‘‘same thing’’ as the attack on the World Trade Center (September 2001), and creates a historical ideal-type known as ‘‘9/11s’’ that will now always recur in the same old way. The recent (2003) violent re´gime change in Iraq turns out to be the same as all the other violent re´gime changes since the time of Nebuchadnezzer. Iraq’s cultural identity will apparently ensure that ‘to define the wished-for future’, the new interim government will ‘turn . . . to historical precedent’. In such a culture where the same old thing evidently keeps recurring ‘the distant past still wields such power’ (MacGregor 2004: 18). Because the latest thing always turns out to be the same as the same
old thing, a historically self-conscious world will comprise both the archaic and the actual, the pre-modern and the postmodern. In a historically self-conscious world they do co-exist and reinforce each other. That also makes history heterogeneous.
