Moved by the Past: Discontinuity and Historical Mutation

Sometimes, in unguarded moments, I mutter to my students that “historians don’t think.” I usually add that there’s nothing wrong with their mental abilities but that the discipline puts a premium on “sorting things out,” and that consequently the history departments spit out specialists in organizing things who have somehow lost the capacity to tolerate messiness. And “thinking,” I go on, is turning things upside down, is awakening dogs that lie sleeping, is taking things apart, is, in short, willfully making a mess. In most disciplines, of course, being allergic to messiness is no issue at all—in history, however, it is. For whereas in other disciplines results are valid only if they can be replicated by your colleagues, in history validity is a function of the extent in which results can not be replicated by your colleagues. And there is no escaping it: in order to fabricate something that is robustly and distinctly personal, you have to resist the neat PowerPoint slides that offer themselves to your clueless mind, to get your teeth in what you are tempted to take for granted, and to create a nice little mess.

When pressed, I tell my students that there are two antidotes to historical hosophobia. The first is, much to their surprise, popularization. Good popularization starts from scratch, and taking your subject apart leaves you with all the scratch you need. The second antidote is to do what Lord Byron said a good workman shouldn’t do: to “quarrel with your tools.” I spell out that because history—like psychotherapy—belongs to the disciplines where you “are your own instrument,” quarreling with your tools means quarreling with yourself. In history “quarreling with yourself” is nothing more—or less—than a sustained attempt to focus on what you bring to your subject rather than on what your subject brings to you, or, as psychoanalysts would say, on the countertransference rather than on the transference. For historians, “not thinking” goes under the name of “positivism” and takes the form of allowing yourself to become wrapped up in your subject. It implies consenting to be a vehicle for what Hayden White has called prefigurations—and, as I will show in the second chapter of this book—to the extent you succumb to prefigurations you only replicate your subject.²

In writing the essays on which this book is based I have struggled out of the grasp of the belief that we “own” the past. In each essay my premise has been that in fact we are part of a field that is bigger than ourselves, a field that includes what we fancy to be “our” history. As Hans-Georg Gadamer has said: “In Wahrheit gehört die Geschichte nicht uns, sondern wir gehören ihr.”³

One of my guiding principles has been that “creating a mess” is opening yourself to the field to which you belong. That, by the way, is why theory is so important for everyone who is trying to engage history: theory, not as a body of concepts and categories, but as the process of quarreling with the tools of the trade can create the mess you need to open yourself to what is not already included in the preconceptions and prefigurations you bring to what you write about. My second guiding principle follows naturally from the first: I have tried to make the most of the fact that the surprises that befall you when you’re opening yourself to the field are structurally equivalent to the contingencies of history. I have used this isomorphy as an antidote to the pitfalls of prefiguration and as my own brand of Giambattista Vico’s verum et factum convertuntur—the principle that you can only really understand what you have made yourself.

In the form I employ it the equivalence of opening yourself to the field and history’s openness to the future is especially useful for fathoming discontinuity. Discontinuity is perhaps the single most important issue that historians deal with. In theory, that is—for in practice they go to great lengths to not have to stare it in the face. Historians are amazingly smart, and brilliantly creative, in chasing monstrous discontinuity away and establishing continuity. Right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and the introduction of the euro, historians rolled up their sleeves and set out to explain why these events were, after all, bound to happen and logical continuations of what preceded them. And though historians tend to loathe postmodernism, their repugnance of discontinuity was conveniently stiffened by the postmodernist notion that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”—that, in short, everything we fancy to be new is contained in, and can be deduced from, what already exists. But there is no escaping it: history progresses by unforeseeable leaps and bounds—leaps and bounds that are neither implied nor determined by what the actors—that is, ultimately, we ourselves—bring to the diving board. As manifestations of, as Goethe said, “Im Anfang ist die Tat,” leaps and bounds spring from a dehors-texte, and after 9/11 brought down the postmodern twin towers of language and meaning it is, I think, about time to focus on how, in history as well as in historiography, the new—the exhilarating, frightening, sinful, sublimely new—comes about.

In the chapters that follow I show that being “moved by the past” comes in two modalities: a “regressive” and a “revolutionary” one. In both the “regressive” and the “revolutionary” mode the linearity of time is adjourned and a primordial “circularity” reclaims its rights. In the second chapter, I demonstrate that “moved by the past” can be a form of regression: I describe how we may act out a necrophylic relationship with a past that is more dead than we suspect—and in which we consequently reproduce a past that is more alive than we think. In the second half of this book the emphasis shifts to the way we may be “moved by the past” in a revolutionary sense, via situations in which a fresh and living past takes possession of us and gets us going again, in which Kairos gives birth to a new Chronos, in which time is created anew, in which—so to speak—a new linearity is rolled out. As a form of regression, being moved by the past entails inhibition, stasis, and a lack of creativity. Revolutionary Schicksalwende on the other hand—not just the French Revolution and the First World War but also the discontinuities I just mentioned: the fall of the Berlin Wall, George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and the introduction of the euro—involve “exhibition,” frenzy, and a transgressive excess of creativity. In both the regressive and the revolutionary mode, the march of chronicity is interrupted, and past, present, and future start to play hide and seek: being moved by the past begins with being stuck in the present. Being stuck in the present begins with having lost the future. And losing the future begins with estrangement from the past.

Having come to the end of my book, I asked myself what the essays it contains add up to. It’s a question I much preferred to dodge. I’ve always sympathized with the dancer Isadora Duncan—who replied when she was asked what she “meant” by a particular dance: “If I could say it, I didn’t have to dance it.” On a sunny Sunday in May, however, on the train to Groningen, somewhere between Zwolle and Meppel, it occurred to me that I could in fact “say” what I had, on my wooden shoes, danced all along, that my dance could be broken down (or up) into a couple of “vectors” that, though interconnected, could be named and identified separately. When I wrote them down there turned out to be ten of them: from continuity to discontinuity, from historiography to history, from meaning to presence, from metaphor to metonymy, from representation to incarnation, from story to monument, from epistemology to ontology, from identity to estrangement, from allopoiesis to autopoiesis, and, finally, from imagination to invention. Though some of them may puzzle you, I will not here, in what for you is the beginning but for me the end of this book, make up for what I didn’t do in the pages that follow and explain them systematically. Taken together, however, my themes approximate my program for a new and up-to-date philosophy of history and they animate the book you are going to read.

There are a few persons and institutions I would like to thank. First I want to express my gratitude to the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research—who gave me the generous grant that enabled me to pursue my interest in the economically worthless ideas expounded in this book. I thank History and Theory for printing some of the essays on which this book is based and for the permission to use them as/for chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8. I have always felt very fortunate that somewhere out there a venerable institution was eager to publish the things that in my own country were frowned upon. I also thank Rethinking History for printing the essay that in this book is chapter 7. Finally I want to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of Columbia University Press—from now on I’m living in the state Pip lived in in Dickens’s Great Expectations—that of having secret benefactors without knowing (though certainly suspecting …) who they are. Among the many people who inspired me just by believing in the things I did I want to single out Sepp Gumbrecht, Brian Fay, and Carol Gluck. Something of the kind is also applicable to my students. Quite a few of them were intrigued by what I was up to—and they stimulated me with their enthusiasm, their questions, and their offhand (but much appreciated) remarks that my ideas caused them sleepless nights.

I will end by expressing the hope that this book creates enough of a mess to open up the field of history to what to my mind is the historical question par excellence: the question of how, in an endless series of metamorphoses, we have transformed and continue to transform ourselves into who we are.