Historiography as readymade

Abstract

ABSTRACT The aim of this essay is to interrogate the possibility of a wake in historiographical practice, especially in written form, by juxtaposing reflections on the theory and philosophy of history at the close of the first quarter of the twenty-first century with the avant-garde movement of the early twentieth. To this end, I establish a dialogue between the Dada and Surrealist artistic avant-gardes’ experiments with writing and reflections on narrative constructivism and the possibility of conceiving a postmodern historical discipline. What are the implications of considering certain well-known historiographical or classic works of the discipline as artifacts of writing that generate effects highly similar to what the Dada avant-gardes called Readymades and the Surrealists objet trouvé? My answer unfolds in two parts. First, I demonstrate the situated nature of historical knowledge about the past (be that past distant or recent) to articulate and evaluate intersections between the artistic avant-garde, poststructuralist academic reflections on historical practice, the institution of academic history, the historiographical operation and, above all, the writing of history as a heuristic in order to access any other bygone period. Secondly, I argue that all historians who emerge from such reflections must be independent as well as firm in their ways of conceiving and rendering concrete their own historiographical gesture. The context for all this is a present in which written formats and platforms on the past as history are exploding and multiplying exponentially. Through the fabrication of an object – a ‘work of history’ – given an aesthetic and reflexive value through the use of the elements, their positioning, and the hierarchy and meanings granted to them, it becomes possible to generate a bi-directional historiographical operation that can incorporate both the audience and a historian-performer, starting from the premise that all writing of history does not end in a single time or in a single paradigm.