Postmodernism and Historical Inquiry: Spoiled For Choice?

Abstract

I O Historically Speaking · January/February 2005 the form theycan take. These questions provide the standard ofadequacy against which the histories can be measured. Postmodernists, by drawing attention to the subjective and cultural sources ofhistorical knowledge, have concluded that such knowledge is nothingbut a personal and cultural construction, providinguswithno reliable information aboutthe past. In facthistorians often provide credible narratives and interpretations ofthe past, and give plausible analyses ofwhathappened in response to the questions people ask about past events. C. Behan McCullagh ¿ra readerandassociateprofessor inphilosophy at La Trobe University . His most recent book isThe Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective (Routledge, 2004). 1 ER. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic:A SemanticAnalysis ofthe Historians Language (Martinus Nijhoff, 1983); Beverley Southgate, Postmodernism in History : Fear or Freedom? (Routledge, 2003); Alun Munslow, The New History (Pearson Education, 2003); Robert E. BerkhoferJr., Beyond the Great Story: History as TextandDiscourse (Harvard University Press, 1995); and KeithJenkins, Refiguring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline (Routledge, 2003). 2 This I have attempted to do, most succinctly in my recent book The Logic ofHistory (Routledge, 2004). 3 Munslow, The New History, 166. 4 Ankersmit, NarrativeLogic. He sometimes wavers from this view slightly: see C. Behan McCullagh, "Bias in Historical Description, Interpretation, and Explanation," History and Theory 39 (2000): 58. 5 Hayden White, Metahistory: The HistoricalImagination in 19th-century Europe (TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1975). 6 1 have analyzed and illustrated common forms of these patterns of interpretation in The Truth of History (Routledge, 1998). 7 Robert Fawtier, The Capetian Kings ofFrance: Monarchy and Nation, 987-1328, trans. L. Butler and RJ. Adam (Macmillan, 1964), ch. 12. Postmodernism and Historical Inquiry: Spoiled for Choice? Beverley Southgate For me, postmodernism definitively arrived on December 12, 1997. On that day the London Timesreported that Prime Minister Tony Blair had gone beyond the bounds of conventional diplomatic generosityby offering the Irish negotiator Gerry Adams nothingless than "a choice ofhistory." For a mere mortal to claim to have such dispensations in his gift may sound extraordinarily hubristic to historians brought up to assert their own unique rights over a past, the nature ofwhich itwas for them, and onlythem, to determine. But for those attempting to assess the implications of postmodernism for historical inquiry, Blair's offer does at least make a start. And as we grope ourway through something of a conceptual fog, the key word "choice" does provide one useful beacon. What Blair implied with his offer ofhistorical choicewas that, while the events ofthe past (with all their anger and frustration and violence) are undoubtedly there—or rather here, in our present—what actually matters is not their existence, their presenceperse, but rather our responses to them. We can look at them, respond to them, remember them, either in such a way as will lead to further disruption or one that will facilitate reconciliation . What Adams had, and what historians have, is a choice ofnarrative—a choice ofthe wayto "emplot" those past events or put them in a story that leads from them, through our present, and forward to the future. That seems to me to get to the heart of what postmodernism implies for historical inquiry—wherepostmodernism represents an attempt to theorize, and make some intellectual sense of, our actual situation in postmodernity ; and postmodernity I take to be simply a chronological category, with disputable boundaries like any other, but one that enables us at least provisionally to locate ourselves in the ever-rolling stream of time. Thus tentatively located, our condition seems to me to display a number ofinterlocking features, which can themselves be seen as the culmination ofhistorical trends. And the narrative net that I cast over that past catches at least the following in its mesh: first, a postCopernican decentering—an enforced realization that I personally am neither static nor the center of the universe, and that indeed there is no single or static center from which either nature or the past can be definitively viewed, assessed, described, and re-presented; second, that a skeptical philosophy, originating in classical antiquity, revived as a central ingredient of early modern thought, and newly regenerated, reminds us of humans' inherent inadequacy—physical and intellectual —in any pursuit of"truth," whether scientific or...