The "return to events" in historical study
In a recent issue of the TLS (September 29, 2000), John Ellis, the distinguished Germanist, published an unflinchingly hostile review of David Macey's Dictionary of Critical Theory: the neo-Marxist postmodernism being expounded was, he said, nothing more than an absurd belief system. To Professor Ellis's chagrin, not a dog of a reader (to adapt an old saying) lifted his leg in protest. Had all the fire departed from postmodernist bellies, was the postmodernist tide now definitively ebbing?
The Great War (also referred to as "the culture wars", "the history wars", or "the science wars"), which had its origins deep in the 1960s, was, in the 80s, marked by phenomenal victories on the part of the postmodernists. They overran much of Eng Lit and established the puppet state of Cultural Studies. They walked, without even token resistance, into History and Philosophy of Science, being embraced by weeping Sociologists; flamboyant hopes of conquering the high peaks and cantons of the Natural Sciences were, however, exposed as ill-conceived. Parts of the marcher lands of History fell easily, though it was here that some of the nastiest fighting took place.
John McGowan, in Postmodernism and Its Critics (1991), thought that postmodernism, as a philosophy or intellectual discourse, had four variants: post-structuralism (Derrida and Foucault); the new Marxism (Jameson, Eagleton, Said); neo-pragmatism (Lyotard, Rorty); and feminism (which -man of discretion! -he did not discuss). But any deduction therefrom that postmodernism is, at most, one-quarter Marxist must be tempered by an appreciation that all the great intellectual debates of the 1960s were within the Marxist tradition (Foucault calling Sartre "the last Marxist", and meaning it as an insult, yet comparing Marx to Newton and Darwin). A useful label is "Marxisant" for those, contemptuous of vulgar Marxism and, of course, all official Communist parties, who still accepted Marxist periodization, Marxist condemnations of the bad "bourgeois" society and Marxist perceptions of what ought to be the role of the "proletariat".
Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard and the luminaries of the Left Bank were all Marxisant. Thus postmodernism inherited a strong radical Marxist constituency, which greatly increased as traditional Marxism suffered blow after blow; only the rigorously scholarly and materialist, like E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, held out.
But postmodernist philosophy could claim an organic connection with postmodernism in the arts, postmodernism as a style. The argument that modernism had come to a stop, with nowhere to go, was a persuasive one, particularly with respect to architecture. Whether postmodernist art, literature and music really represent a total reaction against modernism, rather than an extension and extreme exaggeration of it, is probably best met with the response that it is both, with, often, the state-of-the-art frisson of incorporation of the latest technology, as in video installations or digital art.
Since the upheavals of the 1960s, there had been no such thing as the shock of the new; that had been replaced by the simple allure of the ever-more shocking.
With the power and the bathos of e-mail, the Internet and cellular telephones, the excesses and contradictions of consumerism, and the Thatcherite and Reaganite revolutions, it was difficult not to feel "the contemporary" as palpable, and the explanation that this was "the condition of postmodernity" as plausible. The aphorisms of Lyotard and Jameson were deeply satisfying: who did not feel what Jameson referred to as "a sense of unlimited change co-existing with unparalleled standardisation"? Despite its deep Marxisant substructure, much of postmodernism appealed profoundly to those who were by no means politically radical. They might not be sympathetic to the formulaic linking of the condition of postmodernity to an alleged crisis in late capitalism, but they were aware of all the disruptions and uncertainties implicit in globalization. Many aspects of postmodernist theory had a liberating feel about them: the insistence on plurality and difference; the abandonment of "grand narratives", of which, of course, traditional Marxism was the grandest; the recognition of the insecurities of language and the lack of a direct correspondence between language and reality, if not the whole-hog position of everything being constructed within language.
One of the biggest academic growth areas in the last quarter-century has been Popular Culture. Since the rise and rise of television, pop music and fashion, commercialized mass sport, and the commodification of almost everything are very much associated with the assumed condition of postmodernity, it was natural that postmodernist theory should be at the heart of the study of Popular Culture, insisting, for instance, that theories of narrative and emplotment were essential in, say, analysing television programmes.
Postmodernism drew prestige too from the early association between structuralism and the most celebrated of all historians, Fernand Braudel.
Levi-Strauss sought to snub Sartre by declaring, "Whatever meaning and movement history displays is imparted and endorsed, not by historical actors, but by the totality of rule systems within which they are located and enmeshed"; but this was close to what the Annales historians, with their rejection of histoire evenementielle, believed. Further bottom was given to the cause by praying in aid the anthropologist everyone wished to be seen quoting, Clifford Geertz, and his "webs of meaning".
However, there can be no doubt that political radicalism was the most powerful impetus behind postmodernism, of which Geraldine Finn wrote that it seemed to open up spaces in culture and consciousness where we can speak, hear and recognize other and heretofore subordinated histories, realities, reasons, subjectivities, knowledges and values which have been silenced and suppressed and certainly excluded from the formulations and determinations of the old modernist project.
New departments created, and new appointments made, to further women's studies, black studies and post-colonial literature created bases from which the whole postmodernist project could be expanded. The euphoric, totalizing (though, formally, postmodernism is supposed to be the opposite) enthusiasm of that blissful dawn when post-structuralism, radicalism and feminism were just beginning to come together, is well captured by the note on which the other John Ellis, and his partner, Rosalind Coward, opened their 1977 book, Language and Materialism: Developments in semiology and the theory of the subject:
"Perhaps the most significant feature of twentieth-century intellectual development has been the way in which the study of language has opened the route to an understanding of mankind, social history and the laws of how society functions."
It was, of course, the overtly political agenda of the postmodernists, and their attacks on conventional studies, the sciences and history, in particular, which provoked punitive counter- attacks. Alan D. Sokal, a Professor of Physics at New York University, is a dedicated Old Left figure whose commitment had extended to going out to teach mathematics for the Sandinista government. The publication in the spring/summer 1996 issue of Social Text, an American postmodernist journal of cultural studies, of his hoax article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity", was a brilliant stroke against postmodernist claims that there was a relativist and indeterminate postmodernist science which in itself supported feminist and radical causes.
But to achieve a fuller answer as to why the postmodernist front has fallen silent, we should consider the original German title of Erich Maria Remarque's classic: what was transpiring Im Westen was nichts Neues. Since the thunderous assaults of the 1980s and early 90s, there has simply been nothing new. On the grounds that in an age which, being postmodern, was, by definition, post-hot war, and post-cold war, any kind of war was impossible, Baudrillard wrote an article in Liberation of January 4, 1991, entitled "The Gulf War will not take place", leading inexorably to further articles, "Is the Gulf War really taking place?" and "The Gulf War has not taken place" (Liberation, March 29, 1991), insisting that the War was actually that characteristically postmodern phenomenon, a massive media campaign. For the cause of postmodernism, this burbling nonsense amounted to devastating friendly fire. As John Searle comments in Mind, Language and Society (1999): "It is a sad fact about my profession, wonderful though it is, that the most famous and admired philosophers are often the ones with the most preposterous theories."
At no time did postmodernism carry all before it. Just when the speculative ideas associated with it were emerging, perfectly formed, a new reflexiveness, carefully examining methods and principles, was beginning to develop in the humanities, particularly in history. Thatcherism, with its insistence on value for money from education, strengthened this process. There has been much groaning in academia over the new regime in which intended "outcomes" have to be specified and "benchmarked", welcomed, however, by those of us who have always been explicit and disciplined in our teaching. The new regime, certainly, is inimical to the fantasies and unfounded authoritarianism of postmodernist cultural theory; those who have lived by indeterminacy and the discursive shall perish by benchmarking and Learning Outcomes.
In the 1980s, young postgraduates, going, as apprentice academics, into any of the humanities, felt bound, unless exceptionally gifted or independent-minded, to give their work a distinctive postmodernist ring. Today, I find Open University students objecting to postmodernism and feminism being thrust down their throats, and some tutors objecting to being parties to the thrusting.
Even in America, the forces of external accountability are strong. John Ellis (the Germanist) has remarked that postmodernist posturing "brings power and prestige on campus but lacks any validity in the wider world".
Large tracts of Eng Lit, particularly in America, remain in the condition of pre-1989 Albania, but elsewhere "nothing new" is synonymous with "out of fashion", and we all know the desolation of being out of fashion. Ludmilla Jordanova has been a loyal and aggressive Foucaldian; but now, in her recent History in Practice, she recognizes that postmodernism was merely a fad of its day: "in the late 1990s the enthusiasm is beginning to subside."
Former devotee John Tosh has also, in the latest edition of his book The Pursuit of History, lapsed, lapsing also into one of today's ghastliest cliches: postmodernist appeal was simply explained "by its resonance with some of the defining tendencies (sic) in contemporary thought". Most portentously, Willie Thompson, the former Marxist from Glasgow Caledonian has, in his What Happened To History?, just published a brilliant explication of history as a domain of knowledge analogous to the natural sciences, based on evidence and eschewing second-hand postmodernist tropes, such as nations as "imagined communities" or "memory" as a collective phenomenon inextricably bound up with popular radicalism.
In fact, at this very time, historians are turning back to events, deserting structures and "webs of meaning" in shoals. In France, the lifting of the interdict on histoire evenementielle was symbolized when, in 1994, Annales changed its subtitle from Economies, Societes, Civilisations to Histoire, Sciences Sociales. A culminating point came in the March/April issue of 1999 which had a section on that most evenementielle of events, the Fronde.
Robert Descimon wrote that "the return to events", seen as incompatible with "Fernand Braudel's total history", is opening new "explanatory perspectives", particularly in relationship to willed human action. Throughout the postmodernist efflorescence, event-based history was the prerogative of the Sorbonne and the Ecole des Chartes, led by Yves-Marie Berce, whose magnificent doctorat d'etat, Histoire des croquants: Etudes des soulevements populaires au XVIIe siecle dans le Sud-Ouest de la France had appeared in two volumes in
1974. "Croquants" is the condescending term for "peasants" met with in La Fontaine's Fables: in Berce's account, they are highly resourceful in ensuring that their risings were events of considerable historical significance. Berce's Fete et Revolte (1994) is full of willed action. One event he deals with is the Carnaval of Romans, subject of a grossly oversold, vestigially postmodernist, book by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Deftly, Berce lodges a note of dissent: "Sans la suivre (my italics), j'ai fait mon profit de l'interpretation brillante donnee par E. Le Roy Ladurie." In 1992, having been affected, as we all have, by the dramatic events of 1989-91, Berce published (notez bien le titre) La Naissance dramatique de l'absolutisme, 1598-1661. Fainthearts at Macmillan cut the obviously deeply felt "dramatic", a tug at the tail of Braudel's la longue duree, coming up with an unremarkable (but decisively non-postmodernist) The Birth of Absolutism: A history of France 1598-1661 (1996).
What historians are studying is the way events are experienced, the outcomes of those experiences, and the place of events in complex chains of causation.
Obvious examples are Mark Mazower's Inside Hitler's Greece: The experience of Occupation, 1941-1944 (1993) and The People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution,
1891-1924 by Orlando Figes (1996).
Historians, furthermore, are now, after having talked about it for years, developing genuine transnational comparative approaches to their analyses of events. (Postmodernist historians write about la patrie or, in the case of local hero Patrick Joyce, Britain's own uncompromisingly incomprehensible postmodernist historian,Lancashire.) A most impressive example is Steven J.
Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Volume One, The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age (1994). In The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic memory and national recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965, the Belgian Pieter Lagrou sharply disposes of postmodernist abuse of language: "The universality of the fashionable terminology of 'national memory' might cause its users to forget the metaphorical and probably even inappropriate use of the word 'memory' in this context. Few human characteristics are more inalienably individual than memory."
Postmodernist/Marxist junk about nationalism being "invented" has been seen off in work by Anthony Smith, Adrian Hastings, and the classic, and event-filled, States, Nation and Nationalism (Munich 1994, London 1996) by Hagen Schulze, Director of the German Historical Institute in Bloomsbury: "A whole series of disasters began in 1309 with the exile of the popes in Avignon and assumed even more dramatic features with the beginning of the Hundred Years War in 1337.
Increasing famines and plagues reached a climax with the Black Death . . . .
There followed the Jacquerie . . . ."
I conclude my case by citing the two volumes just published of The Short Oxford History of Europe. By organizing his contributors into teams, Open University-fashion, the editor, Tim Blanning, has coaxed out an integrated narrative which demonstrates the effects of events on society, economy and culture, and vice versa, from the era of "International Rivalry and Warfare" and of "Orders and Classes: Eighteenth-century society under pressure" to the moment of release of the "destructive force of the First World War" and "its horrific long-term consequences", with nary a cheep about gender, memory, identity, or imagined communities.
For some time, I have been running a check on how often the names Foucault and Marx appear in the indexes of serious books in my general field. Their disappearance has been quite staggering. In Albrecht Folsing's Albert Einstein:
A biography (1997), I did find the two names -Foucault (Jean-Bernard) and Marx (Wilhelm): both real scientists. Readers should as quickly as possible get hold of the February 1999 issue of the historical journal Past and Present. With exquisite judgment, the editors simply printed, unaltered, Patrick Joyce's "The Return of History: Postmodernism and the politics of academic history in Britain", this return to planet Joyce being an incomprehensible mix of jargon, cliche, gibberish and unfocused rage. Postmodernism had produced its very own "longest suicide note in history".
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