‘Nobody does it better’: radical history and Hayden White

Abstract

This article is divided into two uneven parts. In the first the author outlines what he calls ‘the conditions of possibility’ for a radical history which will keep historical representations, hopefully, at work for political emancipation and empowerment of a left-wing kind. In the second part he sketches out how this ‘position’ relates to his reading of Hayden White.

Keywords:

• aesthetic
• illusion
• postmodernism
• radical history
• rhetoric
• Hayden White

I want to begin this article for Hayden White – an article inconceivable without White and therefore an article indebted to him – by sketching out, in its very much longer first part, what I take to be the necessary conditions of possibility for the production of radical (and let me stress the word radical) histories – by which I mean histories which, from the point of view of the current ‘state of the situation’ are deemed of no significance. What do I need to be able to think these things, and what are some of their consequences? And in part two, I want to explain how I see all of this relating back to White.

Part one

Without further preliminaries, then, let me re-pose the question governing this first part: what are the necessary conditions of possibility for the production of a radical history … ? And here I want to take a step back so that I can identify as my starting point certain ontological presuppositions which, acting as axioms, will then allow me to build a history thereon, axioms and the resultant history both being, on this occasion, presented in tabular form (and thus somewhat skeletally; impressionistically).

(1) I take as my originary axiom the existence of matter; of materiality, of ‘actuality’. I take it that the ‘stuff’ we call, for example, the world, the universe, etc., is really out there and is therefore not the product of my current mental state. Of course I cannot prove this; I cannot get out of my head to check if there is something outside of it, but my premise is that there is. In that sense I'm a realist but a realist of a certain kind; namely, a transcendental realist – by which I mean that not only does such stuff exist (and has existed previously and will exist in the future), but that it transcends each and every attempt in each and every social formation to reduce it to their inhabitants' experiences, vocabularies, lexicons, abstractions, etc., such that they might think that they really do know it. For it seems apparent that the actuality of ‘existence’ skips free of every (definitive) anthropomorphism. Yet, at the same time such transcendental realism does not commit me to metaphysical realism (namely, that we can know the way things are independent of the way we access them). Rather, my type of realism commits me to precisely the opposite. Insofar as we can present examples of our intuitions via various representations, such intuitions/representations cannot escape the exact circumstances of their production; cannot shrug off the pressure of time and chance, and so are thus radically contingent (radically meaning here forever irreducible to definitive meanings). In other words, I hold the view (with Richard Rorty) that whilst the ‘world’ is ‘out there’ meanings are not; that whilst the world is ‘out there’ truths are not, since meanings and truths are in sentences and sentences are not ‘out there’ (Rorty 1989, 5). There is therefore a radical break – an ontological break – between the ‘actuality’ of the world (all that ‘stuff’) and so-called reality, such reality being created/constituted by our human discourses which are ‘about’ but which do not knowingly correspond to that to which they ‘refer’. Indeed, it is these discourses – broadly construed – which alone make the world variously meaning-full, and we know of no other common reality than that thus constituted.

(2) This reduction of any ‘knowledge’ we ‘may think we have’ of the world (past, present, future) to the contingencies of knowledge production, distribution, reception, etc., means – as already noted but now re-articulated slightly – that we can never have access to the actualities of ‘stuff’ plain; pure. That such ‘worlds’ as ours are always just that, ours, and are thus inescapably human, ‘inescapably’ meaning here that just as, say, giraffes or eagles have giraffe and eagle worlds – have their own species-bound ‘readings’ of the stuff of actuality, never cognisant of human readings of the same phenomena – so, locked up in our own human readings, we have no access to giraffe and eagle ‘reality’. Nor is there some form of neutral actuality/reality that offers a way of adjudicating between different species readings in the hope of finding a trans-species ‘real reality’. Thus we human animals (‘just one more species doing its best’) are indeed just doing our best to pragmatically live out a life unknown to other species and which is for all of us – both them and us – ultimately unfathomable.

(3) Such irreducibility of the actuality of the stuff of our ‘worded world’ to our human sensations, experiences, concepts, categories, schemas, analogies, etc., whereby we try to transform our ‘experiences’ of the ‘concrete’ into the ‘concrete in thought’; the inadequacy of every representation to fully capture the objects ‘subjectified’ by our gaze (to gain subject–object identity, full-presence, etc.), means that, when carrying out our meaning-making operations, we cannot but become (on the back of our transcendental realism) inter-subjective idealists; namely, that it is we who make our actuality ‘real’ by endowing attributes to stuff which thus real-ises ‘it’. This is a way of still thinking of ‘actuality’ – after all these years – along the lines of the old Kantian ‘thing in itself’; as that ungraspable (noumenal) excess which thwarts (‘for all we know’) all our efforts to make things identical to us; the same as us. I therefore hold, axiomatically, that the stuff of existence exceeds our every limit, transverses all our boundaries, escapes our most definitive closures, making both our experiential actions and our thoughts unremittingly and inescapably open: ludic, aleatory, heuristic and thus, once again, radically contingent. And here we might recall some recent and well-known formulations of this excess: Camus' absurd, the sublime of Lyotard and White, Badiou's multiples, Lacan's Real, Derrida's undecidables, Kristeva's semiotic, Baudrillard's symbolic-semiotic spiral, and so on. Of course, we must not for a moment think of such formulations as ever being adequate to the excess. For the excess, the sublime, is not a delimited object or thing; it is not something which we knowingly ‘lack’ and which, if found, would allow us to fulfil our (sometime) human desire for completion, closure, totality. For the sublime is forever unpresentable, is something unable to ever be historicized, is precisely non-ontologizable – otherwise it just wouldn't be sublime – and is therefore just a further dimension of our human imagination which posits that beyond our every closure there lurks an ‘undoing outside’ which, despite all our attempts to disavow or negate or just plain forget, hauntingly persists to remind us that beyond all the ‘somethings’ we have made out of ‘nothing’ (making ‘something out of nothing’ is the story of our lives) is the sense of that (constitutive) nothing that can spell ruin for even our very best representations. Thus, to my growing list of axioms – to my transcendental realism, inter-subjective idealism and the undoing sublime – I add radical antirepresentationalism together with, at this point, a certain type of nominalism, a (metaphorical) naming process which, because of its unavoidable violence, forcefully welds together the ontological (and the ontic) to the political and thus to what I take to be (axiomatically) just one expression of the (power) political: history. And in articulating this interconnection I have found it useful to think of this production of meaning as having (after Jacques Derrida) three levels.

(4) To make (to realise) a meaning, to bring meaning into the world is ultimately an act of violence – a violence of ‘writing’ that can be called first-level violence. Since there is no one-to-one natural correspondence between word and world, no literal entailment of signifier to signifier and thence to the putative signified and thence to the putative referent (putative since the referent is now collapsed back into representation – into signs), then to get the actuality of the world into a ‘language’ it never asked to be put in is to always establish both a power and a metaphorical relationship (that tree as if it really was a tree, that past as if it really was history . . .). Yet, accurate as this is, Derrida thinks that the notion of a metaphorical relationship still runs the risk of carrying (naïve) realist overtones, in that it may suggest that there is (already) a meaningful ‘reality’, some solid ground(ing), to which the sign-system refers – albeit figuratively. But obviously there isn't. Consequently, the founding concepts of meaning are instances not of metaphor generally but the (metaphorical) trope of catachresis: a violent production of meaning, an imposition, an abuse. Derrida:

I have always tried to expose the way in which philosophy is literary, not so much because it is metaphor but because it is catachresis. The term metaphor implies a relation to an original ‘property’ of ‘meaning’, a ‘proper’ sense to which it indirectly or equivocally refers, whereas catachresis is a violent production of meaning, an abuse which refers to no exterior or proper norm. (Kearney 1995, 172)

Yet, whilst this violent call to meaning is, of course, a necessary one if any meanings are to be produced at all – since this violent imposition is the very condition of the possibility of meaning – Derrida is concerned to show how this naming process can never achieve what it would like to achieve – namely, literal full-presence. And for him it is precisely différance, as the irreducible tension (aporia) between what he calls the ‘idealized transcendental gesture’ and the necessity of empirical inscription, that is the site of its unavoidable undoing.

Now, how can this undoing be developed in what is termed the level of secondary violence; well, différance again says it all.

For Derrida, every sign wants to say what it ‘really’ means. This is the sign's motivation; the idealized gesture of the (quasi) transcendental – to achieve full-presence and so forth. Yet, for the sign to operate as a sign it must be irreducible to one context, it must be repeatable (albeit always slightly differently) in other contexts (iterable), otherwise it just wouldn't be a sign. Consequently, the necessity of empirical inscription guarantees the logical impossibility of the purity of the transcendental gesture. Nevertheless, the ‘myth’ of the transcendental (universals, absolutes . . .) remains the animating force behind the signs of, say, Justice, Law, Ethics, or History, such that it is here that the aporetic tension inevitably resides. For while the originary violence of the sign enables us to think the transcendental gesture, that gesture is never realisable at the empirical level. Consequently, Justice or Law or Ethics or History are always only accessible at the level of the empirical/iterable (as justices, laws, ethics, histories … ) and yet are irreducible to them. Historical discourse then (now concentrating on ‘history’) cannot ever escape indeterminacy; cannot escape différance; of being always both the idealized gesture and iterable – that is, being always open to new inscriptions, meanings, to interminable redescriptions. The fulfilment of any idealized gesture is thus permanently delayed; will always be ‘to come’ yet will never arrive: there is no ‘last instance’, no ‘last word’, no closure, no ‘final solution’. We shall never know what History/history ‘really is’ – that will remain a secret like the name and the face of God. Its putative aim – the truth-full reconstruction of the past – is thus an impossible ‘myth’, yet one which continuously energises historians' productions. We shall, courtesy of différance, never know what the nature of history is any more than we shall know The Law, Justice, Ethics or God; we shall never know the past ‘in and for itself’; for its ‘own sake’.

Now, it is precisely this ‘fact’ (and if there is a fact this is it) that Derrida thinks we have tried to forget; to disavow. And it is this refusal to remember the violent, contingent and thus arbitrary relationship of words and things in favour of literal truths, permanent categories, invariable essences and non-relativistic ethics, that goes under the name of secondary violence – the violence of forgetting.

This ‘mind-world’ of secondary violence – of ‘realism’, of representationalism, of ethical imperatives – is the one most of us habitually inhabit: this is ‘reality’, this is what we ‘take for granted’. And it is these repressed actualities which Derrida and others wish us to recall by deconstructing via différance those protective, fictive shelters of secondary violence which, if I can put it this way, the overwhelming thrust of the Western Tradition (of which modernity – and the (violent) modern nation-state – was its swan-song) erected as barriers against ‘the other(s)’. I mean, all those ‘infinite fixes’, those rigid designators, those binary oppositions, those various/sometime white, ethnic, gendered, onto-theological fantasies which, embodied in phallologocentric articulations, have included amongst their vehicles numerous histories, not least those finding sometime expression in upper-case (metanarrative) and lower-case (certaintist/academic/professional) forms. And Derrida as I read him – along with other radical post-structuralist/postmodern historians – is concerned to remove all and every remaining, privileging carapace insofar as they have tried (and try) to help legitimate reasons excusing acts of third level violence; that is, the everyday empirical violence of exclusion, rape, murder, war, genocide. At which point the deconstructionist drive works backwards from third- to first-level violence … for it can now be shown that level-three violence is not of a necessary kind but is just the arbitrary outcome of its catachretic founding, thus opening it up – de-realising reality – to ‘alternative realities’ which could be – which ought to be – explicitly liberating, empowering and uncompromisingly emancipating for those people needing these things: most of us. This is not to say that any such ‘new reality’ will not be ‘arbitrary’, will not be another simulacrum, but the deconstructionist hope is that this world might be a better one than the one we inhabit now. This is a hope for a ‘less violent’ world based on the interminable revisions of its axioms, an ‘open’ world that, recognising its undecidability, its provisionality, refuses all closures. Ernesto Laclau has seen the unavoidability of this better than most:

The metaphysical (logocentric) discourse of the West is coming to an end, and philosophy in it twilight has performed a last service for us in the deconstruction of its own terrain. Let us think, for instance, of Derrida's undecidables. Once undecidability has reached the ground itself – once the organisation of a certain camp is governed by a hegemonic decision – hegemonic because it is not objectively determined, because different decisions were also possible – then the realm of philosophy comes to an end and the realm of politics begins. This realm will be inhabited by a different type of discourse … which … constructs the world on the ‘grounds’ of radical undecidability. (Laclau 1996, 123)

This is the sort of politics the radical historian is committed to.

(5) And so I come now to some of the details of that radical history which might (possibly) be used to help realise such emancipating goals by building on the above set of ‘open’ axioms a sort of superstructural history that might transform and supersede the ‘normal’ historians ‘traditional calling’ by responding to a call that comes not from the past at all but directly from ethics; from politics. Radical historians, unlike ‘normal’ ones, don't go to work to understand the past on it own terms and for its own sake; radical historian don't work on behalf of the people who lived in the past: they work for us.

So to the question of how to proceed to the establishment of the necessary conditions for the production of such a radical history, my answer, on this occasion, is dialectically. That is to say that I want to show, initially, how the conditions of possibility for a closed, empirical/epistemologically striving non-radical historian – for a historian that attempts to establish assured historical knowledge, understanding and meaning – cannot ever be met: this acts as my thesis. Of course traditional historians of whatever stripe – the majority of the history profession, say – are not unaware of some of the factors which deny them surety; intuit that their type of history has epistemological (and/or even scientific) ambitions it lacks the means to deliver. But more often than not it's ‘business as usual’, and as such troubling thoughts are brushed under the carpet or, if raised to the level of consciousness, are articulated as ‘problems’ to solve, ‘challenges’ to overcome and ‘difficulties’ to work through, as they ‘come to terms with the past’. And it is my argument – my antithesis – that such limits and difficulties are not seen by radical historians as problems at all but as opportunities for newness. Radical historians thus turn the weaknesses of ‘proper history’ into strengths; celebrate the fact that historians' representations (including theirs) are always failed representations; that historians qua historians always get the past wrong and that it is these ‘facts’ which become the basis for a new synthesis which, discarding the desire for closure, builds uncertainty on uncertainty. At which point old (modernist) empirical/epistemologically striving histories in whatever case – histories which can never achieve closure nor prevent interminable openness – hopefully ‘drop out of the conversation’ as radical (postmodern) histories take their place. There is no need for any nostalgia here – modernist histories have had their day in the sun – and thus there is no need to keep a foot in both camps in some middle-ground, conserving consensus: we can all become thoroughly postmodern. So let me now give some substance to this position, beginning by outlining my thesis, that is, by sketching out the irremovable obstacles to the establishment of any empirical/epistemological history of closure. And let me retabulate as I work through six relevant areas.

(1) First there is the problematicising contamination – the interpretive bulk – of the author. Frank Ankersmit sets the scene and triggers off a train of thought. Ankersmit:

We have historical writing in order to compensate for the absence of the past. So whereas in the case of pictorial and political representation the represented has a logical priority to it representation, in the case of historical representation the reverse is the case, namely, that the represented – that is, the past – depends for its (onto)logical status on its representation. No representation, no past. (Ankersmit 2006, 328)

No representation no past: exactly. And, because such representations by no means come from nowhere, then it is the ‘writers’ of history, historians (and those acting as if they were historians), who have a prior ‘logical priority’: no representation no history, is (tautologically) ‘correct’, as is, no representor, no representation.

Representors – historians – come in all shapes and sizes to the production of the historicised past but none come innocently. Historians are affected by all kinds of suasive desires and material everyday pressures that are not left behind when they enter the study: by ambitions, jealousies, careerist aspirations; by institutionalisation, duplicities and disavowals, by niggling worries, acts of gratitude and support and various incompetencies, and so on, that cannot avoid unevenly, singularly influencing and conditioning the practices and the products of the author-historian. History is a contaminated discourse which cannot be purified of the tensions and ambiguities – never fully knowable – of situation, circumstance, authorization, legitimation, play; any ‘genealogy of history’, as Sande Cohen puts it, by any half-thorough account, must demonstrate such ‘mixed origins’ which no appeal to the archive, the sources, the data, the facts and objectivity, can negate or transcend (Cohen 2000, 100). These are the circumstances which variously and unmeasurably infuse the historians' texts with life and which, whilst not ignoring the empirical/epistemological components of historicisations, are underdetermined by them.

(2) In which context the next question is what, more precisely, is this historian's referent and its status? Could it be the past per se? Well no, since that no longer exists. Moreover, even if it did, the (idea of) the past is far too complicated to become a fixed object of enquiry. For there is never a solid, ‘real’ past that acts as the common/neutral past for everyone – any more than there is a common/neutral time it exists ‘in’. Rather, many different levels of many pasts and presents and many perspectival ‘timings of time’ congeal and become unstuck, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, and these affect how someone/they/we choose, as Cohen puts it, ‘to initiate, to accept, to reject the data of experience, interpreting and assessing inner and outer relations’. Present habits and memories, continues Cohen, ‘incessantly weave themselves into degrees of pastness in the form of powerful memories mixed with obsessions blended with attempts to self-distract, joined with new projects of forgetting, so that there is no neutral present's relation to the past – as. Remember that the present “is” no more objectively nor subjectively real than the past, as both are embroiled in the other in terms of actualization in any present … we are constantly dismantling and assembling the present; we are constantly dissembling the present to have a different effect/affect of and with the past' (Cohen 2006, 248–9). No stable referent here then.

So can the historian's referent be the traces of the past, the (always already historicised) archive, as widely construed as one wishes? Well no. Because although historians refer to the archive and to, say, the documents therein and the ‘facts’ that may be generated out of them in terms of singular statements that ‘correspond’ to singular or clusters of singular ‘evidential sources’, and so on, and though they reference these things copiously in footnotes, these thing are still not their referent.

So what can it be? And the answer is simply that the historian's referent is ‘nothing’ but the product of their inferences based upon their existential (personal, ethical, public, ideological . . .) condition, their previous/current ‘dealing’ in the field, their modes of prefiguration which work up the ‘material’ they variously have to make it into an object capable of analysis, and their constitutive ‘research’ concerns, theses, and so on which, in never stable interconnections, cause some of the traces they find/produce to become activated as relevant sources and thence as evidence for any arguments they happen to be running (for the ‘past itself’ doesn't have in it any arguments or problems which historians solve … only historians have arguments as they seek to establish their reading over others'). And that on these bases they then infer a past – either simple or complex – which now fits their data, their position, their inferences. And this inferential process cannot work in reverse, no matter how much pleading to the contrary. For historians cannot know the past – especially that part of it which they are putatively ‘finding’ for the first time as they seek the holy grail of ‘originality’ – and then search for the sources to correspond to it, thus confirming it as ‘knowledge’. Rather, the process is that of using ‘this and that’ from which a past to conform to ‘this and that’ is inferred. And this inference, now the historicised past and which constitutes the figural ‘content’ of their texts to which they refer … this is their referent, a referent let us note and underline, which is ‘always in thought’: no one can knowingly ignore Roland Barthes' strictures on this (Barthes 1997, 120–3).

(3) But note now some further aspects of the epistemic status of this referent. Note four things. Note, first of all, that this is a referent which cannot ever have the status of truth or definitiveness – it's only an inference after all – and nor can it be objective. For not only is it self-referencing, but other self-referencers (historians) going to, say, the same archives and working on even the same traces/sources can and do infer very different pasts; indeed, history (as historiography) is composed of such ‘interpretive differences’ that no appeal to the facts as other historicisations (inferences) can close down. And, of course, lurking in this area is the old fact-value problematic that ensures that, whatever the inferred relationship between phenomena and meaning, that relationship is never entailed: ‘the past’ can be read and ‘made to mean’ any way you like.

Note, second, the fact that inferences are always arguments means, again, that truth and so on cannot ever come into it.¹ For, as we all know, arguments are never true or false; arguments can only be valid or invalid so that, no matter how many times ‘forgetful’ historians slip the notion of an argument ‘that’s true’ into their ‘discussions’, a true argument, like another old favourite, the true interpretation, is an oxymoron. Note, third, that because the historian's referent is inferential then the kinds of things inferred – structures, processes, trends, watersheds, statistical runs, influences, movements, explanations, meanings, and so on – were never actually there in the first place, or at least, not in the way Nelson's Flagship Victory was once there. There is thus, as Carolyn Steedman has put it, ‘a double nothingness’ in the writing of history. History is about something that never did happen in the way in which it comes to be represented (the happening exists in the telling, in the text), and it is made of materials (the inferences) which are also not there – in the archive or anywhere else (Steedman 2001, 153–4). Jacques Rancierre has made the same point: ‘There is history because there is an absence … [and] the status of history depends on the treatment of this two-fold absence of the “thing itself” that is no longer there [the past is past] and that never was … because it never was such that it was [and is] told' (Rancierre 1992, 63). And note fourth and finally that the logic of inference is the logic of probability, which is to say that the historian's logic is not that of the syllogism (although syllogistic reasoning can appear in parts of the historian's text), but rather the logic of the enthymeme, a form of logic which cannot lead to definitive conclusions – and thus closure – but can only be to the occasion for the expression of an ‘undecidable decision’, an aporetic choice. For enthymemes always involve a calculation of probabilities and a judgement, and leave things open so that one can always argue contrary-wise: ‘both sides of the case’. Consequently, history as a probable/possible reading – and this is the status of all histories – is always neither rigorously true nor rigorously false; at best it can have to recommend it ‘a certain appearance in its favour’. This, a measure of the shortfall of any epistemological claims for histories, is as good as it gets.

(4) On this account, history has all the elements that fulfil the classic criteria for something to be of a rhetorical kind – namely, a method ‘to invent subjects and arguments, to organize discourse, and to make good judgements’ (Olmsted 2006, 1) – and is therefore the type of phenomenon Aristotle called illusio which, because it deals with things contingent and opaque, can only be demonstrated or ‘proved’. On this reasoning, history cannot ever be a science. For since history has no definitive object of enquiry (the ‘past’ looked at ‘this way and that way’ may be imagined but definitive examples of it cannot be presented), nor any definitive (universal) method of enquiry, then such a discourse, as Martin Davies has put it, ‘belongs properly to the realm of rhetoric’ since this is of a kind that, ‘not dealing with “any one definite class of objects” is “merely a faculty for furnishing arguments”’. Moreover, since history and politics also have an instrumental, ideological intention, their aim is rhetorical: they are concerned to ‘discover the real and apparent means of persuasion’ (Davies 2006, 55).

Since history, then, thus deals only with contingencies (accidental facts, antecedent possibilities, metonymic extrapolations … ) and proceeds by means of enthymemes (rhetorical induction) that can only provide a lesser standard of proof than ‘logic’ offers, then history will remain interminably open, always waiting for the next interlocutor to arrive. One always comes along.

(5) Which means, still pursuing this line of thought, that as illusio, as inferential acts of the imagination, historical representations and consciousness (of this and that) are both fictive (that is, fabricated, made up, fashioned) and, as the product of rhetorical devices and stylistic figures, of an aesthetic kind. And such aesthetic figures are not, of course, subject to epistemological checks at the level of the text: an aesthetic cannot answer to epistemology. Of course, as already noted, empirical/epistemological elements can and do (once things have been ‘put under a description’) operate at the level of singular statements and so on, but a discourse with a story to tell in the form of a narratio is always a manifestation of that mixture of the ‘found’ (the sources, etc.) and the imagined (the inferences) wherein, between these two unstable poles, one is always in a radically indeterminate ‘middle range’. This is indeed a past as much imagined as found or, more precisely I think, more imagined than found: the aesthetic overdetermines the ‘empirical’. Always.

And the radical historian likes this overdetermination, likes the essentially aesthetic nature of all histories. For it is not, incidentally, as if there are some histories (say modernist ones) which really are of an empirical/epistemological kind ‘all the way down’ and that these can be set against aesthetic histories (say postmodern ones). Rather, the point is that all histories – just to be histories – always have been and always will be of an aesthetic type; all histories are of the type the radical/postmodern historian raises to the level of consciousness: rhetorical/aesthetic histories are the only game in town. Thus, logically speaking, no empirical/epistemological histories, and no empirical/epistemological historians, have ever existed on the face of the earth. Traditional historians of this type are generally quite proud and normally not at all defensive when they are called ‘empirical historians’ – indeed, many insist on being so called. But in fact no such specimen has ever been found and it beggars belief to think that they could ‘ever have been imagined’. RIP.

(6) And so I come directly to the area which Hayden White has pretty much made his own over the last forty years or so: narrativity. To be sure, right from the start White has been much criticised by various history establishments across the left–right ideological spectrum – what do you expect if you insist history is a kind of fiction-making – and many historians and some theorists continue to critique, disavow or just plain ignore him. There are some very silly people around. And of course, I am aware of these critiques, just as I am aware that White has made some (minor) adjustments to his position over the years. And I recognise that White isn't – nor would want to be – the closing/last word on anything. Nevertheless, all that said, I think the radical historian can subscribe – I subscribe – entirely to White's decisionist/impositionist/relativistic position on narrativity. Thus I take it as read, for example, ‘that no given set of events figure forth apodictically the kind of meanings with which stories provide them … no one and nothing lives a story' (Tropics of Discourse); that ‘the meaning, form, or coherence of events, whether real or imaginary ones, is a function of their narrativism’ (Figural Realism); that ‘one must face the fact that when it comes to apprehending the historical record, there are no grounds found in it for preferring one way of construing its meaning over another' (The Content of the Form); that the only grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another are ultimately aesthetic and ethical/political: ‘the aged Kant was right, in short, we are free to conceive history as we please just as we are free to make of it what we will’ (Metahistory). And I sign up to all these axioms, just as I sign up to most of the detail whereby White establishes the metahistorical nature of all history productions vis-à-vis the ubiquity of tropes, emplotments, argumentative governing and ideological positioning; I mean can you imagine a history that is not troped, not emplotted, not governed by argumentation and not suasively/ideologically intended? Could one exist? Now that is a rhetorical question.

And I subscribe to all of this because I also sign up to what I think of as White's radical ‘philosophy of history’. That the past is sublime in its ‘whole’ and problematic in its parts; that at the level of meaning (not truth but meaning) historical narratives are inexpungeably singular/relativistic; that scepticism about historical knowledge/meaning is a necessary counter to dogmas everywhere; that ‘the past’ has no legitimate gatekeepers who can tell us what we can and cannot do with it (least of all academic historians); that no one owns the past nor has a monopoly of how to appropriate it; that the interminable openness of the past to countless readings should be celebrated and democratised in the hope that we might, disobediently, seriously entertain those creative historical ‘distortions offered by minds capable of looking at the past with the same seriousness as ourselves but with different affective and intellectual orientations’; that this should alert us to the conserving nature of now pre-eminent narrations that tidily lock up events in case their willingness to be relocated is exploited radically and which absorb experimentation in the name of a fake pluralism, and that the essence of a radical history is its future-orientated politico/ethical thrust. White:

I take ethics to be about the difference between what is (or was) the case and what ought to be (or ought to have been) the case in some department of human comportment, thought, or belief [opening] up a space in which ‘something has to be done’. This is quite different from morality that, on the basis of some dogmatism, insists on telling us what we must and must not do in a given situation of choice. The historical past is ‘ethical’ in that its subject matter (violence, loss, absence, the event, death) arouses in us the kind of ambivalent feelings, about ourselves as well as the ‘other’, that appear in situations requiring choice and engagement in existentially determining ways. (White 2006, 338)

And this existentialism, this ‘humanism’ with a performative rather than an essentialist subject – an old topos in White's work – is also invoked in the cause of permanent openness. Commenting that Camus had once written that in trying to find out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived and that his conclusion was that ‘it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning’, White writes that ‘we might amend the statement to read: it will be lived all the better if it has no single meaning but many different ones’ (White 1978, 50).

And I think, finally, that radical historians should always wear these kind of sentiments where White has always worn his: openly, explicitly, on his sleeve. White cannot have the last word for radical historians – for he is not the only voice which ought to be heard. But I think he deserves to have the first.

History as I have presented it here could be seen as being in bad shape; it's difficult to imagine how this particular Humpty Dumpty could ever be put together again. On the ‘top’ of my ‘open’ axioms it has contaminated writers, an object of enquiry it can neither access nor definitively present; it has a referent that is inferred and therefore imagined, which is another way of saying that, given that inferences constitute history, then history is imagined. Moreover, it has no definitive, shared method; it is a mode of discourse of a rhetorical kind, a product of argumentation and figuration: an aesthetic illusio. In its presentation as narratios, history has to have – simply to be a narrative – all the elements common to narrative per se; that is, it has to be troped and emplotted and sustained by argumentation, its articulation depends on textual poetics, rhetorical devices and figures, compositional strategies, intertextual readings, variable/contingent theories and methods and personal theses which are expressed by, and expressive of, the circumstances of the author. None of these things are ‘found’ in the past, but these are the conditional elements of any history. This is the way history just is for all of us … these are ‘its necessary conditions of possibility’. And this condition is not denied but accepted willingly and reworked by radical historians. Radical historians like this history; they can live with it, use it, experiment with it and, insofar as we still need histories at this point in time, direct it towards emancipation and liberation. (By which I mean the making possible of that which is considered impossible; to put an end to consensus.) And of course, radical historians recognise that history just is impossible to close down, not just ‘once and for all’, but at all. A history of this kind – and these are some of its consequences – means the end, surely, of every metanarrative edifice and all those academic histories of an empirical/epistemologically striving type: toward both of these genres we must have that incredulity Lyotard reserved for metanarratives, as well as working in opposition to all those who would work to prevent what, in the end, radical historians like: the fact that historicisations of the past can be anything you want them to be. This raises, of course, all kinds of dangers; it's always a risk, always a chance, to exist without something like foundations: some future historicisation may well be monstrous. But it's not, I'm afraid, the case that this is a ‘risk worth taking’ as if it were an option; it's a risk that is unavoidable: we have come, let's hope for better rather than worse, to the end of the illusion of the possibility of closure in such a manner that it seems incredible that (to re-use one of White's epigrams again) not only have such histories been imagined in the past but that they have actually been found. Radical historians hope that such absurdities will not be repeated in the future even as farce – and certainly not as tragedy.

Part two

I now come to what I hope by this point is obviously yet just another rhetorical question: what has all of this got to do with Hayden White? For the answer is simple: everything. To be sure, in the above argument I have occasionally had in mind influences gleaned from what are by now old favourites: Marx, Nietzsche, Collingwood, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Rorty, Laclau, Baudrillard, Badiou etal., as well as mid-term or newer ones: Frank Ankersmit, Arthur Danto, Elizabeth Ermarth, Judith Butler, Sande Cohen, Martin Davies etal., a few of whom I have referenced. But the point is that I ‘got into’ most of these people because of Hayden. And by this I don't mean that he introduced me to or helped me to think better or differently about things, but that he has been involved in my intellectual formation – he figures as the point of departure for my thinking about history that my subsequent journey remains indebted to. For it was Hayden who, almost single-handedly, turned me from the old Marxist I once was to the post-Marxist I think I may have become, and from the old normal/empirical/modernist historian I was by ‘training’, into the postmodern person I would like to be. Of course, it's not his fault – nor anyone else's – that I have turned out the way I have … a populariser of postmodern history … and I don't expect Hayden to necessarily agree with anything I have done under the influence – however attenuated – of his brilliant writings, including this paper. No. All I am saying is that he occupies a special place in my thinking, and I want to write just two final paragraphs on this.

I first read Hayden's 1973 text Metahistory in the mid-1970s and I didn't understand it. I'm ashamed to admit that I neglected him until the early 80s, when I bought a copy of Tropics of Discourse (1978), after which I went back to Metahistory, re-reading it through the later volume of essays. After that, Hayden became my critical guide through the types of history that then constituted the ‘historical theory’ field, a field that, compared with Hayden's work, seemed myopic, sterile and, often, just plain dull. Indeed, Hayden's theorising – coupled with the fact that he seemed to say everything so unerringly ‘right’ and in a style that was at once so analytically powerful and so memorably epigrammatic (such that looking over his texts now I can hardly read them since they are so underlined and contain so many marginal comments) – well, these texts were so different from anything else I had read that they just seemed to come from nowhere. Accordingly, it was Hayden's theorisations which became my touchstone, a way of looking that gained increased momentum with my further reading of his various books and papers as they appeared. I've never looked back, nor have I really looked elsewhere; my thinking about Hayden's texts fused with other reading such that there is a sense in which ‘reading White’ has taken on the mantle of a Badiou-like Event; an immanent, transformative break after which things just never ran the same and to which I have remained faithful; an act of fidelity to a certain ‘truth’ which, like all fidelities, necessitates reflexive, critical development but which has only served to strengthen my original commitment. Why not say it, Hayden is an intellectual hero of mine.

The final paragraph. When I first read Hayden – over thirty years ago now – I never thought that I would meet him. But over the years – on his occasional visits to London, at various conferences in Europe and England, over the telephone and, more latterly, via email, I have got to know him a little. And on every occasion when we have met (even when he rebuked me for ‘falling asleep’ whilst on a panel . . .), he has been unfailingly kind and supportive. A complex mixture of laid-back modesty and forceful assertiveness with more than an edge, a man who doesn't suffer fools gladly and yet who is incredibly generous to his often far from generous critics (many of whom are very foolish indeed), there is a moment – I relate it somewhat anecdotally – that has stayed in my mind in a way which typifies Hayden for me. In 1997, when passing through London, he agreed to an interview. Published in 1998 in a slightly edited form as A Conversation with Hayden White (Jenkins 1998, 68–82), our discussion, which lasted for about three hours, was finally brought to a close when I asked him about criticisms of his work: was he happy to live with them, even the unjust ones? And his reply was as follows:

My attitude about the books and articles I have written is that you write them, you send them out and if people can use the stuff that's fine. If they want to use it in a distorted form, if they want to adapt it, let them do it. That's what intellectual work is all about, if they don't like it, let them reject it, do it better. Collingwood used to say, ‘I don't engage in polemics.’ He used to say if you don't like my ideas do them better. It's no good getting angry about things, these are ideas which we are trying out in as interesting a way as we can. And I agree with that. (Jenkins 1998, 82)

And I just want to conclude by saying that actually, for me, ‘nobody does it better … ’²

Notes on contributor

Keith Jenkins is Professor of Historical Theory at the University of Chichester. He is the author of six books on historical theory and joint editor (with Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow) of Manifestos for History (Routledge, 2007).

Notes

1. For a brilliant essay on argumentation see, Bennington 2001, 34–56 (with a reply by Derrida).

2. A slightly different version of this article will appear in a festschrift for Hayden White (edited by Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska and Hans Kellner) in 2008, published by Stanford University Press.