There's just no talking with the past

Abstract

This brief piece, based on a paper delivered at the 2012 UK Social Science History Conference, questions the merits of the common metaphor of communicating as a theorization of ‘doing history’. It claims that, following the rejection of the idea of objectivity in its most radical forms, the idea of conversing or communicating with the past has become increasingly important to explanations of what goes on in historical research, interpretation, and writing. The idea is not without problems of its own, however. Where it positions the past as if indeed somehow an active agent, able to converse with the historian in meaningful ways, the particularity of the past as past seems to deny that possibility. In order to understand the persistence of the communicative metaphor (even in the face of the obvious contradictions involved), the piece relates it to mistaken assumptions in historical thinking that continue to sustain it – namely that of conflating the past with history and that of confusing negotiations of personal memory with ‘experience’ of a historical past. In attempting to deal with these conflicting intuitions, it draws, among others, on a distinction between the creative imagination and any real access to the ‘otherness’ of the past. Ultimately – it will be shown – at stake in this debate is the capacity of the past to intervene on our understandings in any (disruptive) way.

Keywords::

• history as conversation
• the ontological distinctness of the past
• the historian's phenomenological yearning

Notes

^1. For a recent and thorough discussion of a hermeneutic approach to the past, see Gardner (2010).

^2. Rather surprisingly, reader-reception theory has so far really only been touched upon in historical theory; for some insights, see Thompson (1993).

^3. As Icke (2012, 52–53) notes, the metaphor of ‘translation’ is also troubling.

^4. Admittedly I oversimplify to the extreme here, and arguments presented by Ankersmit (2005), for instance, are much more complex. Yet the ‘past’ that we can experience through our surroundings is only ever an (often collective and culturally ingrained) historical imaginary, even if it is evoked in us by concrete objects in specific situations. Much of the confusion in this debate is again, I think, terminological.

^5. There are related arguments to be made for extending the discussion of materiality to language, to linguistic and cognitive structures (spatial, temporal, etc.), for instance. These connections are even more difficult to demonstrate, however, and can only account for rather marginal mechanisms and ways of meaning making when applied to something as complex as history writing. For more on such general structures, see Lakoff and Johnson (1999).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kalle Pihlainen

Kalle Pihlainen is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow, based at the Department of Philosophy, Åbo Akademi University, and Adjunct Professor in Philosophy of History at the Department of Contemporary History, University of Turku, Finland. He has published articles on narrative theory and the philosophy of history in various anthologies and in journals including Clio, Historein, New Literary History, Rethinking History, and Storia della Storiografia. His research interests are in cultural history, narrative theory, historical theory, embodiment, and existential phenomenology.