Hayden White: a postsecular perspective

ABSTRACT

In this article, I propose a postsecular reading of Hayden White’s understanding of the figure and the ‘figure-fulfilment model of narrativity’. I suggest that White revealed and set in motion intellectual resources that contested the superficially secular nature of historical thinking that would otherwise have remained undiscovered in the theory of history. My article is an attempt towards recognizing the potential that White’s theory contains for analysing postsecular aspects of contemporary historical thought. It focuses on an analysis of the ‘figure-fulfilment model of narrativity’. I term the phenomenon discovered by White the ‘cryptotheology of the figure’. I believe that an analysis of White’s works from various periods can provide insight into the ‘secularization of the historical imagination’.

KEYWORDS:

• Hayden White
• cryptotheology
• historical imagination
• figure
• figure-fulfilment model of narrativity
• postsecular history

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Professor Hayden White and Professor Kalle Pihlainen for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this text. I thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped improve and clarify my arguments. I would like to express my special appreciation and thanks to my advisor Professor Ewa Domańska for sharing her expertise on the subject, her generous help and for encouraging my research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I refer here to idea of the substantive (and/or speculative) philosophy of history (as developed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, etc.), which treats history as the course of events that form some general plan or pattern (often identified with progress). As Herman Paul observes, the notion of the philosophy of history was principally shaped by such a substantive thinking: ‘Since the eighteenth century, philosophy of history has traditionally been identified with the study of the laws of historical development’ (Paul 2011, 3). Cf. Simon (2016). Indeed, the images of history that Löwith analysed represent various stages and forms of this approach to philosophy of history, and one of main issues of his approach could be identified in the tension between the idea of progress and the idea of providence.

2. Schmitt also reflected on the formal aspects of Löwith’s vision while also proposing his own vision of eines christliches Geschichtsbildes (a Christian conception of history) in his review of Meaning in History. Cf. Schmitt (2009 [1950]).

3. My interest, however, lies elsewhere. In contrast to the conceptions of secularization outlined above, White’s concept, which is central to my analysis here, might well be related to a similar mechanism, yet it functions on a different plane. His conception of the figure does not endow it with substantive character; instead, it is formal; it is thus an epistemic pattern that encompasses a teleological vision of fulfilment while at the same time bearing a variety of essential traits. The specifically Judeo-Christian conception of history as the course of events did indeed provide a historical precedent, yet its secularization was grounded in the fulfilment of rather arbitrary elements, interpretations of particular historical periods and the course of historical time, rather than in eschatological prophecies and related hopes. On a rather general level, White’s conception of the figure and its flexible qualities does correspond to Blumenberg’s notion of epochal ‘reoccupations of positions’ (Umbesetzung), as outlined in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, which formed part of his critique of the concept of secularization as ‘a category of historical wrong’. In Blumenberg’s understanding of it, idea of secularization is of a substantive nature as it assumes the continuity of the transformation of the metaphysical substance of certain successive positions. What he instead proposes is a functionalist perspective: subsequent epochs ‘inherit’ from the preceding ones certain general horizons that they then independently imbue with their own values. In this way Blumenberg sought to defend the intellectual autonomy or even sovereignty of modernity in the face of arguments that deemed it to be a deformed continuation of the Christian universe of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Blumenberg 1986 [1966]). A similar case can be made with regard to the figural model: demonstrating the substantive continuity between subsequent links in the narrative chain or in the historical process would require rather audacious interpretive inventions. The continuity of the subject of this process is, according to this view, largely virtual, as far as it is possible to speak of one at all. It would be more reasonable to point to a diverse chain, a rather particular ‘relay team’ of actors so to speak, who in turn take on tasks and challenges from one another, with these challenges having been imposed on them by the circumstances pertaining in a given historical moment.

4. ‘There was once, we know, an automaton constructed in such a way that it could respond to every move by a chess player with a countermove that would ensure the winning of the game. A puppet wearing Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent on all sides. Actually, a hunchbacked dwarf – a master at chess – sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophic counterpart to this apparatus. The puppet, called “historical materialism,” is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight’ (Benjamin 2006, 389).

5. The foreword to the book bears the telling subtitle ‘Teologia pod stołem’ [Theology under the table], (Bielik-Robson 2008, 7–49). Cf. Žižek (2003); Lipszyc (2012). Bielik-Robson also applies the concept of cryptotheology in other works, such as her book on ‘philosophical Marranos’ (Bielik-Robson 2014) and in her critical analysis of Carl Schmitt’s use of the concept of sovereignty (Bielik-Robson 2016).

6. Bielik-Robson’s statement on ‘two antagonistic religious horizons’ refers to her juxtaposition and confrontation of two modes of thought, namely the Greek and Jewish. She explored their protracted encounters and games in her subsequent philosophical studies that concentrated on working through the legacy of German idealism, with a particular focus on Marxism and critical theory, including its hidden messianic themes. Cf. Bielik-Robson (2012). Avihu Zakai also found a similar hidden antagonism in Auerbach (Zakai 2015). Zakai argues that one of the central issues in Mimesis was the confrontation of Greek mythology and its epic forms (for example, Homer’s Odyssey) with the Jewish Biblical vision of history as a precursor to realism (Greek discourse of the sublime and archetypal identities versus the Jewish mixture of styles and attempts at a rational interpretation of universal history). Zakai also highlights the debt that Auerbach owes to the Hegelian oeuvre, which offers one of the more adequate models for a systematic analysis of the past in the search for truth and for the ideas guiding history. Cf. Zakai (2017).

7. Interestingly, Immanuel Wallerstein also used the concept of a ‘historical system’, albeit in the context of his theory of world-systems as he explored the historical nature of social systems (Wallerstein 1987).

8. Ewa Domańska has developed this idea in the context of new animism and the indigenous ontologies that it is rooted in (Domanska 2014).

9. The analysis presented in this article explores the concept of the figure as developed by White with reference to Auerbach’s ideas. Thus, like White, I do not address the issue of allegory, for example, which Auerbach juxtaposed with the figure. Auerbach associated allegories with mythical narratives in other ancient cultures. They were a product of archaic, magical-symbolic thinking, based in notions of presence, something that came to lose its authority, subsequently acquiring a solely spiritual-ethical and, at the same time, temporally abstract character that was far removed from the historicity that emerged with the innovative figure (Auerbach 1984 [1938], 54–60).

10. I would like to stress that I am not contrasting tropes and figures (it is indeed quite obvious that tropes and figures are closely interconnected). Instead, what I am concerned with is demonstrating the evident shift in White’s interest from tropes to figures. I agree with Ewa Domańska who notes that since the mid-1990s, such concepts as figure, closure, kairos, crisis, fulfilment, catastrophe, and utopia acquired greater prominence in White’s vocabulary (cf. White 2007). His interest in Auerbach’s concept of the figure, observable already in The Content of the Form, took a different direction (Domańska 2002, 325–326).

11. In this article I use extensive citations from Hayden White’s works following White’s suggestion as to how one should approach criticism of historical writing. During a discussion with Chris Lorenz in Poznań, White became irritated that the Dutch scholar criticizes him on the basis of summaries and restatements of his words. As White said: ‘My approach to you would not be to characterize, not to sum up, not to paraphrase what you said but to quote you’ (White 2014a, 72). By employing fairly extensive quotations from White’s works, I not only want to offer greater insight into his thinking but also – something crucial in light of the subject matter – draw attention to the fact that he addressed the same issue in different texts using diverse terminology.

12. Hans Blumenberg also employs the concept of prefiguration (Blumenberg 2014) in a posthumous work on the creation of contemporary political myths (such as those relating to Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler).

13. Jakub Muchowski has also written about the concept of disfiguration as something ‘that stresses that modernist literature inverts Auerbach’s model, albeit in a way that accords with its description of the experience of the modern world. Alongside enthusiasm, fascination and hope for a better future, this experience comprises disenchantment, suffering and fear of the catastrophes of the modern age. Irony and parody give structure to the historical interpretations developed from this perspective as these modes present the relations between events as a disfiguration. … Disfiguration is not only a response to the figure but also a prophecy of future fulfillment that this encourages action. … Modernist literature employing disfiguration engages readers and demands a response in the form of working towards a world that differs from the one that has been represented’ (Muchowski 2015, 191–192).

14. For more on this theme, see, for example, a completely ‘secular’ early text (White 1975).

15. While investigating the question of thinkable postsecular historical consciousness (Wiśniewski 2017), I sent Hayden White a text in February 2016 asking him for his opinion on it. He commented on selected aspects, including its introductory remarks on the question of the figure. White was generally positive towards it, encouraging me to continue the research. The article explored issues including something I termed ‘postsecular events’, i.e. those that initiated the postsecular turn (for example, 9/11). According to White, there are earlier events that could be explored in this context, even if they did not consciously stimulate the contemporary apocalyptic imagination to the same extent (for White, the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima is crucial as is the subsequent fear of nuclear war). White considered my attempts to reread Western secularity and its ideological essentialism through the idea of mourning (as prompted by Ananda Abeysekara) drawing on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. In his comments on my paper, White also stressed the specificity of Western monotheistic traditions’ perceptions of relations between the sacred and profane, comparing them to ‘pagan’ worldviews (animism, etc.) that prevail in other parts of the world. While we can have an intuitive understanding of postsecular thought as an attempt at rethinking secularity in the Western world, in other cultural contexts where there is a struggle against Western ideologies or worldviews that seem to be ‘foreign bodies’ (albeit intellectually and politically stimulating ones) it must take diametrically different shape, enigmatic for us. White also wrote: ‘Recall that in any “religiously oriented” culture, the whole of creation is “sacred,” in fact, there is no “secular” at all. This is especially the case with monotheistic religions. But also in monothistic religions, there arises the possibility of the “secular” understood as deviation from “the one true religion.” It is also “religious” in the sense that the secular is religion’s “negative.” Thus, to e secular is among other things to be anti-religion. So too with “post-” as in post-secular: post has the implication of “leaving behind”’ (cited as it appears in the original source, without corrections).

16. The remaining two mottos come from Michel Foucault: ‘L’histoire, ce n’est donc pas une durée, c’est une multiplicité de durées qui s’enchevetrent et s’enveloppent les unes les autres. Il faut donc substituer à la vieille notion de temps la notion de durée multiple’ (Foucault 1994, 279), and Roman Jakobson: ‘The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence’ (Jakobson 1960, 358).

17. For more on the subject of the connections between Ricoeur and White, see Pellauer (2013).

18. In ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical Representation’, White suggests that Andreas Hillgruber attempted something similar by attempting to divide German history during the Second World War into at least two parts. In Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (Hillgruber 1986), he attempted to incorporate two differently emplotted subjects who had different historical fates. Alongside the narrative about the German extermination of European Jewry which was morally humiliating for domestic readers, Hillgruber also sought to present a narrative about the Wehrmacht’s heroic defence of the eastern front in 1944/45: ‘Hillgruber’s manifest purpose was to salvage the moral dignity of a part of the Nazi epoch in German history by splitting the whole of it into two discrete stories – the “shattering [Zerschlagung] of the German Empire” and the “end of European Jewry” – and emplotting them differently, the one as a tragedy, the other as an incomprehensible enigma. … Hillgruber’s suggestion for emplotting the story of the defense of the eastern front did not violate any of the conventions governing the writing of professionally respectable narrative history. He had simply suggested narrowing the focus to a particular domain of historical continuum, casting the agents and agencies occupying that scene as characters in a dramatic conflict and emplotting this drama in terms of the familiar conventions of the genre of tragedy’ (White 1999, 32). White consistently employs the term ‘emplotting’, although we could argue that in a later phase he might equally have used ‘enfiguring’, since what he is describing is not the homogenous emplotment of the entire narrative but the heterogenous emplotment of different subjects encountered within the framework of a single narrative.

19. White has written more on this subject in ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical Representation’ (White 1999, 32–33). See footnote 18.

20. English translation of Benjamin’s phrase is different than cited by White: ‘History decays into images, not into stories’ (Benjamin 1999, 476).

21. Cf. White (2000). In this condensed text, White more or less repeats the findings presented in ‘The Metaphysics of Western Historiography’ before going on to suggest a Benjaminian conception of the dialectical image as a critical and potentially politically emancipatory mode of breaking down existing histories into specific images and thus giving meaning to those elements that had previously been overlooked in narratives written by the victors.

Additional information

Funding

The translation of this article was enabled by financial support from the Faculty of History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland.

Notes on contributors

Tomasz Wiśniewski

Tomasz Wiśniewski is completing his PhD thesis on Postsecular History in the Faculty of History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He is author of articles and reviews published in Polish in peer-reviewed journals on the theory of history, intellectual history and political philosophy.