Wrap-Up Lecture II: History Writing in Postmodernity Dr Claudia Stein

Enlightenment ideas that structured ‘modern’ history writing between s? Belief in the power of human reason in all areas of human individual and collective life. The belief in the power of reason brings about the new intellectual virtue of rationality that was supposed to guide all investigations into the natural and human world. This rational enquiry was based on the empirical method, a way of gaining knowledge by means of direct (and indirect via experience) observation or other sense experience. The knowledge gained through the empirical method was deemed to be neutral. Because empirically gained knowledge was neutral, it was believed that absolute and universal truth about the world around us could be achieved by humans. Reality could be assessed and discovered by humans – historians could understand the reality of the past and identify universal truth of human behaviour.

What are we talking about? Definition, definition, definition…. Postmodernity: This term refers to a set of perceived (sociological, political, economical, technological, etc.) conditions of everyday life, which are perceived as distinctly different from the conditions of ‘modernity’ (from the 1960s). Postmodernism: describes a broad late-20th century movement that occurred across philosophy, the arts and humanities, architecture, and criticism and marked a departure from modernism (although it has some intellectual links to it). Postmodernism is the intellectual (cultural, artistic, academic, and philosophical) response to the conditions of postmodernity. While encompassing a broad range of ideas and projects, postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of scepticism or distrust toward all forms of grand narratives and ideologies (e.g. the grand narrative of progress, Marxism). It questioned Enlightenment morals and beliefs in rationality, objective reality and the existence of absolute truth. Instead, it asserts that all knowledge and truth are the product of unique systems of socio-cultural, economic and political discourse at a particular moment in time, and are therefore contextual and constructed. Postmodernism challenged and undermined the certainty over knowledge and morality that characterised modernity and most of modernism (roughly between s). Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterised by tendencies to epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and a focus in subjectivity.

‘While encompassing a broad range of ideas and projects, postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of scepticism or distrust toward all forms of grand narratives and ideologies (e.g. the grand narrative of progress, Marxism and its idea of a fixed human nature and historical development etc). It questioned Enlightenment morals and beliefs in rationality, objective reality and the existence of absolute truth. Instead, it asserts that all knowledge and truth are the product of unique systems of socio-cultural, economic and political discourse at a particular moment in time, and are therefore contextual and constructed. Postmodernism challenged and undermined the certainty over knowledge and morality that characterised modernity and most of modernism (roughly between s What stands at the core of postmodernism critique?

The ‘Linguistic Turn’: An intellectual move from the 1960/1970 which was inspired by linguistic, semiotics or turn of the 20 th -century language philosophy and used it as a critique of Enlightenment views of history writing (and other other forms of knowledge). At the beginning it was inspired by Saussure’s structural linguistics which had argued that language precedes the world and makes it intelligible by constructing it according to its own rules. Later develops into poststructuralism, deconstruction. Common to all of them is: language is the constitutive agent of human consciousness and the socio-cultural production of meaning, and our apprehension of the world, both past and present, arrives only through the lens of language’s precoded perceptions.

Why do these claims allow postmodernist to critique the Enlightenment ideas of how knowledge is produced:  Our relationship to knowledge becomes uncertain because the ‘meaning’ (‘concept’ or ‘signified’) and the ‘signifier’ (sound/image/written word) are separated and their link is arbitrary. They are ‘made-up’ by humans and rely the internal structure of a language which only allows you to say certain things at a certain moment in time.  Radically questions understandings of causality, change, human agency and subjectivity, and experience  The notion of arbitrariness of the sign deeply challenges the correspondence theory of truth: if words relate only to each other within an own structure, how could language be deemed to refer to the world out there? How could language ever refer to a universal reality? Or a universal Truth?

How does this affect academic history writing? Why was the idea of a ‘constructed’ reality so frightening for historians in the 1980s and 1990s? It disturbed their confidence that they were able to get at the ‘reality’ of the past through the empirical study of their ‘neutrally’ collected sources. And it therefore also affected their professional identity as ‘bearers of the truth’ about the past. Where did their confidence come from? Leopold von Ranke, , the ‘father’ of modern history writing ‘…wie es eigentlich gewesen’’ (note that it should be translated as ‘essentially’ not as ’really’!)

What did postmodernism do to the ’reality’ and ‘truth’ of the modern historian?  Reality is unrepresentable in any form of human culture (whether written, spoken, visual or dramatic). All ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ is a construction or a represention of the time it is spoken/written/painted about.  What ‘reality’ is changes from period to period and from culture to culture, and is also dependent on the perspective of the person who constructs ‘reality’ in past and present. What we think ‘reality’ is --- in the past and present – is thus culturally determined and NOT universal. What humans consider as ‘truth’ is also not universal but also culturally determined -- ’truths’ change through time.  Any representation of ‘reality’ therefore can never be complete and no person or technology can replicate the complexity of relations between things or human beings. Therefore there cannot be a universal ‘truth’ about things.  No authoritative account can exists of anything. Nobody can know everything, and there is never one authority on a given subject. No human can ever speak or discover a ‘universal truth’.

‘New’ Cultural History: Influence by the linguistic turn the ’new’ cultural historians of the 1980s tried to overcome the division between society and culture. They attempted to avoid the social determinism that was a by-product of the mechanistic model and functionalist approaches by the social sciences models. They proposed ‘culture’ as an autonomous realm in which the principal stakes were not thee pursuit of individual or class interests but the creation of the domains of meaning. (Spiegel, Practicing History 8) influenced by symbolic anthropology of Clifford Geertz who understood culture as an ‘interworked system of construable signs’ Many of these new cultural historians while being influenced by the tenets of the linguistic turn never abandoned a belief in the reality of the socio- cultural world. But their enthusiasm for interpretive approaches and above all the shift in the focus of investigation from social phenomena to discourse and language– influence of Foucault – makes their works different from social history.

Orientalism An idea, produced both in and about the West, that holds principally that the ‘East’ is both ‘other’ and ‘inferior’ Within the framework of Orientalism, the Orient is not an inert fact of nature (the ‘geographical’ natural orient) but a phenomenon constructed by generations of intellectuals, artists, commentators, writers, politicians (since the 18 th century), and, more importantly, constructed by the naturalising of a wide range of Orientalist assumptions and stereotypes. Combines Gramsci’s ideas of hegemony with knowledge/power ideas of Foucault

Marxism and Its Notion of Power which Foucault engaged with in the 1960s/1970s 1.Concern with power relations as manifestations of a specific mode or configuration of class domination 2. Marxists are concerned with the links among economic, political, and ideological class domination. Different views on location of class power (e.g. in social relations of production, in control over the state, or in intellectual hegemony over hearts and minds (Gramsci). 3. Marxists note the limitations inherent in any exercise of power that is rooted in one or another form of class domination and try to explain this in terms of structural contradictions and antagonisms inscribed therein. For them all forms of social power linked to class domination are inherently fragile, unstable, provisional, and temporary and that continuing struggles are needed to secure class domination, to overcome resistance, and to naturalize or mystify class power. 4. Thus, Marxists address questions of strategy and tactics. They provide empirical analyses of actual strategies intended to reproduce, resist, or overthrow class domination in specific periods and conjunctures

Foucault’s Geneology is a ‘history of the present’ and a ’critical’ history method The subject matter of this kind of history is the origins of present rules, practices or institutions that claim authority over us. It starts therefore from an investigation of the present. And asks the question: What claims authority over us NOW? What makes us think that certain ideas, practices, institutions in the present are ‘normal’, indeed we feel angry and threatened when it is questioned. Why is it, for example, upsetting to think that ‘evolution’ is a historical construct? The primary of a ‘critical history’ intend is not to understand the past for its own sake, but to understand and evaluate the present through the past, particularly with a view to discrediting unjustified claims of authority in the present.