Imprisoned by History: Aspects of Historicized Life (Routledge Approaches to History)

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Author: Martin L. Davies

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Imprisoned by History

Routledge Approaches to History

1. Imprisoned by History Aspects of Historicized Life Martin L. Davies

Imprisoned by History Aspects of Historicized Life

Martin L. Davies

New York

London

First published 2010 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Davies, Martin L. Imprisoned by history : aspects of historicized life / Martin L. Davies. p. cm.—(Routledge approaches to history ; 1) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. History—Philosophy. I. Title. D16.8.D26 2010 901—dc22 2009024913 ISBN 0-203-86310-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-99520-5 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-86310-0 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-99520-7 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-86310-7 (ebk)

For Rasida

There are always two paths to take: one back towards the comfort and security of death, the other forward to nowhere. Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

[ . . . ] détruire, par tous les moyens hyper-politiques, l’idée bourgeoise du bonheur. Guy Debord, Rapport sur la Construction des Situations

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments 1

2

3

4

xi xiii

‘Shaking the respect for history’

1

‘The Dogma of the European Educational System’

2

‘The Every-Day Influence History Exerts’: History-Focussed Behaviour

15

Historicized Knowledge: Knowledge in Ruins

34


46

The Anatomy of a Coercive Thought-Style

46

Strategies of Incarceration

49

Historicization as Self-Incarceration

73

The Historical Unconscious

82

History as Ideology

83

The Historical Unconscious (1): ‘The Actual, Essential Forces of the Age’

91

The Historical Unconscious (2): Social Configurations

106

History: A Self-Centred Science

128

Historians: ‘The Only People Qualifi ed’

128

‘World History is the Sensorium Commune of the Universe’

136

Anthropic Bias: Probing History’s Methodological Unconscious 153

x

Contents

5

History: Deception as Cultural Practice

172

Historicized Culture as Sophistical Culture

175

Pre-Emptive Occlusions

189

Which Now?

197

Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

221 225 233 251

Preface

Imprisoned by History: Aspects of Historicized Life is meant to complement Historics. Why History Dominates Contemporary Society (2006). Both books develop the ongoing “Historics-project”, a critical analysis of the theory of knowledge (in the broadest sense) that sustains this contemporary culture of self-deception, unprecedented in its deference to historical precedents. Imprisoned by History elicits the coercive character of totally historicized culture from its most striking manifestations: the historianfunction,—what historians as historians actually do, be it intentionally or unconsciously, rather than what they say or what they say they do; historyfocussed behaviour,—a coerced form of behaviour and thinking organized on behalf of state authority by managerial, professional, and academic elites and induced in the wider public through the workplace and through leisure activities as the comprehensive framework of reality; and identitary thinking,—the logical principle, the sufficient reason, for categorizing social phenomena historically, for thereby imposing a pacifying political order, particularly by generating the “common places” to which people and their everyday existence can be confi ned. The book presents historicized thinking as the ideological expression of totalitarian capitalism and the political system that endorses it. Historical knowledge reinforces them by making them culturally indispensable: the muse of history, Clio, is no sagacious guide in life, magistra vitae, but the venal CEO of a global corporation wised up to any racket going. Accordingly, Chapter 1 argues that history operates as an all-purpose instrument of social management affi rming dominant political, economic, and cultural interests, while stressing that it can do so only because its foundations are chimerical and in doing so it generates a culture of despondency; Chapter 2 reveals the coercive, carceral character of historical discourse as the means for issuing the chief commands and authorizing the main regulations that keep the fatal political-economic system running; Chapter 3 focuses on the remorseless historical unconscious historicized consciousness must presuppose, ultimately dreads because of its disruptive potential, but can’t help reinforcing through what it represses, excludes, or makes redundant— through the unintended consequences of its own dispensations; Chapter 4

xii Preface takes history’s coercive world-order as symptomatic of cognitive self-centredness that, in sustaining the exceptional ontological status of humanity, discounts biological and cosmological instabilities that compromise both the existence of the human species and the cognitive basis of history itself; fi nally, Chapter 5 identifies the historicized world, self-incarcerated by its illusions of regularity and dominant order, as the epitome of self-deceiving, sophistical culture. The chapters stand in two main symmetrical relationships to each other: Chapters 1 and 3 focus on history as an ideological affi rmation of the dominant social and political order; Chapters 2 and 4 stress the social coercion exerted by history’s self-amplifying discourse, its self-attributed cognitive privilege, and its panoptic scope. Conversely, Chapters 1 and 2 explore historical knowledge as a social managementtechnology; Chapters 3 and 4 consider history’s coercive, carceral strategies against the background of what it unconsciously represses: both the ecological system that a priori supports human cognition and the blind spots and redundancies created by its totalitarian order. In Chapter 5 these themes are restated in terms of Classical sophistry to show that historical knowledge is coercive because, being essentially illusory, the political-economic system in spectacular form, it needs above all else to coerce itself,—to persuade itself of its own veracity. Deriving from a wide range of material, Imprisoned by History dissociates itself from interdisciplinary methods that are, in fact, the perfect alibi for concentrations of narrow, specialized authority. It doesn’t set out to produce the ample discourse and theological aura of scholastic writing or the conviction of certainty they project. Instead, it would generate what Roger Caillois called ‘adventurous patterns of coherence’ [cohérences aventureuses] that result from ‘improbable truths’ [vérités imvraisemblables] and ‘concealed evidence’ [évidences dérobées] that defy common sense and received opinion, the same old, historicized platitudes by another name. The mind is simply, but crucially, a node in the multifarious circuits of information that constitute the self-sustaining biosphere. Just as nature generates biologically the camouflage-patterns on an insect, or geologically the translucency of quartz or the razor-sharpness of obsidian, so it produces intellectually regularities, densities, symmetries, and dissymmetries in thought. Therein lies an aesthetic theory of knowledge that would strike another blow against mortiferous historicism. But that must be left to further reflection . . .

Acknowledgments

My thanks are due to the University of Leicester for a study-leave in which the idea for this book fi rst took shape and for another study-leave in which the revisions and editing were completed. I would also like to thank Robert Burns for inviting me to present a version of Chapter II at the Philosophy of History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Studies, University of London, in October 2006. I am very much indebted to the History editors at Routledge for supporting and taking on this project, to Eve Setch in Abingdon and to Laura Stearns and Nicholas Mendoza in New York. Also I very much appreciate the critical but supportive comments made by the readers of my original proposal. M.L.D. March 2009

1

‘Shaking the respect for history’ The more I analyze the everyday influence history exerts on people’s actions and opinions, the more I have convinced myself that it was one of the most fertile sources of their prejudices and errors. [ . . . ] I believe, therefore, that I will have performed an eminent service if my book could shake the respect for history now that it has become a dogma of the European educational system; if, becoming the foreword, the universal preface to every history book, it alerted each reader to the persuasiveness [empirisme] of the authors and to his own illusions; if it required each thinking person to subject each narrating person to a severe interrogation about how they came by their information and the primary sources of their hear-say.

Doesn’t this sound like a lead-in to some postmodern theory, a cool riff on the non-availability of historical truth? Actually, it’s the foreword of Volney’s Lectures on History delivered in 1795 at the École Normale in Paris and published in 1826 (Volney 1989a: 504–505). More to the point: it endorses the theory of historical knowledge proposed in Historics (cf. Davies 2006a). This new Historics confronts the old historicism, the ‘organon’ of historical knowledge developed by German historians in the nineteenth century, epitomized by Johann Gustav Droysen’s Historik, elaborated between 1857 and 1882. This same old historicism still supports the history disciplines,—as in the assertion ‘The History & Policy papers demonstrate [ . . . ] that the most convincing and illuminating perspectives on the present come from applying the core principles of historicism’. It still affirms the prevailing naturalized (i.e. academically authorized, socially conventional) sense of history, predicated on ‘historical process’, analogical reasoning, ‘historical context’, and ‘historical difference’ (Tosh 2008: 116). As in the sociological theory of Norbert Elias, it still promotes history as the best means for humanity to fulfil its global intention of creating a civilized world for itself (Droysen 1977: 289). It constructs history as the dominant rationale of human existence in all its various economic, social, political, cultural, and religious forms. That’s to say: this same old historicism still projects history as the dominant form of thought,—(1.) as dogma; (2.) as a pervasive, ideological influence on everyday-life; and so, on account of its dominance, producing (3.) the redundancy of humanistic thought. Its outcome, a world shaped and dominated by history, a world in which history operates ideologically, reveals this historically civilized world to be actually humanity’s global detention-centre. Only historians don’t see it: they’re obsessed with past “processes”. Only a dissident view based on immediate

2


actuality [aesthesis], such as Volney’s extra-terrestrial perspective on a globe torn apart by religious fundamentalist conflict, as in Ruins or Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1791), confronts the actually squalid conditions to which the self-same “historical processes” confine human life (cf. Volney 1989b: 187ff., 195ff., 271ff.).

1. ‘THE DOGMA OF THE EUROPEAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM’ History is the ultimate form of mental coercion. That it always does impose itself as dogma, that it always does incarcerate us in its comprehensive designs, testifies to its persuasiveness. After all, if what happens can’t be explained historically, how can it be explained? If history doesn’t represent the accumulated reality of humanity, what does? If the past is abandoned, what stops it fatefully, fatally recurring? Just posing these questions exposes a limitation in thinking,—like standing on the brink of consciousness, peering into the void of absurdity. History apparently functions in relation to acting, as language to thinking. Just as thinking activity ceases if it resists the ‘coercive force of language’ [dem sprachlichen Zwange] (to take Nietzsche’s line), so the reality created by human behaviour collapses unless captured by historical categorical coordinators (e.g. origins, precedents, contexts, trajectories, traditions, heritages, legacies, identities, catalysts, causes, products, etc.), that constitute the ‘poetics’ of the discipline, that bestow on what it produces a ‘regime of truth’ (cf. Rancière 1992: 180).1 In both cases meaning and explanation depend on ‘a scheme we cannot dispense with’ (Nietzsche 1996: 358, §522).

1.1. The “lessons” of history Two centuries on, Volney’s attack is as sharp as ever. But then history suffuses all aspects of reality more than ever. And if one were to think historically, as one naturally might in this historicized reality now, one could regard Volney’s Leçons d’Histoire as having “set a precedent” for Historics, or as being in a “long tradition” of scepticism towards history that would include Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, Theodor Lessing, Paul Valéry, Gaston Bachelard, as well as such thought-styles as structuralism and deconstructionism. Further, thinking historically in a historicized world makes each incident interchangeable and reversible: so one might also regard Historics as “going back” to Volney’s 1795 treatise, and Volney himself as “going back” to Lucian’s treatise ‘How to Write History’ (c.162–165AD; cf. Volney 1989a: 573ff.). In fact, just think historically and, historically, Volney will say nothing new. In history, there never is anything new: as this example shows, it’s all the same. Just think historically: that most effectively blocks his attack, any attack.


3

Volney, though, offers something else, quite different. The title is already suggestive. Leçons d’Histoire could also mean ‘history lessons’, i.e. ‘lessons about history’ or ‘lessons from history’. The difference is: history isn’t the teacher. The Classical precept, Cicero’s historia magistra vitae, is inverted. What happened in the past (history [rg]), has no lessons to teach.2 History’s lessons Volney infers for himself from immediate observation (the ruins of ancient cities, globalized religious conflict, the violent convulsions of the French Revolution) and the available historical knowledge (history [crg]). They are inferences drawn from actuality, from evidence incriminating history. They derive from the immediate sense of things [aesthesis] as antagonistic to entrenched habits of thought, to the received categories of historical consciousness [illusio]. Volney’s work, in other words, represents the classical dilemma of the reflective sceptic in a totally historicized world. It shows history imposing itself, being totally coercive because of its cognitive redundancy. It realizes the past can’t have any lessons to teach, because knowledge based on it can’t help being baseless. In a totally historicized world historical knowledge descends inevitably to the ‘inactive commonplace’ (cf. Whitehead 1968: 174). Volney’s work ultimately evinces an innate, essential tropism of the human mind. The eidetic capacity of human consciousness has an inherent sense of reservation: its own vital interests galvanize dissent. Sooner or later it needs to stand back from the forms it has created, to distanciate itself. As an organic entity, human life finds it cannot dispense with ‘novelty of functioning’ or, conversely, ‘the entertainment of the alternative’: these expressions alone are essential for creating ‘varieties of importance’, the moral and aesthetic values that sustain human life (Whitehead 1968: 26, 28). As Volney shows paradigmatically, once history becomes the dominant form, the mind can’t help turning against it, resisting the historicizing trend, pursuing an alternative: the contrary, self-opposing (i.e. de-historicizing) principle historicization through its very presence establishes. And still, despite this scepticism, history dominates. As Volney argues, it’s an effective, addictive anaesthetic: it offers pacifying certainties, it numbs the mind’s and body’s vital demands with narcotic rêveries. Volney is aware that his conception of history is novel. He focuses not on what history is, but what it does: that makes his work a prototype Historics. His world is already historicized: history comes into all aspects of social activity. He, therefore, wants to know whether or not historical narratives inspire confidence, what importance can be placed on historical facts, how studying history can be socially or practically useful, how history should best be studied, and, fi nally, ‘what influence historians have over the judgement of posterity, the workings of governments, and peoples’ fate’ (Volney 1989a: 510–511). Leçons d’Histoire takes a cool, rational view of history like Voltaire’s in the essays Remarques sur l’histoire [Remarks on History] (1742) or Nouvelles considérations sur l’histoire [New Reflections on History] (1744) or, despite the difference in scale, an anthropological, scientific line like Montesquieu’s

4


in De l’Esprit des Lois [The Spirit of Laws] (1748) or Buffon’s in his Histoire universelle [Universal History] (1749–1789). Its view of history dissents from the general historical, historicizing trend. Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History (1681), Vico’s New Science (1725), Mably’s On the Study of History (1775) and his On the Manner of Writing History (1783), Kant’s ‘Ideas for a World History with a Cosmopolitan Intention’ (1784), Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity (1784–1791), Schiller’s ‘What is Universal History and to what End is it Studied?’ (1789), Condorcet’s Outline of a Historical Tableau of the Progress of the Human Mind (1793), or, subsequently, Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1822–1831), Cieszkowski’s Prolegomena to Historiosophy (1838) and Droysen’s Historik (1857–1882) (e.g.): these all variously endow historical truth with positive moral value or propose meta-historical schemes enclosing all human beings and assigning them as individuals, nations, or cultures their proper place in the grand, historical design. That includes, above all, assigning the present its place in the total historical agenda they envisage. In contrast, Volney, like Marx, inverts the priorities. Starting with the real existence of a global, historicized human society, he defi nes what history signifies for it. From this inverted standpoint he regards it as ‘a series of involuntary experiments to which the human race subjects itself’ (Volney 1989a: 511). Further, this experiment figure graphically vindicates the most important lesson about history Volney’s lectures on history would teach: to repudiate credulity and certainty as the effects of ignorance, indolence, and pride; to reject the imposition of beliefs by authorities; and, instead, to advocate scepticism, both the precept to ‘believe with difficulty’ and ‘the exterminating power of doubt’, since history shows that ‘certainty is the doctrine of error or mendacity, and the unfl inching weapon of tyranny’ (Volney 1989a: 507, 539). Experiments do come up with results, with everaccumulating data or experiences,—in history’s case, with all kinds of moral and political precepts drawn from predicaments posterity can learn from. At the same time, they involve trial-and-error, they test strategies: they can and do go wrong or produce unexpected results. This figure of thought, therefore, brings out the coincidence between historical truth and human error, human reality and historical illusion (Volney 1989a: 519–521).

1.2. Volney: on history as illusio From this standpoint Volney explores the scope of history as an illusion, its illusory scope [illusio]: (a) History is illusory because it promises a total human knowledge potential it can never fulfi l. Volney evokes the possible political and ethical benefits of what he calls his novel ‘analytical or philosophical method’ of constructing history that would have a moral, scientific, and political utility (Volney 1989a: 544). It involves, beyond anything Montesquieu or Buffon envisaged, a comprehensive, social-anthropological, synchronic, and


5

diachronic inventory of all the nations. Such a vast compendium would become the ‘unequivocal subject of the most useful reflections and combinations for the profound art of governing and passing laws’. Backed up by philology, by historical linguistics, by historical dictionaries and grammars, themselves manifestations of a people’s history, it would bring out the ‘genealogical fraternity’ of mankind. However, here Volney’s ambivalence comes in: such comprehensive knowledge, if it were achievable, would inevitably be late knowledge. Volney confi rms a central tenet of Historics: historical knowledge is, by defi nition, late knowledge,—the belated insight, the deferred response, the always postponed resolution. From surveying ruins, monuments, inscriptions, coins, ancient scripts, the past’s débris, the characteristics of a world already historicized, he concedes that only those peoples already existing would be capable of gathering this data since its accumulated, historical significance would become apparent only to modern times,—the latest times (Volney 1989a: 584–585, 590, 592, 598). Volney’s conception of history is technological. In his work as in Historics, history does stand unmasked as a social management technology. Taken in its universality, evincing in all their heterogeneous forms ‘the springs and mechanisms of human nature’, it constitutes a vast, complex social machine. The study of history would, therefore, perfect this historical mechanism and so produce ‘moral machines’ capable of establishing ‘fixed and determined principles for legislation, political economy, and government’. But this possibility too remains hypothetical [illusio]. It founders on the problematic criteria for evaluating evidence, for ascertaining beyond the major causes the relevance of a host of ancillary, but no less decisive factors. Failure to reckon with them, adhering uncritically to the given facts and erecting hypotheses on them instead, would inevitably produce calamitous errors of public administration. So, if the ‘moral machine’ of history were to materialize, the complexity of its engineering would require from historian-technicians knowledge of what Volney calls ‘probability calculus’, the ‘higher mathematics of history’,—possibly something like the current application of Bayesian logic to analyze information transfer between past and present or to assess in the present the likely, future occurrence of cataclysmic change (Volney 1989a: 542, 554–555; cf. Tucker 2004: 95ff.; Leslie 1998: 198ff., 216ff., 258ff.). Here, Volney confirms a further issue central to Historics: the history ‘mega-machine’ demands a technology so comprehensively complex that it’s too complex for its users’ comprehension,—that its complexity is an insuperable impediment to learning anything from it. (b) History is also illusory, therefore, because this discrepancy between potential and performance makes it deceptive. To begin with, the historian has no ‘fi rst-degree certainty’ about his facts. They reach him only through intermediaries: so that, like a judge, he has to question these intermediary witnesses to discover the truth, ‘the existence of the fact as it actually was’.3 Underlying this forensic interrogation is an assessment of verisimilitude (likeness) and probability, themselves sources of deception. Designating

6


something as a fact of itself invokes the constancy of nature and, through its factual essence sustained by the ‘system of the universe’, establishes similarity with other facts. Factual narratives thus generate a priori both their own plausibility and, in the historian, a predisposition to be accepted as probable. In any case, to add to the deceptiveness, assessments of verisimilitude (or—in the terminology of the argument here—“likeness”) can vary widely according to the historian’s own knowledge and experience (Volney 1989a: 516–517). Here Volney further confi rms Historics. Because historical knowledge operates in terms of probability and verisimilitude, even to the point of 99.99% likeness, it ipso facto operates on identitary thinking, establishing identical structures (things as they actually were), producing identical cases (nations, societies, cultures, communities), and defi ning identities (abstracted personality structures to identify oneself with). History’s identitary thinking is, therefore, inherently illusory [illusio]. Because there can be no verification, independent of any of the available witness testimonies, of the degree of likeness achieved by the historical account, its illusoriness can never be dispelled. Hence, Volney’s scepticism towards history and identity-forming procedures: one should not assent to anything one has not conceived for oneself (Volney 1989a: 518). Because history requires identitary procedures to produce its likenesses, it must be illusory. Its illusoriness is both constitutive and compromising. It sets it apart from subjects of immediate apprehension such as art, mathematics, geometry, physics, medicine, or geography. It renders it in every respect irrelevant to the practical conduct of life. History is nothing other than a ‘fantastic tableau of facts that have vanished leaving only their shadows behind’: ‘why [Volney asks] is there any need to know about these fugitive forms that have perished and will never again return?’ To the labourer, the craftsman, the merchant, or the businessman, it is quite inconsequential to know that (e.g.) Alexander or Attila, an Ancient Roman or Spartan republic, or Socrates or Confucius, once existed. These phantoms [illusio] (he continues) have nothing to do with his existence: they contribute nothing necessary for his conduct or useful to his happiness. As in the case of the great moral legislators, a maxim of theirs may well have survived, but its value for our own, real existence is decided not by reference to the mould, long since shattered, that originally formed it, but by how it stands up to natural facts now. Studying history, therefore, diverts attention from subjects that could be usefully applied, such as the exact sciences and other sciences of primary necessity. In any case (Volney adds), studying history is pointless, partly because of its confusing complexity, partly also because of its inherent unreliability: its inveterate recourse to ‘vague sentiments of personal conscience and persuasion, to the reasons of those who do not reason, and which, with their indiscriminate concern for both error and truth, are no more than expressions of arrogance always ready to flare up at the least contradiction and engender partisanship, zealotry, and fanaticism’ (Volney 1989a: 570–571). History, in any case, has nothing to teach. It


7

sets no examples to follow: it offers ‘almost perpetually scenes of madness, vice, and crime and, as a consequence, models and incentives for the most monstrous perversions’ (Volney 1989a: 565). Here, too, Volney confi rms a contention central to Historics: that far from producing comprehension, history with its destructive force engenders apprehension (cf. Davies 2006a: 91ff.). This he knew regrettably from his own immediate experience of the French Revolution, along with its conceited self-identification with Sparta and Rome, its historical cult of Antiquity. With its philosophically vindicated values of universal peace and tolerance, ‘the eighteenth-century seemed on the verge of humanity’s fi nest epoch, when a new storm blew up, carrying opinion off in the opposite direction, razing the burgeoning edifice of reason, and provided a fresh example of the influence of history and the abusive application of the comparisons it suggests’ (Volney 1989a: 601–602). It’s hardly surprising, therefore, if, like Hegel, he discounts happiness from history, since he laments the fate of those peoples who do fi ll its pages (Volney 1989a: 606; cf. Hegel 1961: 69–70). Hardly surprising either is his conviction that, in exposing the fraudulence of historical knowledge, he is doing not just the world of letters, but also the moral and political sciences a ‘veritable service’ (Volney 1989a: 540). (c) History is illusory because of the unreliability of historical evidence and the inadequacy of the historiography based on it. Primarily the authority of testimony is extremely variable: it depends on whether the historian directly participated in or immediately witnessed the events concerned, whether he interrogated witnesses only afterwards, or whether he relied merely on tradition or hear-say (Volney 1989a: 523ff.). But the authority of testimony is anyway extremely variable: ‘by its very constitution, human understanding does not always picture the facts as a perfect resemblance to how they are and is all the more disposed to modify this picture if less effort is required or it is more ignorant, or if it cannot appreciate the causes, the effects, and the whole action’ (Volney 1989a: 529). Consequently, the more barbaric, ignorant, superstitious the society is, the more unreliable its historical testimony, the more illusory its historical account of itself. Only once peoples become enlightened, policed, and civilized do their tableaux of history become more recognizable. As their sciences and arts improve (Volney remarks), so a whole host of marvellous events, all sorts of miracles and monsters vanish as soon as they are exposed to their light, ‘just as phantoms, wailing, and spectres with which the apprehensive imaginations of the sick [les imaginations peureuses des malades] populate shadows and silence of the night, vanish at daybreak with the fi rst rays of the rising sun’ (Volney 1989a: 530). This line of argument takes Volney to a further, crucial precept of Historics: that history [crg] is not to be taken as society’s “objective” self-knowledge but as its ideological self-projection or psychopathological self-replication, that what it consciously says (its cognitive content and intention) it subverts through what it unconsciously signifies (as ideology, as a referential simulation of capitalism, as anthropic bias, as

8


sophistical image). It establishes ‘a maxim fecund with results in the study of history’: that the very nature of its historical accounts sums up fairly accurately the stage of enlightenment and civilization a people has attained; in more general terms, ‘that history assumes the character of the epochs and times in which it has been composed’ (Volney 1989a: 530–531). Moreover, this line of argument emerges only in a historicized world, a world with a historicized historical consciousness, with a historical hyperconsciousness. This is a world in which the history technology produces technological advances that shift the social reality principle, thereby derealizing its precursors, revealing their reliance on political strategies, cultural forms, and social discourses that now appear as self-delusions [illusio]. These technological advances delivered by history include the invention of printing (since it preserves written evidence, which enhances historical certainty); methods and remedies in medicine; instruments for surgery; tools and machines in mechanics; and decorations and furniture in architecture (Volney 1989a: 532, 549). But of all these the latest invention, the technological appliance with the most historicizing potential, is history [crg] itself: ‘Only in modern times [i.e. the latest times] and almost only in the last century, has history assumed a philosophical character, seeking in the sequence of events, a genealogical veil of causes and effects [un voile généalogique de causes et d’effets], in order to deduce from them a theory of rules and principles designed to direct individuals and peoples towards the goal of their self-preservation or their perfection’ (Volney 1989a: 543). This “scientific” history historicizes the world, produces an already historicized world. It ensures there’s no experience, no event, that hasn’t already been conceived in terms of the past. (d) History is illusory, fi nally, because it doesn’t derive from, or relate to, immediate apprehensions [aesthesis]. As Volney points out, historical facts no longer exist: being dead they can neither be revived for the observer to see nor verified by witnesses. Whereas the sciences address immediate sensations, history appeals to imagination and memory. So physical facts exist; historical facts have to be narrated: the difference is crucial. Physical facts come with their own evidence and certainty: they are immediately apprehended [sensibles] and ‘reveal themselves in their self-evidence on the immutable stage of the universe’. Historical facts come as approximations to verisimilitude and probability: ‘they appear merely as spectres in the uneven mirror of human understanding where they lend themselves to the most bizarre schemes’ (Volney 1989a: 509). Moreover, their spectral quality never leaves them. The testimony of witnesses suggests that human understanding works like a mirror with irregularly curved surfaces that strangely disfigure the tableaux placed in front of it. Even though these distortions themselves might be rectified if they were reflected in turn by another distorting mirror, they remain reflected mental images (Volney 1989a: 518). Further, history operates in various, heterogeneous ways,—sometimes as a nostalgic projection or reality-surrogate, sometimes as a compensation or


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experience-supplement. It comes primarily (Volney asserts) from vulgar traditions such as story-telling, the ‘mechanical need’ that disposes people to recollect their experiences, to bring back their image once their reality goes, as in the reminiscences of the elderly or the conversations of those who do no thinking at all. It responds also to human curiosity, to the no less natural human need to increase our sense-experiences and enhance reality with semblances of itself. As a result, history becomes a mesmerizing, sophistical performance, a ‘magic lantern spectacle’ [spectacle de lanterne magique], entrancing children and reasonable adults alike (Volney 1989a: 543; cf. Plato 2002a: 344–355; III, 283B–286B; Huizinga 2004: 161ff).

1.3. Identitary logic = identitary illusion Leçons d’Histoire, therefore utterly mistrusts history and historians. They have, it argues, no warrant to be trusted. It cuts through the indolent credulity, the deference to authority, the arrogance of correctness historicization affirms. It intends instead to establish for judgement and opinion, particularly for educational purposes, a ‘reliable basis’ defined by philosophical or scientific criteria. It advocates knowledge not in terms of disputable inferences derived from an ideal world, but ‘as facts in the physical world that can be known reductively by demonstration and observation, which offers a fi rm basis to judgement and opinion’ (Volney 1989a: 506). Its conception of history as an ‘experiment’ humanity puts itself through, confirms Volney’s positivistic reconception of history, be it as action [rg] or as knowledge [crg]. As a late Enlightenment philosophe, Volney places history in the same category as fanatical dogmatism, religious zealotry, and superstition (Volney 1989a: 584). It, too, is an aberration from the rule of philosophical and scientific reason. It, too, needs to be treated sceptically, to be scientifically tested. With this strategy (one could object) Volney makes rationalism look dogmatic. Doesn’t he reduce life to a series of mathematical calculations? Doesn’t he evoke a rationalized and disenchanted world? Doesn’t his vision confi rm that caricature of an experientially destitute world invented by Counter-Enlightenment thinkers to justify instead their own obscurantism, with its dogmatic convictions, group identities, cultural relativism, vitalistic intuitions, or misty nostalgia (cf. Berlin 1979: 6ff., 14ff.)? Volney’s methodological acumen disqualifies these objections. It anticipates the vicious circle that forms whenever the nature and value of historical knowledge are assessed. In a historicized world, predicated on the identitary logic of the same old thing, philosophical reflection on history is bound to be historical: what reveals what history is, is nothing other than history itself. Where history is everything, explanation will be ipso facto historical or historicizable. A historian would naturally maintain: ‘If the ambition to know the past is completely surrendered, we shall never be able to determine how the present came to be.’ But this proposition merely affi rms what its premise already implies: that the present is a priori determined by the past; that

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connections between past and present are invariably self-consistent. In seeing history in terms of ‘coherent narratives linking past and present’, the explanation is simply self-centred, tautological (Tosh 1999: 131). It reveals nothing about history not already known. To break this vicious circle, history has to be envisaged in terms of a larger entity in which it is embedded. This larger entity can be only nature: for history to exist, for something to have a history, nature must exist a priori. Further, historical explanation has to be formulated in terms used to understand that larger entity history belongs to. These terms can come only from philosophical logic and scientific analysis. (a) The cognitive potential of this approach, Volney’s approach, lies in its reductivism. It exposes the above proposition as particularly treacherous, as in the following illustration. To say that knowledge of the past determines the present, is to assume that, for any given event E in one domain at one moment in time T1 and another event J in the same domain at a subsequent moment of time T2 , nothing can possibly intervene that will prevent J from issuing from E. But this assumption is vicious because no-one can infer from event E what he or she can discover only after event J has occurred: ‘no society can predict its future states of knowledge’ (Popper 1974: vii). There is here not just cognitive asymmetry between the retrospective knowledge of the historian and the intentional consciousness of past agents. The point is rather: retrospective (historical) explanation, along with its identitary (self-referential) logic, whether for historians or for past agents, will define for the same domain any event at T2 as issuing from E at T1. The successive unfolding of coincident circumstances in the same domain (sequence a) at any moment between T1 and T2 can contain the most heterogeneous elements (e.g. a: E, F, R, M, W, V). However, their reflective reconstruction at T2 (sequence b) cannot but perceive the recent, unfolded events in a consistent, necessary order (i.e. b: E→ F→G→H→I→J). What happens, happens. But what happens afterwards, re-evaluates the significance of what happened before: automatically deferential to the past, history is indeed ‘a retrospective art that waits upon the passing of time’ (Corfield 2007: 157). The historical reconstruction thus habitually ‘muddles together’ (as Whitehead puts it) ‘the creative advance of nature [ . . . ] which we experience and know as the perpetual transition of nature into novelty, with the single-time series which we naturally employ for measurement’ (Whitehead 2004: 178). It mistakes the stream of consciousness that delivers the coincident circumstances as they immediately unfold for a “naturally” causal relationship between the circumstances themselves, a relationship that normatizes them and reduces them to the recurrence of the same old thing. The reconstruction has to be based on ‘the assumption that history is not so fragmented as to be beyond explanation’ (Corfield 2007: 220). It presupposes that ‘time is not a random agglomeration of moments’, but is rather ‘a connected and orderly sequence of moments, and human actions exist in that sequence and can often be best understood within it’ (Tusa 2004:


11

131). Explanation thus by itself surreptitiously substitutes conceptualized comprehension (sequence b at T2 [illusio]) for immediate apprehension (sequence a as transition from T1 to T2 [aesthesis]). That’s how explanation explains: history’s identitary logic always ensures b-type sequences identify what “really happened” in a-type sequences.4 Therefore, the conventional assumption that knowledge of the past is needed to understand the present, is particularly vicious. It shows why history is illusory. For a start, it denies the inherent instability of the present: the present now is ever fluid, ever in the midst of unfolding heterogeneous circumstances (a-type sequences). It also assumes that any ongoing incident in an immediate, a-type sequence can be “understood” in terms of an already historically reconstructed, b-type sequence. History’s identitary logic makes them essentially the same. This ludic research procedure might seem fairly harmless if confi ned to its point of origin, the university or the academic research institute. The trouble is: in the wider public sphere it sanctions a particularly vicious, obscurantist reflex. It directly legitimizes all kinds of ideological mystifications that mask what’s happening: e.g. George W. Bush’s analogy between the 9/11 terrorist attack (September 2001) and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour (December 1941); or ex-Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comparison of Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s genocidal pronouncements (January 2007) with those of Hitler and the Nazis (1933–1945). Historical comprehension normatizes what would otherwise be an unprecedented source of apprehension—for its own ideological purposes. (b) To return to Leçons d’Histoire: the reductive—or sceptical approach (as Volney calls it)—simply argues that, if historians operate with history [rg] as a natural reality, historical knowledge should be open to evaluation in terms of nature and reality. So, if positivism delivers verifiable insights into nature, it should also be applied to the nature of history. Volney, therefore, prioritizes empirical sense-data rather than history’s reported facts. As preliminary to historical study, he recommends courses in the exact sciences, mathematics, physics, and geography, particularly in the latter to enable students to locate where historical scenes took place, lest ‘they float in the mind like clouds in the air’ (Volney 1989a: 566). Because history is ‘the rotation of the same old circle of calamities and errors’ [la rotation d’un même cercle de calamités et d’erreurs] he advises against using it widely in popular education. Rather he envisages it as a resource of political and ethical examples that in their erroneousness should encourage philosophers and politicians to exert themselves to improve government policy and social administration (Volney 1989a: 570, 609). Leçons d’Histoire, however, implies something more. Considered in the light of the overall scope of positivism, Volney’s methodology anticipates, albeit sketchily, a radical reformulation of human knowledge. It suggests that if history is a catalogue of errors, then the premises of historical knowledge must themselves be erroneous, because history is the identity of

12


human ignorance (Volney 1989a: 609). It implies, therefore, that the glib, conventional assertions historians need for vindicating history mask not only basic epistemological problems, but also historians’ own ignorance of history’s basically erroneous character. History’s illusions start from historians’ self-delusions.

1.4. Volney: on history as aesthesis Certainly, the explicit framework of Volney’s argument reproduces the usual, bifurcated structure of experience that characterizes the Cartesian world-view: immediate sense-impressions, on the one hand; ‘immutable laws of the universe’, on the other, with the mind, ‘disengaged from passion and prejudice’, impartial spectator of both (Volney 1989a: 602). It derives from a duplicitous cognitive situation: the mind, bearing the imprints of the assumed, objective world “out there”, becoming conscious of the world through the correct images or accurate likenesses it receives, can project the world only as an accurate likeness or correct image [Weltbild] (cf. Heidegger 1972: 80–82). However, as though it were the argument’s subconscious instinct, the tentative adumbration of a conception of knowledge based on radically aesthetic premises [aesthesis] is detectable. It has two main features: (a) The repudiation of causality. Volney advocates a ‘mathematics’ of history to calculate the relative significance of all the factors involved as events unfold, because discerning in them their causes misrepresents them in their totality. He exposes what Whitehead calls ‘the unexhaustive character of knowledge’ (Whitehead 2004: 50). Like Hume, Volney sees causality in mental terms, as a relationship inferred from ‘the experience’d conjunction of objects’. Its discernment is something fictional, created by the mind, rather than natural. Hume’s defi nition makes this clear: a cause is ‘an object precedent and contiguous to another and so united with it in the imagination, that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other’. The relationship between cause and effect is established through identitary logic but also supported by sufficient reason, a reason sufficient to identify an event as being a cause of a particular effect. Hence, an object becomes precedent and contiguous to another when ‘all the objects resembling the former are plac’d in a like relation of priority and contiguity to those objects that resemble the latter’ (Hume 1969: 222; I, xiv [my emphasis]). The defi nition follows the Aristotelian principle ‘that that which generates is of the same kind as that which is generated’ and is ‘formally one’ with it (Aristotle 1996a: 349; 1033 b 30). But it also raises radical epistemological issues. It leaves still open the criteria for defining resemblance, for defi ning what “sameness” (or “likeness”) makes a precedent object the “same” as a subsequent object, for assessing the sufficiency of the reason that constitutes the precedence. That the ‘circular mode of


13

reasoning’ produced by this identitary thinking is fallacious, is well summarized by Sextus Empiricus. First, he observes that the cause is apprehended only after the event, when the effect is identified as its effect. But next he points out that ‘we cannot [ . . . ] apprehend the effect of the Cause as its effect unless we apprehend the Cause of the effect as its cause’,—as he adds: ‘we think we know that it is its effect only when we have apprehended the Cause of it as its Cause.’ Ultimately, the principle of causality becomes redundant, tautological, since ‘in order to conceive the Cause, we must fi rst know the effect, while in order to know the effect we must [ . . . ] have previous knowledge of the cause’ (Sextus Empiricus 2000a: 338–339; III, 21–22). It thus exposes what Whitehead calls the ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’: in this case, the illusion that causes exist concretely in nature such that causality is a conceptual abstraction from this apparently natural occurrence (Whitehead 1967c: 58–59). It confi rms ‘the unexhaustive character of knowledge’, since—as the b-type sequence just mentioned demonstrates—what is received as reliably known is actually based, in accordance with conventional disciplinary practice, on a very narrow selection of data ‘from the whole complex of related entities within the general fact there for discernment’ (Whitehead 2004: 50). In repudiating causality, Volney implies that historical knowledge is in any case limited by the limitations of induction. That it discerns causes as concretely immanent in events is certainly a delusion. But even the sceptical standpoint, that mental structures bring events into causal relationships with each other, produces nothing but ‘a simplified edition of reality’ (Whitehead 1967b: 213). Volney thereby implies not just that history [rg], as a catalogue of human calamities, is full of illusions, but also that history’s [crg] attempts to make sense of these illusions are also illusory. He realizes that inductive generalization from direct observations ‘is a kind of optical illusion’ (Popper 1974: 134). Prior to verifying the reliability of sources and the veracity of witnesses comes the realization that, in the immediate contact with them, ‘sense perception does not provide the data in terms of which we interpret it’ or, conversely, ‘the real world does not make the world we perceive’ (Whitehead 1968: 133; Merleau-Ponty 1990: 97). History takes always a selective (i.e. prejudicial, hypothetical, conventional, or ideological) line to guide its data-gathering. What informs its criteria ‘as a rule [ . . . ] cannot be tested’ (Popper 1974: 151). In its recourse to identitary conventions (categorical coordinators), to pre-conceived, identical modes of causality (e.g. traditions, legacies, origins, precedents) or to stereotypes of causal agency (e.g. nations, states, classes, personalities), history avoids the endemic uncertainty of experience by stamping on it its own coercive designs. (b) The somatic basis of experience. In his critique of Mably, Volney generally censures writers for being so concerned with others that they remain oblivious to their own body and its influence on their moods and thoughts. He ventures briefly into physiology and dietetics as the ‘fundamental

14


sciences of our affections’. Studying their manifestations in our own body would reveal that the ‘the corporeal machine, depending on how well or how badly it works, is the powerful regulator in the working of the intellectual organ’ (Volney 1989a: 576–577). Though expressed mechanistically, in dualistic terms, this materialistic standpoint subverts the idea of the mind’s impartial self-detachment (Volney 1989a: 602). The contradiction might seem to vitiate the argument. But it reads also as a dialectical antithesis awaiting resolution. It suggests that, just as historical reality needs evaluating in terms of nature, so the mind that reconstructs it also needs its natural context defi ning. Both sense-perception and mental cognition can be reduced to functions of embodied existence. As Volney points out, the physiological and physical circumstances of the body have a bearing on one’s behaviour and opinion which in turn contribute to the social atmosphere (Volney 1989a: 577–578). The materialism that stresses the somatic basis of experience sustains the aesthetic character of knowledge [aesthesis]. Draw out the implications in Volney’s argument: immediately they reach to an ecological conception of mind. The mind interacting with the body interacts with nature, with the whole world it encounters and that encounters it: ‘there is no defi nite boundary to determine where the body begins and external nature ends. [ . . . ] there is a unity of the body with the environment, as well as a unity of body and soul into one person’ (Whitehead 1968: 161). Hence, the mind itself is an integral part of nature and reality. It discloses, through ‘observation selection effects’, the anthropic principle, its anthropic bias: that what human beings observe, what knowledge they have, is a priori determined by the physical conditions that make observation and knowledge by human beings possible at all (cf. Bostrom 2002: 2). The mind cannot, therefore, ever be an impassive spectator: it’s embedded in, and complicit with, the nature and reality it’s trying to understand. Even ‘secondary qualities’—(e.g.) colours, tastes, smells, and sounds, usually discounted as subjective or impressionistic—belong to nature and reality (Whitehead 2004: 27–30). Aesthesis thus produces a different kind of natural causality based not on the mechanical, ‘unexhaustive’ isolation of intelligible factors according to identitary logic, but on the ‘systematic correlation of the character of all events throughout all nature’. It involves the whole of nature, including the observer, his or her percipient events, and his or her situation: ‘We are in the world and the world is in us. Our immediate occasion is in the society of occasions forming the soul, and our soul is in our present occasion. The body is ours, and we are an activity within our body. This fact of observation, vague but imperative, is the foundation of the connexivity of the world, and of the transmission of its types of order’ (Whitehead 2004: 152ff.; 1968: 165). It implies what Volney himself recognizes: that a fact, as part of the world immediately given, can exist only as an integral part of the entire order of the universe (Volney 1989a: 509, 516).


15

Finally, what vindicates the authenticity of existence is the somatic basis of experience—not one’s place in history, not one’s historical identity. The ontological correlation between mind, body, nature, and reality takes priority, with history merely its accidental pendant. History’s mediation between embodied self and nature is not just misleading, but existentially dispensable. Instead, aesthesis invests knowledge with existential necessity: what we know, we know now, for the duration of our physical being, asserted as a specific, physically identifiable, socially recognizable person. It vindicates Schopenhauer’s conviction that, if a coherent plan is anywhere to be found, it lies not in world-history, as the philosophy of its professors claims, but in the life of each individual. Peoples (he continues) exist merely as abstractions; only individuals are real. So world history has no direct metaphysical significance: it’s merely a ‘contingent configuration’ [eine zufällige Konfiguration] (Schopenhauer 1977a: 249). Volney demonstrates the same defiant conviction in his bid to shatter the faith placed naturally, unquestioningly in history. With it he responds to the anomie, the despondency, the symptoms of the time-sickness that comes inevitably with a historicized world. It comes not just from structural disaffection between the tangible, existential order of individual life and the illusory, transcendental order of history. It comes also—as Volney discovered in 1783–1784, contemplating the ruins of Palmyra—from the immediate apprehension of the coercive force of history, from the ruin now present, its lasting aftermath.

2. ‘THE EVERY-DAY INFLUENCE HISTORY EXERTS’: HISTORY-FOCUSSED BEHAVIOUR Volney’s is an anthropological conception of history: history is the social climate. But to see history’s everyday influence in its most vicious form requires a socio-economic perspective. The historicized world is the world ‘jaded by the experience of history’, shaped by the neo-liberal state that, nevertheless, imposes itself as the best imaginable product of the historical process (Fukuyama 1992: xiiff., 306). Neo-liberalism asserts itself as the political and economic ideology of a global economic system in which ‘capitalism has become a form of totalitarianism, in which every human individual is an economic actor with a role to play in the division of labour’. It ensures ‘that the socalled division of labour is, in fact, an aggregating of labour, a totalitarian integrating of human effort, including the totalitarian integrating of human consciousness. One people, one market, one mind. Ein Volk, ein Markt, ein Geist’ (Allott 2002: 139). This ‘totalitarian capitalism’ enforces ‘the social and personal values necessary for the efficient functioning of capitalism’ by ‘aligning [human beings’] life-determining desire with the desire of all other economic actors’. What sustains it is the neo-liberal politics of ‘democracy-capitalism’ which necessarily ‘socialises the citizen by

16


integrating systematically individual consciousness and social consciousness, the private mind of the human being and the public mind of society’. Hence, neo-liberal ‘democracy-capitalism is the most advanced form of social oppression ever invented’ (Allott 2002: 140). As the managerial expression of a historicized world governed by identitary thinking and the principle of sufficient reason, this surreptitious totalitarianism needs to be stressed. What Marx calls the ‘despotism of capital’ [die Despotie des Kapitals] operates through a social production-process, based on technology and controlled by the systematic instrumentalization of natural science: all the industrial production-plants collectively promote the comprehensive organization of the total labour force, which ensures that the production-process is scientifically organized and socially coordinated (Marx 2005: 510–512, 656–657, 669). This surreptitious totalitarianism implies, therefore, ‘not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests’ (Marcuse 1986: 3). It enforces the socialization of work, the requirement for all parts of society to be productive, to create “public value”. To this end, it must appropriate the means of not just material but also cultural production, since the systems generating and circulating knowledge form a ‘general intellect’ of thoughts and discourses that through communicative action blend capitalistic production with commonplace social relationships (Virno 2004: 106–107). As a result, ‘the contours of the totality become obscured and the specific sites of production seem to become dissolved throughout society. This allows capital [ . . . ] to disguise its hegemony over society and its interest in exploitation, and thus to pass its conquest off as being in the general interest’ (Negri 2005: 204). It manipulates social needs all the more easily since, in controlling the dissemination of information (e.g. in the media), it can exert its total persuasiveness effectively, diffusely, through images (e.g. advertizing), through the spectacular presentation of commodities. The spectacle makes the world into a ‘waking dream’: it displaces reality itself by pure appearance dominated by commodity thinking [la raison marchande]. Hence, totalitarian domination (political and economic) through socialized production, reinforced through its governance of the spectacle (cultural domination), affi rms itself through the self-images it keeps putting into circulation (cf. Lipovetsky 2004: 58; Debord 1992: 18–19; Debord 1996: 19–20). Historicization is the neo-liberal ideological principle that enforces the total, technical and economic coordination of society, since socialized work by defi nition includes history-focussed behaviour as a socialized activity expressing the ‘general interest’. Both technologies (i.e. both historical and political-economic) in their ‘planetary imperialism’ represent the pinnacle of human subjectivity, of cognitive self-centredness and privilege; both establish themselves on ‘the level of uniformity’ [die Ebene der Gleichförmigkeit], since ‘this ability to make everything the same becomes


17

the most secure instrument of their total, namely technical domination over the earth’ (cf. Heidegger 1972: 102–103). Precisely this production of sameness, the same old thing, the always latest thing, and the managerial technology underpinning it confi rm the convergence between political (and economic) and cultural (and historical) domination, its comprehensive (i.e. totalitarian) regulation of thought and behaviour. Hence the premise of the present argument that history [rg] is the reality of production in an ideal form. For Marxism, history is driven by the labour power of human beings that reproduces what they need for their existence (Marx 1981b: 28–29). But for neo-liberalism, the ‘unfolding of modern natural science’ provides history with a ‘directional mechanism’ that ensures capitalism’s ‘ultimate victory as the world’s only viable economic system’ (Fukuyama 1992: 73, 90). Either way, economic production has an historical end. For Marxism it’s ultimately liberation; but for neo-liberalism it’s historicization itself. It’s the social, material form of historicization, a remorseless historicizing agent in its own right, ‘a continuously evolving process without a clear end point, where today’s modernity quickly becomes tomorrow’s antiquity’ (Fukuyama 1992: 91). Further, history [crg] is the idea of production in a real form. Based on identitary thinking, it produces reality as it actually was: in regenerating the past, it enables reality to replicate itself. It superimposes itself on reality as its simulacrum. In a historicized world reference to reality and reference to history become identical: historically replicated reality is as coercive as reality itself. What drives, and is driven by, historicization and neo-liberal ideology alike, what ensures their totalitarian dominance, is history-focussed behaviour. History-focussed behaviour results from the comprehensive ‘economic-technical coordination’ that enforces socialized work, from the domination of the sophistical image as mesmerizing spectacle, and from the resulting economic and cultural production and reproduction of the same [Gleichförmigkeit], predicated as that is on socially affirmative, identitary thinking. Instantiating ‘a scheme we cannot dispense with’, it is thus the pragmatic expression of the ‘general interest’ in which historicizing capital and historicized culture coincide. Hence, it is ideal for extracting value from all parts, even the most remote and esoteric, of the social system.5 After all, it embraces the most heterogeneous activities, such as the disciplinary practices in formal historical study; the conservation and promotion of heritage sites, museums, galleries, and archives; tourism; tracing one’s family-tree; pursuing local historical interests; collecting sentimental keepsakes and mementoes; personal tastes in music, film, art, fashion, and so on. Replicated sufficiently frequently on a national or international scale (as in the BBC television programme Who Do You Think You Are? which has celebrities researching their ancestors), it constitutes a social reality with its own political and economic ramifications,—and with its own demand to be explained historically, to be historicized. Reflecting mass public interest in history in a historicized world, history-focussed behaviour has immediate public value, quantifiable in economic terms, hence requiring

18 Imprisoned by History social regulation. It induces the private mind to identify itself with the public mind of historicized society and its technical-economic coordination.6 That makes it integral to the alignment [Gleichschaltung] of individual and social consciousness, the absolute prerequisite of neo-liberal ideology.

2.1. Historicization as ‘referential simulation’ The production of capital needs history as its ‘referential simulation’. It generates historical production in its own image [illusio] as a universally intelligible scheme applicable to any society at any time (cf. Baudrillard 1985: 75, 91ff.). It represents itself in its ideality as a comprehensive history-system in order the more easily to impose itself in its reality as a total economic system. Historicization is, therefore, a procedure of ‘double coding’. The postmodern term confi rms its historicizing implications. ‘Double coding’ is produced in postmodern architecture through combining modern techniques with the traditional styles they quote. It’s a form of historical hyperconsciousness. It results from the past being seen with ‘irony and displacement’, as in the historically self-conscious observation: ‘we live in an age which can build with beautiful expressive masonry as long as we make it skin deep and hang it on a skeleton’ (Jencks 1989: 14, 19, 56 (my italics)). It typifies the historicized world, the world propelled by the restless dynamic of capital, where the latest thing, displacing the same old thing, keeps reproducing it in its own self-image [illusio], keeps parodying itself (e.g. the MP3 player + downloads is in the same progressive, historical continuum as the wind-up gramophone). In socio-economic terms also, the historicized world defines itself as an historical epoch in which the totality of its historical self-knowledge impacts on historical action, action already prompted by historical knowledge,—in which historical knowledge confronts its own, practical consequences. It thus produces a historical situation that transcends all previous history while reinforcing its historicized character. It enforces a comprehensive knowledge-structure that mirrors an all-inclusive reality-structure. It’s ipso facto the perfect strategy for the ‘totalitarian integrating of human consciousness’ into the global production-system of totalitarian capitalism, for reinforcing neo-liberal ideology. However, the paradigmatic example of historicized double coding, of the latest thing being reproduced in its own self-image as the same old thing, is not the commodity, but one’s personal sense of self,—one’s identity. In neo-liberal, ideological terms, identity is the historicized, referential simulation of political and economic self-interest. History is there, above all, to produce identities in all varieties, personal, communal, ethnic, social, or national, for all consumers. To fi nd out who we are in this latest phase of the world, we consult history, the same old thing. That makes identity construction the basic paradigm of history focussed-behaviour. Identity, as vindicated by history, is thus the ultimate instrument for aligning individual consciousness with social consciousness, for consolidating totalitarian


19

democracy. Identitary practices generate a purely specular world [illusio]. The self fi nds itself reflected in its historical environment, the still existing trace of its origin; conversely, the historical environment as a common reference-point ensures group cohesion and blocks foreign intrusion. Identity formation operates ideologically: it has no immediate, existential basis. Any research method one employs is ‘unable not only to measure, typify or investigate, but even to empirically locate existence of ethnic or national identities’. Its ideological power derives precisely from its ‘chimerical quality’, from its specular, reflexive modus operandi (Malešević 2006: 56). But for this very reason, it’s also ideologically indispensable: ‘the success and the stability of liberal democracy [ . . . ] requires [sic] a degree of conformity between peoples and states’ (Fukuyama 1992: 213). Since ‘to articulate a distinctly political claim as a cultural/identity claim is to empty it of its particularistic, divisive and normative content, to make something which is fundamentally confl ictual seem much more consensual and natural’, it alone guarantees to deliver the complete integration of personal and social consciousness (Malešević 2006: 228). Identity synchronizes perfectly with history, since, as with history, its key virtue is that it has no virtue. As history is a repository of promiscuous meanings, so identity is a catalyst of phantasmic affi nities. The production-system of totalitarian capitalism thus assimilates reality to history. Whatever happens, its history always happens fi rst: its production-process (i.e. “where it comes from”) takes priority. In this sense, historicizing as a thought-style really does define ‘inactive, commonplace’ thinking. It’s inactive thinking, not because it’s inert or motionless, but because, in a historicized world where everything always changes, where the same old historical “process of change” keeps things changing, historicized thinking won’t change anything. It won’t change the changing process. It can’t help going along with the way things are going. It cannot but conform. The common places to which historians confine people, the sense of commonness history enforces, are nothing but conformist. They do reveal the convergence between history’s cognitive self-centredness and state-imposed consensus in its absolute form (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 466). They do chime perfectly with (e.g.) a form of politics that announces that ‘the politics of the mainstream centre ground in Britain [ . . . ] is a politics of the common ground and draws upon the common sense of the people and it is where the progressive consensus will be built so that we can meet the challenges of change in the long term interests of our country’. And the identification of historical common places and common thinking (consensus) does reflect the power of the state to define itself historically, as it always has done,—to decide (e.g.) ‘that it is the wrong time in history for politics as usual [ . . . ]. Faced with the common challenges we face together it is the wrong time for continuing to treat citizens simply as members of contending groups [ . . . ], the wrong time for perpetuating the sterile divisions [ . . . ] that dominated

20 Imprisoned by History the ideologies of an ever more distant past. Instead, this is the right time to discover what we have in common’ (Brown 2007: 1, 5 (my italics)). If historicizing stopped, if thinking in commonplace terms stopped: that would be revolutionary. It probably would stop if politicians and historians alike did not keep insisting on the social necessity of historical knowledge as a political necessity for social, cultural or political identity (as in the case of the History and Policy website).7 It would stop if politicians and historians did not remorselessly reinforce the ideology of totalitarian democracy by insisting that the only place for people to exist is the historical places they have in common. As a result, they make historicized thinking, as inactive and commonplace, both politically coercive and economically indispensable. That’s to say, they make it economically indispensable because it is politically coercive. For political governance under conditions of totalitarian capitalism, history is the most effective instrument of public policy.

2.2. History and public policy Nostalgia for the past, the longing for some temporally stabilized place, is stimulated by the ultra-fast tempo of postmodern living. The demand for palliative, ancestral remedies is generated by the neo-liberal drive for economic modernization. Its collaboration with a heritage industry only too keen to supply them proves to be a lucrative enterprise. Since totalitarian capitalism countenances no values outside economic values, even nostalgia delivers profit. It just needs re-functioning ideologically as an instrument of social alignment. This takes several forms: (a) Socio-economic integration. The past can be instrumentalized: history-focussed behaviour, as a form of economic value, makes history a powerful socio-economic agent on an everyday level. It insinuates it into the grain and texture of everyday reality, the present social and cultural environment. It facilitates control of the social mass by means of appropriating, dumbing down, and popularizing knowledge already known, the readily available same old thing that once sustained liberal bourgeois culture (cf. Barthes 1984: 110–111). As Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in the Blair Labour government, points out, ‘the historic environment is distinctive’ because ‘we do not have to seek it out. It is constantly before us as we go about our daily lives’ (Jowell 2005: 9). There’s no-one without some stake in it, everyone already, in a general sense, owns some part of it, it requires little effort to take part in it—as history-focussed behaviour, as a widespread social phenomenon, confi rms. It’s not surprising that, since admission charges were removed in 2001, those museums and galleries that had charged for admission saw a 75% increase in visitors (i.e. more than 5 million extra visits) (NMDC 2006: Part II). So it’s also not surprising, that what has value for the public, has, within the all-embracing economy of values, a quantifi able ‘public value’ (cf. Jowell 2006). In fact, because the historical heritage is


21

so heterogeneous, economic value becomes the only way of gauging its public value, since the more numerous and historically heterogeneous the objects and interests are to be evaluated, the more clearly money with its own consistent value emerges as their common denominator (cf. Simmel 1989a: 64). Construed as ‘public value’, history here too works as a referential simulation of capital. What historicizes everyday social reality is the immediate economic value of history-focussed behaviour. In reports emerging from government and, toeing the government line, from the institutions that conserve and manage the national public heritage (e.g. The National Trust, English Heritage, the National Museum Directors’ Conference (NMDC), the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA)), it figures as a hitherto relatively unexploited resource. A family (two children, parents and grandparent) visiting a museum, an art gallery, going to a children’s show and hearing a concert will probably spend in a day in London £174 (but in New York £227–87, in Paris £180-21, in Berlin £193-86 (NMDC 2006: Part II)). Estimated on an annual basis in terms of visitor numbers and income, there are ‘42 million visits each year to major museums and galleries’: in other words, ‘43 per cent of the population attended a museum or gallery at least once during the past year’ (compared to 41 per cent of the population ‘interested’ in football). To the museums and galleries affiliated to the NMDC ‘selfgenerated income has ranged as high as £200 million a year, including £100 million in donations and sponsorship, over £100 million in trading income and some £20 million in ticket sales’. The annual turnover of the whole cultural industries sector, including museums and galleries, is estimated to exceed £900 million; but, ‘if even very modest assumptions are made about the related economic activity (international visitors, regeneration expenditure and so on) are added to this total, the figure would exceed £1 billion’. Broadly speaking, ‘£1 in every £1000 in the UK economy can be directly related to the museums and galleries sector’ (Travers 2006: 8, 15, 35). In permitting the commercialization of historical interests, historyfocussed behaviour also evidently works for other reasons,—for the neoliberal economic agenda. Ideologically speaking, museums and galleries have to present themselves in economic, performative terms, as a way of ‘assessing their place within the wider social and economic framework of society’ (Travers & Glaister 2004: 4). They need to, particularly to make a case for receiving subsidies from central government for the costly work of looking after their collections, for ensuring they remain attractive to the present public, and to ‘maintain their integrity for the future’ (Travers & Glaister 2004: 12). They cannot help doing so, because, ‘as significant centres of economic activity within their local community’, they always have been primarily socio-economic agencies, generating ‘jobs, spending power and a more general sense of well-being’. With ‘an annual turnover that dwarfs most locally-based companies’, they, therefore, ‘undoubtedly think of themselves as businesses’ (Travers & Glaister 2004: 16).

22


History pays, because anyone can buy into it. As a socio-economic ‘catalyst’ it keeps history-focussed behaviour aligned with economic priorities. One example is the concept of the ‘heritage dividend’. It is predicated on heritage funding acting ‘as a catalyst for further public and private investment’, since ‘investment in the built heritage in areas of social and economic deprivation makes a strong contribution to economic regeneration and the creation of new opportunities for local people’ (English Heritage 2002: 8). The Heritage Economic Regeneration Scheme launched in 1999 is ‘English Heritage’s primary area-based funding programme’. In 1999–2002 its total funding came to £29,614,850. The Scheme confi rms that both history (commodified as heritage) and history-focussed behaviour (the past as a recognized public value) fit in with a modernising, post-industrial economy. English Heritage calculates that £10,000 of its funding achieves ‘leverage’ from public sector matchfunding of between £5,000 and £192,474 and ‘additional private sector investment ranging from £828 up to £65,440’ (English Heritage 2002: 12). As the case-studies presented in the report show, the Scheme focuses on the ordinary environment of everyday life, on ‘commercial and mixed use areas, in recognition that it is these areas which most overtly combine heritage importance, repair need and economic malaise’ (English Heritage 2002: 8). It covers places spread across the English regions and includes ‘seaside resorts, market towns, suburbs, district shopping centres and inner city areas’. It thus contributes ‘significantly and effectively to delivering the government’s urban agenda of positive brownfield development, the re-use of existing buildings, the delivery of mixed use/mixed tenure housing and high quality public spaces and community cohesion, all of which ensure sustainability’ (English Heritage 2002: 3). No wonder everyday reality becomes historicized and history-focussed behaviour reinforced: if economic factors (with their historicizing potential) sustain the museum, the museum (as conservational practice with its own historicizing effects) sustains the socio-economic environment. As Sir Neil Cossons, Chairman of English Heritage, points out: ‘[ . . . ] above all, conservation-led regeneration works because people like it and popularity brings prosperity. People like living in familiar places that have character and distinctiveness. Nearly all the most prosperous and desirable areas, the places where people most want to live, work and visit, are those areas where the historic environment is a dominant influence’ (English Heritage 2002: 7 (my italics)). Conversely, the report insists: ‘By investing in the physical fabric of towns and villages—the buildings and the public spaces between them—we “pump prime” wider regeneration initiatives and, together, improve business confidence, give pride to local communities and strengthen the sense of place which makes the historic environment so popular’ (English Heritage 2002: 3 (my italics)). The ‘heritage dividend’ historicizes the everyday world not just “subjectively”, through historicized consciousness, or “objectively”, through historicizing economic change alone, but through these two tendencies automatically mirroring each other


23

[illusio]. The coercive, totalitarian ideology betrays itself in the self-mirroring propositions [illusio] it employs. Just reflect a moment: the historicizing change then, in economic terms (history [rg]), that ruined an area is the same historicizing change now, done up as conservation (history [crg]), that regenerates it; as a socio-economic agency, history [rg] lets nothing with a ‘distinctive character’ emerge that isn’t already ‘familiar’ (‘commonplace’), that hasn’t already been historicized (history [crg]); hence, history is ‘dominant’ only because history-focussed behaviour is already socially popular,—though it wouldn’t be popular, were it not for an already historicized social reality and the concomitant historicized consciousness reinforcing it. History exerts its influence on everyday life by thus double-coding already historical (derelict) reality as its own (regenerated) historicized simulacrum [illusio]. The socio-economic impetus to recast reality in its historicized self-image, is reinforced through totalitarian capitalism being, in its own self-interest, an illusion-generating system. Money, as Marx asserted, is the ‘means and capacity to transform representation into reality and reality into a mere representation’ (Marx 1981a: 635). It contains within itself ‘the entire spectrum of economic life’: it concentrates in a single point ‘the results and possibilities of countless functions’ and yet can be diverted into producing ‘countless effects’ (Simmel 1989b: 291–292). It has transformative potential, particularly oneiric potential: it stimulates dreams,—of how to get it, of then what to do with it. In marketing the chance to dream, capitalism crystallizes into gambling, its ideal-typical ludic form [illusio].8 Therefore, that illusions generated by ‘casino capitalism’ should be simulated in the museum display or the regenerated city quarter, seems appropriate when, be it through English Heritage or the NMDC, the Heritage Lottery Fund is fi nancing it.9 For museums and galleries within the NMDC Lottery funding has been ‘significant’. ‘In the early years [ . . . ], from 1997–98 to 1999-2000, between £48 million and £65 million was provided in each year’; since 2000–2001, however, ‘the total has slowed to £20 to £30 million a year’ (Travers 2006: 25). Dependent on the ludic nature of economic activity, the regeneration of derelict neighbourhoods assumes an aura of illusoriness fostered by the risks, chances, and contingencies the market plays with. Driven by neo-liberal ideology, this historicized double coding of everyday life [illusio] keeps reproducing the culture of illusion, the very culture of reproduction, in which our days successively expire. History thus enforces totalitarian capitalism. Historicization, double coding historical dereliction as heritage, promotes capitalism; capitalism, producing the always latest thing and ruining everything else, historicizes (cf. Davies 2006a: 4, 218–219, 224–230). Museums and galleries, as “culture industries”, help historicize reality not just by institutionalizing the past [illusio], but by fostering the ludic activity, the “creativity” essential to the latest imperatives of the mercurial, postmodern economy: ‘The impact of the NMDC sector on business and industry rests on its capacity to nurture

24


talent, inspire creative practice, provide opportunities for experimental work and promote the industries through imaginative engagement with their audiences’ (NMDC 2004: 30). They see themselves as belonging in the “creative” economy along with other creative industries, often sharing the same workforces. So (e.g.) ‘a student visiting a fine art gallery may find inspiration for a stage design or fabric. A scientist at a natural history museum may work on the museum’s holdings in ways that advance modern scientific understanding’ (Travers & Glaister 2004: 29). Thus their ‘collections and the ideas they prompt’ are ‘the key resource’: historical culture, in other words, is the inexhaustible “raw material” of the post-industrial economy (NMDC 2004: 2). Hence, ‘one of the clearest examples of this inter-relation between culture and industry’ is the V&A’s ‘key role in raising the profile and interest in contemporary fashion’ (NMDC 2004: 30). For the National Museum Directors’ Conference it is, therefore, axiomatic: ‘Museums and galleries offer a major internationally traded service (by generating exports) while also underpinning the creativity upon which future high value added economic activity is likely to be based. Thus the sub-sector will help in the development of new services, products, and even manufactured goods’ (Travers 2006: 7). They no longer regard themselves as just ‘repositories of exhibits’, now that ‘their holdings and activities also [ . . . ] encourage people to think differently, to take and transmit ideas, and to generate new things based on the creativity of the past’ (Travers & Glaister 2004: 28–29 (my italics)). Once, ‘traditionally offering the public [ . . . ] an exclusive version of art, culture, or science’, hence making ‘visits to museums [ . . . ] often serious, exclusive or even gloomy experiences’, they ‘had little to offer the “real world”’, they had become, in their own estimation, ‘outdated’, not postmodern enough, in a postmodern economy (NMDC 2004: 2). That museums foster innovation instead, that the same old thing sustains the latest new thing, is the hallmark of an already historicized world. Now, not least, museums and galleries have historicized themselves. With capitalism historical consciousness wakes up to itself: the now historicized world becomes historically hyperconscious. Capitalism needs to generate new needs, produce new commodities, and discover new resources. In historical culture, with its historicized consciousness and its historyfocussed behaviour, capitalism fi nally achieves its own self-realization. In the postmodern, neo-liberal economy history has a variety of functions,— as the cynosure of unquenchable, nostalgic desire; as a plentiful resource like oil, coal, gas, or minerals to be refi ned by academic scholarship for ideological and economic exploitation; as a ‘valuable resource for managers and policy makers’ exploited by (e.g.) the consultancy History Associates Incorporated with regard to ‘historical research and writing, information resources management, historical research for litigation, and international services to help clients explore, preserve, present, and utilize the past’; as a repository of commodity designs and seductive images through which (as in media, film, and literature) dominant economic force masquerades


25

as consumer-choice.10 But, more importantly than all this, the postmodern economy, by reinforcing historicized reality, reinforces capitalism itself. Heritage, as cultural wealth, used to be the historical form of affi rmative culture, a symbolic compensation for the unequal social distribution of material wealth (cf. Marcuse 1973: 66). Under totalitarian capitalism this function itself becomes historicized. Heritage, let alone historical culture in general, has a public value because in a historicized society people value it, because a historicized society coerces people into valuing it, because it can be aligned with economic value as such. Thus, a historicized world doesn’t just convert historical-cultural values into socio-economic values; rather it defi nes socio-economic values themselves as historical-cultural values. (b) Socio-political integration. Defi ned by the concept of public value as an economic resource, history-focussed behaviour integrates personal values with the economic values of post-industrial capitalism. It thereby also assimilates these values to the political values of neo-liberal society. The political and economic values of history-focussed behaviour thus reinforce each other. The public value that makes it a valuable economic resource also makes it an effective instrument of governance. Statements from government, cultural institutions, the heritage industry, and a whole host of academic advisors in universities, research councils, and thinktanks all concur: as a mass public phenomenon, hence as a public value, history-focussed behaviour essentially binds political and economic values together. The political and economic dynamics of neo-liberalism create history [crg] as the dominant value. Self-interest requires them to promote history-focussed behaviour [illusio], inculcate historicized thinking, and, above all, thereby historicize the world. The political alignment [Gleichschaltung] of individual consciousness is already presupposed in the jargon of heritage management,—as confi rmed (e.g.) by Demonstrating the Public Value of Heritage, the result of collaboration between Accenture, the global business consultants, and the National Trust.11 Here it is axiomatic: ‘Heritage is acknowledged to make a valuable contribution to society through its contribution to national identity and well-being as well as for its intrinsic value and its role in delivering social and economic progress’ (The National Trust + Accenture 2006: 9). What brings out the public value of heritage, is ‘shareholder value—in which investment and management decisions are assessed according to their benefit to shareholders’. As the Trust’s Director of Policy and Strategy asserts, the concept of public value ‘presents a more rounded approach which starts by identifying the direct benefits to people both as consumers of heritage “goods” and as citizens’. It also provides a comprehensive framework, be it ‘for assessing the value for money of different kinds of investment and decisions, in terms of their overall benefit to the citizen’, be it ‘for demonstrating the contribution places rich in history [ . . . ] make to our collective quality of life.’ Its totalitarian scope embraces alike large-scale issues of principle, such as ‘the intrinsic value of heritage’; public social behaviour, i.e.: ‘the

26


subtle but important benefits of contact with heritage such as its ability to inspire and for people to think more about the world around them’ (which is, of course, the already historicized world); and the familiar texture of everyday life, ‘such as the contribution of heritage on people’s doorsteps’ (NT + Accenture 2006: 6). The ‘Accenture Public Service Value Model’ both ‘helps to defi ne a framework to optimise a set of outcomes, which are valued by citizens, within given resource restraints’ and ‘identifies some possible value drivers [ . . . ], which could assist decision making about how to optimise their delivery of public value’ (NT + Accenture 2006: 7). It enforces socio-political alignment by examining ‘the value public organisations deliver from the perspective of the citizen and provides a single indicative measure of value creation and delivery, by aggregating quantitative performance indicators with more subjective, qualitative indicators such as levels of customer relations’ (NT + Accenture 2006:13 (my italics)). Furthermore, the political alignment [Gleichschaltung] of individual consciousness is already presupposed in the discourse of neo-liberal cultural policy. In Better Places to Live, Tessa Jowell, the then Culture Secretary, asserts: ‘The historic environment and wider heritage contributes to a wide range of Government ambitions to cut crime, promote inclusion, improve educational achievement, but it is worth supporting in itself, for the way it can encourage people better to understand and engage with their history and their community, and help slay that poverty of aspiration which holds so many people back from fulfi lling their potential’ (Jowell 2005: 23–24). Clearly, neo-liberal government has no need to legislate for an egalitarian society, a strategy neo-liberal economics anyway excludes, when it can exploit history-focussed behaviour to reconcile public attitudes to the economic injustices that prevail, especially when demonstrably these have always—historically—prevailed. They’re quite deceitful, these allusions to Mill and to Ruskin, to the nineteenth-century liberal ideal that ‘complex cultural activity [ . . . ] is at the heart of what it means to be a fully developed human being’ or that cultural enterprise is important not just ‘because of the wealth it generates’, but ‘also if it can help with education, with keeping society stable’ (Jowell 2004a: 7, 9). Government support for historical culture pays off only because it is really an investment in ‘personal social capital’, a means of enhancing overall economic performativity (Jowell 2004a: 16; 2004b: 20; Travers 2006: 7). This is the policy objective museums and galleries implement in return for government funding. The ‘improved quality of life’, the social inclusion of marginalized groups, and the ‘intellectual capacity building’ that enable individuals to ‘improve [their] employability and self-confidence’, that allegedly result from the historicized experiences they offer, all promote the government’s goal ‘of making the UK the world’s creative hub’, based on the increasing importance of the country’s ‘key cultural and “weightless” assets’ (Travers 2006, 12–13). In particular, therefore, the political alignment of individual consciousness is already presumed in the discourse of education. Education as a


27

means of social amelioration is a classical liberal ideal. However, in its cynical, neo-liberal form it turns nefarious. To guarantee that history-focussed behaviour will enforce the economic and political imperatives of totalitarian capitalism, it needs imprinting on childhood. A conspicuous example is the Renaissance in the Regions programme that, under the motto of ‘museums for changing lives’, ‘provides central government funding to museums in the regions’ to enable them to carry out the social eugenic objectives of neo-liberal cultural policy (Hooper-Greenhill, et al. 2006: 1). As a recent report shows, 86% of teachers it consulted use museums as a teaching resource and the number of school aged children using museums increased by 40% between 2003 and 2005 (Hooper-Greenhill, et al. 2006: 83, 114). Both teachers and pupils express high levels of satisfaction (80%–90+%) with the pedagogical experience, even though the children’s responses were predictably self-determining, given that they were sought only in terms of the Generic Learning Outcomes (knowledge, creativity, values, skills, behaviour) promoting the government’s social-eugenic objectives the museum visit was anyway meant to enhance (Hooper-Greenhill, et al. 2006: 160). But, most conspicuously, the report shows that museums ‘are working with a disproportionately high level of schools located in areas of high deprivation where children may be at risk of social exclusion’: e.g. ‘32% of the visits were made by schools located in the 20% most deprived SOAs in England’, as though the ‘inclusive museum experience’ could really, materially, remedy socio-economic discrimination (HooperGreenhill, et al. 2006: 83–84).12 Thus this and the other reports mentioned here leave the distinct impression that, with their government-sponsored educational mission, museums ultimately infantilize public attitudes. Given that ‘museums underpin civil society’, given too their ‘mission [ . . . ] to take culture and creativity deep into every community’ to promote social and economic well-being, they cannot help placing the public under their tutelage (Travers 2006: 73; NMDC 2006: 3). They invite everyone to subordinate themselves to their historicized conception of reality, to place their lives and aspirations in the hands of motley policy and strategy directors, marketing directors, public relations officers, curators, academic experts, information technicians, and resource managers. Historicized culture thus proves inimical to enlightenment and autonomy: museums are just another coercive public agency which (as Kant remarked) ‘does our thinking for us’ (cf. Kant 1977b: 53).

2.3. History as an instrument of neo-liberal ideology13 The neo-liberal strategy for enforcing history-focussed behaviour and historicized consciousness is a cynical version of the classical ideal of a liberal education (NMDC 2006: 3). The ‘nourishing’, unforced encounter with ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world’ that was meant to educate for autonomy, has become the enforced assimilation of

28 Imprisoned by History what most have thought and known, as a means of inducing conformity (cf. Arnold 1971: 70). In the historicized, neo-liberal world, history is the ideology: history is ideology,—and for these reasons (Travers 2006: 73; NMDC 2006: 10). (a) For political and economic authorities with totalitarian aspirations, the virtue of heritage derives from the virtue of history, that of having no virtue so that it can mean as much as anyone anytime wants it to mean, so that it can mean anything to anyone. As the then Culture Secretary points out: ‘“Heritage” is a wide concept which embraces the historic environment both man-made and natural, landscapes and buried archaeology, parks and open spaces, museum and archive collections, artefacts and works of art, and even our traditions, customs and languages. Everything, in fact, from Routemaster buses to The Last Night of the Proms’. It implements history as ideology precisely because its definition ‘can be so elastic as to lose focus’ (Jowell 2005:10). To see this, just discard the simplistic notion that ideological history is falsified history (e.g. that suppresses crucial facts, tampers with evidence, or denies the past). Ideological history need not falsify: it just needs to amplify and atomize itself. It needs merely to generate beyond the basic stock of commonly received history [crg] an immense profusion of promiscuous meanings that confuses and diffuses its overall sense. Thus it makes history redundant as an autonomous form of knowledge, yet potent as an effective form of persuasion. To see this, just cancel the distinction between “public history” and academic history with its professional codes that allegedly prevent ideological abuse. The confusing profusion of promiscuous meanings is diffused by none other than highly trained, academic experts, scholarly administrators, information engineers, and resource managers, each active in their own highly specialized field. In their social function museums and galleries are there to assimilate specialized (so-called value-free) academic interests to the ideological agenda. They are explicitly, simultaneously, ‘centres of scholarship and curatorial expertise’, ‘teaching institutions and mass entertainments’, and, not least ‘moderators of scientific knowledge and agents for social change’. Their business is nothing other than to align ‘history and scholarship’ with ‘the future, creativity, leisure and social cohesion’ (Travers 2006: 8). For the general public in its everyday life they are the most accessible point of contact with history culture. They ‘provide a gateway between “high culture” and people’s day-to-day lives’ (Travers & Glaister 2004: 42) They entice it into a comprehensive, complex information technology that comprises ‘everything’, from the most routine to the most esoteric of topics, and projects itself as the ‘real thing’ [illusio]. They are thus microcosms of the already historicized world, history’s detention-centres: the more beguiling they make the past, the more they take people in, the more people they take in. As a means of aligning individual with social consciousness, defi ned in terms of learning objectives and performance targets, and presented as achieving personal well-being through social inclusion, history is geared to


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delivering the state’s eugenic goals. With history meaning something for everyone, having something for everyone to identify with, government officials, heritage managers, and academic experts have at their disposal the perfect means for chaining personal identity to the socio-economic apparatus. Their seductive reassurances may well encourage history-focussed behaviour. They may well affi rm that ‘we identify closely with places where we came from, where we live, and where we visit’, that historic places form part of people’s lives, that heritage sustains ‘a sense of community, citizenship and public value’, or that ‘celebrating our plural inheritances [ . . . ] says vital things about what sort of inclusive, generous, and progressive society we hope to have in this country in the 21st century’ (Jowell 2005: 12, 13, 17). They are, though, just a front for the state’s totally coercive self-interest: ‘[ . . . ] in this rapidly changing world, we need a sense of belonging, a sense of our Britishness, more than ever before. Our historic and built environment reminds us of the ties that bind, that root us in our own place and time. [ . . . ] it contributes to our sense of identity because it represents what we, as communities, have contributed both economically and culturally to Britain in the 21st century,’ says the Culture Secretary, who goes on to conclude: ‘We need a strong sense of national purpose which is based on a clear sense of national identity. I am convinced that our historic and built environment can help in this’ (Jowell 2005:10–11 (my italics)). With its economic and political ideals thus embedded ‘in the movement of history as such’, specifically in the social movement of historical knowledge, the neo-liberal state reveals its distinctly totalitarian character (cf. Arendt 2005: 209). Far from being ‘generous’, this political vision has people, bound and tied, where they belong. It employs the jargon of the ‘administered world’, this ‘striated space’ of managerial regulation (cf. Adorno 1979: 122ff.; cf. Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 479ff). Nothing moves except along the preset lines of programmes, schemes, frameworks, targets, or objectives (cf. the references to ‘value drivers’, ‘optimized delivery’, ‘benchmark performance’, ‘indicative measures’, ‘sector outputs’, ‘cost effectiveness score’, ‘Generic Learning Outcomes’, ‘Phase 1 and Phase 2 Hubs’, ‘Super Output Areas’, ‘Indices of Multiple Deprivation’, etc.). Most conspicuously, it evinces a specific characteristic of historicized and historicizing mentality: its predilection for catachresis, for a figure of thought and expression that artificially binds together terms by defi nition incompatible, such as “hard”, technical management procedures and “soft” psychologistic or personal values. So history involves ‘the exploration of human feeling in all its magnificence [ . . . ] to be done by scholarly moles and meticulous mice who [ . . . ] must professionally be bureaucratic managers of information’ (Vincent 1996: 15–16); it is ‘a human activity carried out by an organized corps of fallible human beings, acting, however, in accordance with strict methods and principles’ (Marwick 2001: 28; cf. Davies 2006a: 159 (my italics)). Similarly, while being scrupulous about the precision of their

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data and methodologies, the reports consulted simply accept at face-value vague, ‘elastic’ terms such as “history”, “heritage”, “context”, or “identity” as apparently self-evident and unproblematic. So the National Trust / Accenture report concludes: ‘Is support targeted at heritage which is of high historical and cultural significance but receives low visitor numbers? Or is support targeted at heritage which is of comparably low historical and cultural significance but receives high visitor numbers?’ (NT + Accenture 2006: 24); the Department for Culture Media and Sport ‘examines [ . . . ] legislative, policy and funding regimes [ . . . ] to ensure that these regimes preserve the best of our past’ (DCMS 2001: 33 ); Tessa Jowell affi rms: ‘it is the job of politicians and government to provide this infrastructure, the hardwiring if you like, where our identity is played out’ (Jowell 2006: 3); because of ‘the demands of accountability’ NMDC members are ‘put under pressure [ . . . ] to fi nd ways of translating the magic of creativity and innovation into a comprehensible analysis’ (Travers & Glaister 2004: 32 (my italics in each case)). The principle of its coercive rhetoric, catachresis underpins the ideological exploitation of history-focussed behaviour. The neo-liberal sentiment that sees public value in historicized culture transmits a bureaucratic, carceral mentality. (b) In neo-liberal culture, the culture of totalitarian capitalism, history operates ideologically like a narcotic. Sometimes it works as a stimulant to get people hooked on the past, to make them “past dependent”, to keep them craving for a history fi x. Sometimes it offers a sedative, anaesthetizing people to social injustices, accustoming them to them as historical facts, lulling them into a sense of their natural inevitability. In neo-liberal culture history must work ideologically. For all its façade of target-driven performativity, neo-liberal society is perpetually terrified by dysfunctionality, constantly haunted by despondency [anomie], the fate to which it succumbs, should the deceptiveness and dishonesty of its eugenic ideals be exposed,—should it itself be exposed for what it is, a desolate place, nothing but heterogeneous spheres of fact and value, conglomerates of atomized individuals and disparate communities, regulated by bureaucratic administration to optimize economic performance as a self-vindicating end in itself (Durkheim 2002: 284–288). So fragmented is neo-liberal society ‘that the individuals amongst whom social labour is divided might just as well form so many distinct, even antagonistic species’. ‘They even appear to conspire to distance themselves as much as possible from each other,’ so Durkheim observes. ‘What resemblance exists between the brain that thinks and the stomach that digests?’ he asks, and continues: ‘In the same way, what does the poet lost in his dream have in common with a scientist devoted to his research, the worker who spends his life fashioning pin-heads, the labourer pushing his wheelbarrow, the shop-keeper behind his counter?’ (Durkheim 1998: 246). Should these examples from the industrialized nineteenth-century seem dated, the contemporary, globalized economy has produced now (what


31

The Sunday Times called) the ‘New Victorians’. These are the ‘entrepreneurs and chief executives [ . . . ] the bankers, brokers, hedge fund managers, private equity players and lawyers who foster and feed off the giant deals of today’s global market’, those whose assets are in the tens and hundreds of millions of pounds, those (in other words) who have ‘the enormous wealth of the imperial age’ but are somewhat lacking in ‘the moral conscience and sense of duty that drove the 19th century tycoons to help the poor’ (Woods 2007: 2, 1). The result is (as public surveys show): 69% of those surveyed believe the gap between the highest earners and average earners is too high; ‘social mobility has declined over the last 30 years and in Britain is the lowest for any advanced country for which data is available’; and differentials in life-expectancy (e.g. between a labourer in Glasgow and a retired banker in the south-east) still parallel those obtaining in Victorian times (Woods 2007: 2). In these circumstances neo-liberal ideology fi nds history indispensable for promoting social inclusion and synthetic identity. As Durkheim points out, the more vast and differentiated a society becomes, the more ‘general ideas necessarily appear and become predominant’ (Durkheim 1998: 275). Totally comprehensive, history is the most general social idea possible. Hence, in thereby representing the ‘general interest’, it’s also the most socially coercive idea possible. What confi rms history’s ideological function is the impression left by the reports discussed earlier: their discursive uniformity that not just advocates social indoctrination, but betrays their authors’ and sponsors’ own self-indoctrination. Neo-liberal society simply would not cohere without the postmodern relativization of all values resulting from historicized thinking and history-focussed behaviour. History symbolically anaesthetizes the apprehension it itself induces in this, the latest historical phase of the historicized world. Symbolically, but not materially: though meant to compensate (as common values) for the social differences capital creates, history and capital ultimately mirror each other. Driven by economic production, history produced these differences in the fi rst place. For their part, historicized consciousness and history-focussed behaviour inevitably reinforce them: they anaesthetize dissent. So, in establishing the historical parallel, the ‘New Victorians’ article minimizes the historically parallel injustice. Vindicating the possession of wealth through the charitable behaviour that does exist, it quotes ‘a member of a top US bank in London’ advocating the need ‘to create a more virtuous circle’ of public giving,—which its conclusion only, historicizingly, affi rms: ‘Virtue? That sounds rather Victorian’ (Woods 2007: 2). To historicized consciousness, the latest thing is always the same as the same old thing. (c) Is it then surprising that museums see themselves, and are seen by government, as a political and economic panacea, ‘as part of the essential infrastructure in new and existing communities’, promoting social cohesion by ‘encouraging more active citizenship and in contributing to contemporary debates about community and identity’ (The National Trust

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2006: 7)? The socially eugenic intention was already implicit in the classical ideal of liberal culture. As Arnold remarked, culture ‘does not try to teach down to the level of the inferior classes [ . . . ]. It seeks to do away with classes [ . . . ]. This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality’ (Arnold 1971: 70). In principle liberal education aims to equip people with knowledge of the rules of ‘this mighty game’ of life, with the knowledge of the laws of Nature which include ‘not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways’ (Huxley 1905: 83). Yet the ideal is not unambiguous. Its results still come couched in industrialized, instrumental terms: the recipient of a liberal education is someone ‘whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind’ (Huxley 1905: 86). There’s nothing in it to prevent its current, cynical, neo-liberal variant from reducing it to merely training people in whatever skills happen to be required for whatever economic conditions historically prevail. A socially eugenic function animates both. What differentiates them is the way this function works. Classical liberal culture proposes a natural human egalitarianism in order to promote the full development of an individual’s aptitudes, even though this unrealizable goal still leaves the social class-system intact,— because it leaves the class-system intact. If the state is an historically evolved, historically self-conscious, hence historicized organism (according to Herbert Spencer), then ‘it is in the nature of those great and latest developed legislative bodies which distinguish the most advanced societies, to interpret and combine the wishes of all classes and localities, and to make laws in harmony with the general wants’ (my italics). That implies, therefore, ‘that we may describe the office of a Parliament as that of averaging the interests of the various classes in a community; and a good Parliament is one in which the parties answering to those respective interests are so balanced, that their united legislation allows to each class as much as consists with the claims of the rest’ (Spencer 1992: 429). By contrast, neo-liberal culture works cynically. It ignores both idealistic notions and material social differences, as long as culture is inclusive,—because it can enforce social and cultural programmes that make culture inclusive. Neo-liberal culture thus represents a highly sophisticated social control mechanism. In this historicized, hence heterogeneous society, its educational and cultural programmes have a direct bearing on the ‘social level’. Through cultural policies delivered by public institutions, government can defi ne the level of social homogenization, adjust the pitch of social aspiration and set permissible degrees of social self-differentiation. In both ideologies, however, the politics of “balance”, of social averaging, the affi rmation of a political common middle-ground is both determined by history and determines history. Evading any attempt to pursue social justice, the socially eugenic aims of ‘inclusion’, ‘cohesion’, and


33

‘stability’ resulting from history-focussed behaviour foster the illusion not so much of a society “levelled down” as of a society “evened out”, ‘averaged’. Evidently, the historicized world sees itself as historically coincident with an ‘age of equalization’ [Zeitalter des Ausgleichs] (cf. Scheler 1968: 97).14 As Scheler argues, in an ‘age of equalization’ social differences collapse, tendencies towards social differentiation fi nd their common social level. It produces a world with heterogeneous characteristics: a technologically based global cosmopolitanism that equalizes classes and nations; a resublimated culture that devalues intellectuality and provokes a hedonistic revolt of human nature against abstract cultural ideals; an equalization of gender differences; the cancellation of the distinction between knowledge and technical information; the unmasking of history’s logical forms as sources of ideological deception [Täuschungsquellen (illusio)] (cf. Scheler 1968: 97–114). Significantly, this ‘averaging out’ [Ausgleich] can occur only in a historicized world, as the ‘inevitable fate’ [unentrinnbares Schicksal] historicization represents. In a historicized world, heterogeneous as it is, fi nding some characteristic or specific ideal to cultivate is like ‘trying to grasp air’: ‘The world today is full of them, as though it were a bric-à-brac shop with antiques intending to renew the human species in all its various forms and styles’ (Scheler 1968: 97). Neo-liberal culture thus represents the ‘evened out’, ‘averaged’ social level in a historicized world,—a revolting, stingy culture that doesn’t so much destroy values as levels them down, diminishes them (cf. Barthes 1984: 272). Its ideological ideal is the cohesiveness of disciplined, identitary organizations, such as the religious community or the military. In such ‘artificial groups’ (so Freud contends) the ‘demand for equalization’ [Gleichheitsforderung] applies only to the individual members, not to the leader. All the individuals ‘suppose they are on the same level as each other’ [sollen einander gleich sein], as a pre-condition of being governed by a leader. Hence, ‘many similar individuals [viele Gleiche] identifying with each other and a single individual superior to them all’, is what makes the collective life of the social mass viable (Freud 1973: 60–61; §IX). The concept of a social level arises from the dialectical relationship between common identity and particular interests, between social integration and self-differentiation endemic in human social existence in general, let alone in historicized life in particular. But human beings can’t help being selfdifferentiating creatures [Der Mensch ist ein Unterschiedswesen] (Simmel 1989b: 137). The technologically regulated, bureaucratically administered social world that requires conformist personal performance still can’t help creating ipso facto a different, private world of imagination and desire (cf. Simmel 2000: 28–29). The purpose of neo-liberal culture is to fi nd ways of reconciling these alienating tendencies, of identifying commonplaces for people to identify with. As we have seen, state and culture industry alike fi nd real political and economic value in reconciling them, in redirecting divergent personal interests into common social objectives. In doing so,

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they inevitably resort to historical culture, not just because history is the ‘common denominator of all our sensibilities’, but also because the most broadly disseminated knowledge and values are by definition the oldest and the most commonly recognized (Ariès 1986: 58; Simmel 1989b: 204– 205). That’s to say: being the socially least differentiated objects, ideas, and values, they can be easily synthesized into common identities. As the then Culture Secretary remarks, ‘the historic environment [ . . . ] is a great equaliser too’ (Jowell 2005: 9 (my italics)). (By contrast, true novelty, as that ‘rare thing that differentiates itself from the mass of usual things’, is far less amenable (Simmel 1989b: 202)). Ultimately, in the constantly, self-historicizing culture of neo-liberalism, history-focussed behaviour not only seems “natural”, but also, as a mass phenomenon, is “naturally” selfenforcing. Feeling stimulated, the thrill of hands-on imitation, the immediate sensation of the ‘real thing’, empathetic identification with times past: these affective characteristics (as reported by teachers, children, and other museum visitors) express the nervous apprehension typical of historical hyper-consciousness in contact with the historical environment. In the collective excitement it induces, history-focussed behaviour reinforces itself, not only promoting social cohesion, but as something socially cohesive in itself. The indeterminacy of historical values here too proves crucial. History-focussed behaviour simply determines them for itself: whence the eclectic values heritage embraces. In making them the identical focus for a mass of particular, subjective interests, it creates and objectifies for itself its own historical objects (cf. Simmel 1989b: 220–221). In thus making history appear objective [illusio], it further substantiates the historicized world.

3. HISTORICIZED KNOWLEDGE: KNOWLEDGE IN RUINS Imprisoned by History might deconstruct historical knowledge, but not for history’s sake. Historians won’t want to exploit in their own interest, for their own benefit, its analysis of how history[crg] is put together as they, at least nominally, have done with the postmodern critique. They don’t need to. There would be no point. (There wasn’t where postmodernism is concerned: ‘history has risen to the postmodern challenge, and met it in productive collusion’ (Arnold 2007: 127).) For one reason: the historicizing mentality is totally absorbent. History might be where everything happens, including its postmodernist critique, but nothing happens to it. Whatever happens to it in history [rg], historical knowledge remains self-identical. The more it expands its scope, treats other humanities disciplines as ancillary, follows new theory-trends, adopts new information-technologies: the more it enhances itself,—the more it becomes what it was already like. Its identitary logic works in its own self-interest. For another: the historicized world perpetuates itself. Its self-perpetuation is the problem. The historicizing mentality has self-confi rmation built in. It commutes forms of invalidation


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such as error, revisionism, infeasibility, and contradiction to stages in the historiographical process. They become filtration procedures indispensable for the distillation of “historical truth”. This in-built proof against contradiction ensures history perpetuates itself. But in being impervious to contradiction, it is fraudulent [illusio]. That goes for the fraud historicization perpetrates, particularly in its own defence. Inevitably it appeals to the fact that the past ‘really happened’: what else could it appeal to (Evans 1997: 253)? But it is fraudulent to construe this past as somehow still existing for itself, as though independent of history[crg], as a reason for needing it to access it. This defence rests on an epistemological fallacy. It makes reality viciously bifurcate into immediate experience and entities beyond immediate experience as its immediate cause. It also makes the entities beyond experience (i.e. the past that objectively happened) more real than immediate experience. In fact, the converse holds. The past that actually happened persists in social consciousness only as an imaginary object [illusio], the product of an extensive abstraction from the present prehension [aesthesis] of the historical material currently available.15 Further still, history’s absorbent, self-perpetuating tendencies render it defenceless against any critique of its self-centredness. In defending itself history can’t help confi rming its identitary thinking and coercive thought-style, but also the time-sickness they induce: (3.1) the apprehension of redundancy, (3.2) the recourse to fundamentalism, (3.3) a culture of despondency.

3.1. The redundancy of the humanities This is what history, the basic humanities discipline, symptomatically represents, where history-focussed behaviour eventually leads. Where historical knowledge socially equalizes and aligns [Ausgleich; Gleichschaltung], it changes nothing, it merely affi rms. Though still produced more than ever, it reinforces only history itself, the same old thing: it creates redundancy. It creates redundancy in two, ultimately related respects: (i) superfluity; and, as though it were its reverse-side, (ii) meaningful order. (i) As a dominant signifier, producing the same old thing, in affi rming the same old thing, history [crg] ensures that nothing else is significant: its own discursive order renders critical differentiation, the ‘entertainment of the alternative’, purposeless and unachievable (cf. Whitehead 1968: 26). So, in a historicized world it just goes to waste (Deleuze &Guattari 2004: 101). Further, in its dominance, hence without restriction, producing ever more of the same old thing, in atomizing and amplifying itself, it can’t help going to waste itself. (ii) Conversely, redundancy, the recurrent imposition of the same, hence as a restraint on novelty, a limitation on randomness, is essential in communication: ‘the essence and raison d’être of communication is the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information, and /or the reduction of the random by “restraint”’. That’s to say, the ‘loss of information’ in biological systems as well as in ‘systems of

36


organization, differentiation, and communication’ shows that ‘in all such systems, redundancy is a major and necessary source of stability, predictability, and integration’ (Bateson 2000: 131–134, 393). Communication, therefore, makes sense because it contains repeated features that do not signify; noise makes no sense because it contains all kinds of features that do nothing but signify. The most successful communication contains the most redundancy since it is encoded to be stable and unambiguous, such as a command or an order; the least successful communication would be a poem with its intensity of signifi cation on many different levels (verbal, formal, structural, thematic, etc.) that requires careful, often protracted interpretation. History [crg] produces redundancy in both respects for itself and, being their paradigmatic science, for the humanities as well. In sense (ii): as a correctional, affi rmative discourse aligned with the prestige of the state, enforcing the political and economic coordination of society through history-focussed behaviour, and in assimilating reality to its rational order by means of categorical coordinators, historical discourse as an ordering discourse predicated on sufficient reason must be constructed on redundancy, on the reduction or loss of information. It is evinced in one of its most characteristic features (as the argument will subsequently show): that its maximum persuasive force actually requires a minimum of cognitive value or informational substance (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 100). Certainly, through specialization, through its endless capacity to invent topics for scholastic treatment, it can atomize or amplify itself as means of compensating for its low cognitive value. But this heterogeneity assumes uniform contours [cf. Gleichförmigkeit] through its same old, standardized encoding: the recurrent, self-reiterating patterns imposed by categorical coordinators (processes, traditions, causes, contexts, etc.), underpinned by the principles of identity and sufficient reason, that articulate its historical sense and meaning. Consequently, bound to the logic of its own, self-compensating overproduction (cf. sense [i]), historicization produces redundancy through superfluous significances. It thus actually subverts cognitive value as such. The exponential growth of information that characterizes contemporary knowledge suggests ‘that it becomes easier to rediscover a fact rather than to fi nd out whether somebody else has already discovered or described it’. So what the researcher hails as a novel discovery may well have already been established decades previously, but then forgotten. Hence, ‘“this rediscovery phenomenon” may well become one of the major factors limiting the rate of the advance of science’ (Waddington 1977: 33). In the excluded alternatives and the superfluity of historical production as well as in the loss of information through the imposition of order, redundancy defi nes the function of history [crg] in a historicized world. In both of these respects together, it forms the backdrop to the recourse to fundamentalist certainties and the mood of despondency, the psychopathology that afflicts the historicized world.


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(a) The very quest for historical identities generates redundancy. To identify issues, to explain why things were the way they were, to represent them as they actually were, as the principle of history-focussed behaviour, is (as Simmel points out) a procedure of atomization. The bid to recapture the vital totality of past life by accumulating ever more detailed, specialized knowledge proves chimerical [cf. illusio]. Usually it gets pushed too far. As it crosses the ‘fragmentation threshold’ [Schwelle der Zerkleinerung] the individual character of a historical event evaporates, leaving behind merely its residue, a crust of gestures and motives, each of which is, in terms of behaviour and experience, no more than a very ordinary, ‘frequent occurrence’ [häufiges Vorkommnis] (Simmel 2003: 301–303). History may well be the repository of the total self-knowledge of humanity, but evidently, in its inevitably atomized form, this total knowledge exceeds what any one person, any one historian, can conceive: it creates for itself knowledge it cannot adequately know,—ultimately a historical unconscious into which this excess recedes. As a result, historians rely on ‘instinctive rightness’, a hunch, an act of faith based on their experience and familiarity with the primary materials (Elton 1969: 95; cf. Davies 2006a: 161–162). That they can rely on familiar experience just confirms the underlying presence of redundancy, of the same old ‘frequent occurrences’ of behaviour history ultimately boils down to. That history [rg/ crg] thus produces more than can naturally be conceived is the hallmark of a historicized world. The historicized world is a world in which the humanities are redundant. Its sheer quantities of heterogeneous contingencies along with the same old ‘frequent occurrences’ have long since overwhelmed the ‘metaphysical principle of the unity of mankind’ they were founded on (cf. Simmel 1989b: 127). Once revealed as redundant, the humanities’ function changes, as does the historians’ function, the key paradigm of history-focussed behaviour. The humanities’ function now proves illusory. Even before the postmodern ethos of performativity had cleared the last remnants out, the pretensions of a liberal education had been ‘found out’. ‘Disinterested, intellectual appreciation’ of the ‘best knowledge and thought of the time’ proved to be a ‘psychological error’, because it was an ideal beyond human reach (Whitehead 1967a: 47; cf. Arnold 1971: 70). What remains is the historicized world, is history circulating the same old, redundant thing, knowledge already known, history, therefore, the corner-stone of a ‘learned world [that] tends to offer [ . . . ] one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information’, its second-handedness ‘the secret of its mediocrity’ (Whitehead 1967a: 51). The conventional discourse of explanation and reflection proves so intellectually absorbent that it easily accommodates the most contradictory terms: it makes them sound all the same. It also sustains a gratuitous, specialized technicism and, along with that, an information culture that disables reflective judgement. It further affi rms the humanities’ orthodox function as affi rmative ideology, as quasi-religious dogma. Finally, it shows

38 Imprisoned by History that their disciplinary and interdisciplinary methodologies, by which their advocates set so much store, just follow the going trend,—that academic practice is a cast-iron alibi for whatever you fancy. The redundancy of the humanities thus evinces a characteristic psychopathology, a symptomatic time-sickness: it causes the anomie suffusing the historicized world. (b) Describing the humanities as redundant certainly implies its everyday sense of ‘surplus to requirements’. Surplus production is guaranteed primarily by the academic system of personal promotions and institutional funding. Being geared to the production of books and articles on a massscale, it itself obstructs any adequate public recognition of what it calls its ‘research output’. A recent survey by Keith Thomas, the eminent Oxford historian, can’t avoid mentioning ‘the Stakhanovite ethos prevailing in research-driven universities’ that ‘has resulted in a torrent of publication that threatens to overwhelm anyone who attempts to study more than the tiniest area of the past’. The result is ‘the crippling accumulation of specialized knowledge’ that ‘means that one has to work very much harder to say anything new’ (Thomas 2006: 4). As these comments suggest, ‘redundancy of the humanities’ also implies a crisis of representation, a diremption between what is real and what is conceivable. It generates its own, characteristic apprehension. On the one hand, what is conceivable may well not represent reality. The same survey dwells on the ‘discouragement’ that comes from ‘an enhanced sense of the sheer complexity of the past and the impossibility of embodying in a single, selective account the infi nitely numerous points of view from which it can be legitimately surveyed’. On the other hand, what is conceivable seems to reflect what is real. The survey also recognizes that ‘despite the professional drift to intense specialization, modern realities encourage the study of everlarger units: [ . . . ] the globalization of economies and communications inexorably generates the conviction that the only true history has to be a history of the world’ (Thomas 2006: 4; (my italics)). That is to say, what is conceivable merely reflects the ‘realities’ historians professionally validate. Whether or not these realities capture anything the fatally compulsive historical unconscious has in store, remains totally unclear.16 For example, the survey recognizes that ‘large-scale narratives mapping the course of historical change over long periods’ have been ‘discredited by the teleological triumphalism and ideological intent with which such narratives are usually infused’. At the same time, it contradicts itself with the assertion that a comparable ‘ideological intent’, this time on the largest, the global scale (i.e. ‘the globalization of economies’) will produce the ‘only true history’. That Thomas detects nothing illogical either in connecting the ‘impossibility’ of history with the ‘torrent of publication’ or in blending ideology with truth, exemplifies history’s absorbency. ‘Become a crowded and heterogeneous field, characterized by an astonishingly diversity of approach’, history does absorb everything and anything all at once (as Thomas demonstrates). Being absorbent, it must ultimately have recourse to truisms of the most


39

vacuous kind: ‘It seems certain that, for the next generations of historians, the relationships between the world’s different cultures will be a central concern’. It cannot help culminating in the most elementary of all identitary propositions, history as the same old thing, as the source of the same old, visceral apprehension: ‘History has always embodied the hopes and fears of those who write it. Its future depends on what those hopes and fears will prove to be’ (Thomas 2006: 4; cf. Davies 2006a: 91–92, 97–101). The historicizing mentality that sustains the humanities makes them redundant. Thomas’s survey reveals that, as arguably the foundational humanities subject, history defi nes itself in terms of disciplinary criteria that produce redundancy. Highly absorbent, the historicizing mentality equalizes everything, reduces everything, to the same value (‘impossible’ production ↔ ‘torrent of publication’; ‘ideological’ ↔ ‘true’). And then the production of a knowledge surplus devalues knowledge itself and, along with it, the knowledge producing-system. That this surplus knowledge can be wasted, devalues the significance of all of it. It implies it can’t all be necessary (i.e. most specialized researchers will disregard most of the specialized work of most other specialized researchers in most other disciplines). As Sande Cohen remarks: ‘what counts as distinctive achievement in one area of historical representation hardly enters the discursive ambience of another. What do the archeologists of Armegeddon have to do with the contemporary writing of, say, the history of rock and roll?’ (Cohen 2006, 108). Conversely, if knowledge is neither valuable nor necessary, how could one discover in the ever-accumulating morass anything of foundational, species-essential significance, even if it existed. As Simmel argues (and ordinary experience confi rms), the disciplinary organization of academic production so much deters specialists from formulating any foundational principle that would authentically govern both their lives as ‘whole human beings’ and their particular activities, that they mostly fall back on predictable responses drawn from their particular professional expertise (Simmel 1999: 190). Where specialized disciplinarity prevails, any generalized principles that might form a unifying foundation for knowledge simply lose credibility: to synthesize is to oversimplify (cf. Durkheim 1998: 353, 355). Along with their surplus production of knowledge, their crisis of representation, this foundational misgiving reveals the humanities’ redundancy. (c) Redundancy further implies a measure of adequacy. It draws a line between insufficiency and abundance, between too little to be useful and such a lot that’s useless. Redundancy appears only because historians (like Thomas) imply that knowledge mass-production is necessary and ought to be assimilated, despite physically human limitations. This predicament in itself indicates the redundancy of the humanities. If history really does ‘make us who we are’, a system producing history surpluses, imposing order by sacrificing cognitive substance, ensures that some part, perhaps most, of ‘who we are’ will keep haemorrhaging into oblivion.

40 Imprisoned by History In essence, two conflicting models of knowledge production operate here. On the one hand, historical knowledge is technical knowledge: history is a technology of technologies (cf. Davies 2006a: 120ff.). Just as a closedcircuit TV surveillance-system produces images for its monitors, so it produces representations for publication. It screens its objects [illusio] whether or not anyone is looking. What it screens, it would screen anyway, whoever’s looking. For this reason history’s ‘impossible accounting’ is no bar to mass-production. Intermittent interference, poor signals, puzzling glitches, corrupt codes are endemic in data transfer. In purely technical, systemic terms the information system functions with complete indifference. On the other, adequacy involves judgement. It defi nes the basis and scope of the knowledge that enforces practical decisions, be it in professional or existential circumstances. Judgement is necessary because knowledge is never adequate: ‘the Certainties of Science are a delusion’ (Whitehead 1967b: 154). Outside the sphere of self-referential logic, certainty is not available. Relying on judgement is a human condition: one only knows what one knows, one can act only on what one knows. But judgement can be improved: there are, as Kant insisted, reliable ways of orientating thinking. The cult of information removes these scruples. It comes with the conviction that complete, self-evident knowledge is “out there” somewhere. It undermines judgement by subverting it with certainty. Self-evident information makes knowledge look so inadequate. It imposes the certainty that knowledge is too inadequate to be the basis of any judgement. That’s why history dominates: being the repository of everything, it claims knowledge of everything. In complete denial of the fallacy holistic knowledge, of the non-availability of certain comprehensiveness, it alone decrees ‘what it all meant’ (Evans 1997: 253; cf. Popper 1974: 74, 77, 81).

3.2. The fundamentalism of ‘society’s high priests’ With its total knowledge claim, history sabotages the very idea of humanistic knowledge. History moves itself out of the realm of debate (however much its technical topics generate debate within the discipline) into the realm of dogmatic faith. It becomes a religion-substitute, a religion supplement. It evinces that ‘ecclesiastical spirit, that clericalism, which [ . . . ] to whatever denomination it may belong, is the deadly enemy of science’ (Huxley 1893a: 16–17). Its conviction of omniscience exempts it from any critical, social-intellectual negotiation about knowledge values, the indispensable function of the humanities. Its total knowledge claim ensures that a totally historicized world with its ephemeral fluctuations coincides with the totally theologized world with its fundamentalist doctrines. As Volney points out, ‘historians exaggerate the certainty of history, since almost all religious systems were imprudent enough to base their questions of dogma on it’ (Volney 1989a: 540). The currently prevailing conception of history still comes in for Volney’s censure,—and in the most exemplary way. A survey of current


41

historical practice, what its cover-blurb calls ‘a vivid snapshot of historians and history in our new century’, evokes all the bigotry, all the conceitedness Enlightenment philosophes targeted in their censure of institutionalized faith. Historians, it proclaims, are ‘Very Important People’ because they are ‘like the high priests of modern society’. History, it says, ‘has acquired many of the qualities of religion’ (e.g. ‘it provides ancient justifications for presentday action’; ‘it adds legitimacy and pedigree to nations’; ‘it bestows dignity upon time-honoured practices and places which become sanctified as “heritage”’); it has, ‘like religion, [ . . . ] what amount to its sacred relics’. So ‘it is perhaps not altogether fanciful to regard historians like priests, as mediating between our present anxieties and the ancestor gods looking down on us from an elevated past’: historians are ‘priests in the new quasi-religion of history’ (Snowman 2007: 13–14).17 Underlying this ideological contention are two key notions: (i) that the modern world defines itself against Classical Antiquity through Christianity, in particular through the self-reflection Christianity induces; (ii) that modernity, being a historical category resulting from historical consciousness, assimilates the progression of history to the revelation of religious truth. The modern world is, therefore, a ‘period of thought’ in which, due to Christianity, the ‘world spirit’ reflects on itself’ and ‘religion itself becomes a means of thinking and knowing’ (Cieszkowski 1981: 140–141). So philosophical reflection on history demonstrates that, on the one hand, it affi rms religious truth and, on the other, it represents the world-spirit as it unfolds through human thinking and acting. History thus becomes the supreme, metaphysical agency for mediating between religious truth and human reality, hence for producing the truth of human reality in the image of religious truth (Garewicz 1981: 190). Investing historical knowledge with religious authority not only confirms history and religion as dominant signifiers. It also guarantees history’s supreme cognitive privilege, as the key mediator between the human and the divine dimensions. It invests the historian with clerical authority, since he or she becomes a divine intermediary, ‘one of the bureaucrats of the despotic god’ [un des bureaucrates du dieu-despote]. But to accept this authority at face-value is to fall for the sophistical trick, ‘the clerical subterfuge’ [la tricherie du prêtre] it relies on (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 143–144). Particularly in the case of history as a hypostasis of God, it proposes a theological idea of truth as the alibi for history [crg] as a coercive, social-management technology (cf. Barthes 1984: 20, 66). In thus assimilating academic interpretation to theological exegesis, it generates the essential character of bourgeois science. It predisposes academic interpretation to replicate theological practice. The whole arrangement is dedicated to consolidating social authority, to signifying itself, to affirming its own redundancy. The historian-priest is there not to impart historical truth, rather historical truth is a means of affirming the historian’s clerical, socially corrective power: ‘the signified [le signifié] incessantly restores, re-charges, or produces the signifier [du signifi ant]. The form always comes from the signifier’ [La forme vient toujours du signifi ant]

42


(Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 143–144). Accordingly, even though based on source evidence, the likenesses historians produce as historical knowledge still require, as likenesses, the reader’s belief in their veracity and that can be sustained only by the historian’s own quasi-theological authority. Curiously enough, the analogy between priests and historians is no sooner proposed than withdrawn. The cult of omniscient certainty that makes reflective judgement redundant apparently saps its author’s own self-confidence. On the one hand (it says), ‘good priests help their flock to learn from the past in the hope that they might make better use of the present and future, and we might construe a good historian as doing much the same’. On the other (it admits), the priest can ‘embroider the past and use it as myth, parable or allegory’ while the historian must base inferences drawn from the past on ‘demonstrable, verifiable fact’ (Snowman 2007: 14). Ultimately, the analogy has to confront its own redundancy: ‘History is not a religion, of course. Its relics are not worshipped and historians are not priests.’ Left in abeyance, the sense and purpose of history are affirmed here too in the most vacuous terms, ‘A lot of people these days take history extremely seriously’: so historians, ‘purveying the past to the present’, hence ‘performing a highly sensitive function and bearing a profound responsibility’, are ‘not quite priests perhaps’, but ‘Very Important People nonetheless’ (Snowman 2007: 15). Fuelling the conviction but extinguishing the courage: what self-defeating ambivalence! In historical scholarship the recourse to dogmatic fundamentalism, to insisting on ‘the truth about the past’, reinforces the default recourse to traditions and identities, to history-focussed behaviour, based on sufficient reasons and categorical coordinators that structure historical discourse. These principles are of a metaphysical type that provides a ‘natural matrix for all the transitions of life’, a ‘locus which [ . . . ] provides an emplacement for all the occasions of experience’ (Whitehead 1967b: 187). They basically frame the heterogeneous, technically specialized quanta of knowledge generated by the atomisation of historical interests and the concomitant disintegration of the humanities disciplines. In principle they seem immutable; in practice their immutability is nominal. They are highly susceptible to heteronomous influences: the latest intellectual fashions, commercial opportunities, political necessities, the phantoms of the social imagination, the sentimentalism of collective memory. They become agents of historicization, discovering new “pasts”, uncovering new traditions, defining new identities, while replicating and reaffirming themselves, the same old principles, the same old things. They become agents of deception [illusio]: these technically contrived, exquisitely theorized exercises in specialized expertise turn out to be surface inflections of the unfathomable impulses of the historical unconscious.

3.3. A culture of despondency Ultimately the circumstances that make the humanities redundant, produce depression and frustration. They generate typically psychopathological


43

instances of dysfunctionality [parapraxis; Fehlleistung]. In a word, they are characterized by anomie: they produce to the very letter the moral despondency Durkheim describes in his studies on the division of labour in society and on suicide. That is to say: those who work in the humanities do not see redundancy in what they produce. To them, their work cannot but appear socially relevant and, therefore, academically important, vindicated as it is by its heteronomous social affi nities. In fact, the heteronomous social reception cannot but negate the autonomous value of expertise. So the anomie that afflicts them comes out unconsciously, unselfconsciously, in the way they reflect on their work. Thomas’s survey offers a paradigmatic case: the present-day historian is so overwhelmed, crippled, and discouraged by the drift of historical knowledge towards ever increasing specialization that his will-to-research expires in vacuous banalities (cf. Thomas 2006: 4 (my italics)). It offers a good example of the current discourse that structures historians’ self-reflection,—as typified also (for example) by Jordanova’s derogation from historical comprehensiveness as a ‘crippling ideal’, Cannadine’s reservations about ‘the point of writing it [history] and publishing it in the fi rst place’, given that ‘much of this vast public output is read by so small an audience’, or Fernández-Armesto’s ambivalence towards ‘the curse of over-specialization’ and the ‘frankly unmanageable’ ‘amount of output’ which imbricates ‘the growth of rubbish’ in ‘the increased availability of good work too’ (Jordanova 2000: 102, 103; Cannadine 1999: 10; Fernández-Armesto 2002: 149–150. cf. Davies 2006a: 79, 89–90, 106–107). (a) Anomie such as this is a morbid condition that arises within collective existence, involving a highly specialized, mutually interdependent division of labour when it proves devoid of any moderating regulation (Durkheim 1998: III). It indicates systemic maladjustments in the economy of the entire production-system, critical disruptions between its necessarily interdependent components (Durkheim 1998: 344–345). Given that its disciplinary organization of production reflects the wider social organization of production, the academic world is particularly susceptible to it. The specifically academic dysfunctionality is similarly systemic (as Thomas, and others confi rm). Specialization locks each expert into his or her own particular discipline with its own already recognized problems. But the heteronomous influences on the academic environment produce failures of consequentiality,—a lack of connection between work and its value, commitment and its recognition, originality and its replication. Collective solidarity, the broad consensus soon get lost: the specialized, technical division of academic work cannot go too far without it becoming a ‘source of disintegration’ (Durkheim 1998: 347–348). Like the metaphysical unity of man, the fundamental ‘unity of the sciences’ vanishes: only a formal, selfabsorbed alexandrine culture remains, the perfect façade of ruinous anarchy (Durkheim 1998: 347, 353, 360). (b) The redundancy of the humanities is, though, catastrophic. It is the historical catastrophe: a catastrophe caused by historical study, but also

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a catastrophe of current existence. The historicized world is catastrophic: never have the humanities been more necessary. Only the humanities are in a position to reflect on what happens to the world. They are supposed to address those issues of meaning and value that, if not addressed, provoke despondency. That is: wherever issues of meaning and value are raised, the humanities are already implicated. This unique responsibility entitles them to be vigilant, to mobilize the collective social imagination. Their aim should be ‘to maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system’ and to ‘reverse the slow descent of accepted thought towards the inactive commonplace’ (Whitehead 1968: 174). Rather than merely mirroring the same social circumstances, their role is to produce ideations of different circumstances. Instead, the alexandrine culture of technical specialization tranquillizes consciousness. In this sedated form, the humanities slot into the economic, technical, and cultural apparatus [Ge-stell] that manages political governance and drives history.18 Through their heteronomous affiliations, they become an economic-technical resource valued exclusively for their potential conversion into capital, the ultimate agent of historicizing transformation. They may well help society to “understand” itself, but only in an affi rmative (“enriching”), identitary way, to rationalize the necessity of that which already is: ‘At the heart of research across all disciplines is the determination to understand the world we make and inhabit,’ argues Geoffrey Crossick. It’s the typical, technical-managerial view: ‘Without the approaches of the humanities, we cannot understand how knowledge is constituted and how it is developed in a knowledge society. [ . . . ] How all knowledge has a past and can be understood only through that past. [ . . . ] How subjectivities, narratives and sense of self provide indispensable tools for understanding after decades in which [ . . . ] objectivity was claimed as sufficient’ (Crossick 2003 (my italics)). No wonder the humanities are redundant when one of its leading administrators sees them in purely selfreferential, tautological terms.19 This makes them, from the species-essential standpoint, inconsequential. (c) So there might well be so much knowledge out there, but it seems to have no immediate, existential bearing. It never connects, it doesn’t seem to matter, it makes no difference. Would the National Trust along with other major cultural institutions really launch a campaign in 2006 called ‘History Matters’, if history mattered? The upbeat tone conveys spuriousness: the apparent need to affi rm history indicates the lack of confidence in the humanities, the pervasive social anomie, historicization itself generates. It discloses a social knowledge deficit. History dominates: we learn the lessons of the past so that it doesn’t happen again. But there’s no connection: we remember; it happens. There’s no consequence: it’s inconsequential. There’s not meant to be a connection. The ‘ascendancy of insignificance’ that comes with heterogeneous culture driving, and driven by, the transformative dynamic of capital has a ‘dreadful capacity’ to suffocate any real,


45

intellectual divergence from the norm (Castoriadis 1996: 86–87; cf. Davies 2003: 17). The atomization of knowledge is thus the most effective form of censorship. It might well maximize the opportunities for developing potential capital resources. However, in safeguarding the academic freedom to pursue whatever one fancies, what the official jargon calls ‘creativity’, it provides the perfect alibi for neutralizing dissidence. The very heterogeneity of historical knowledge, its capacity for accommodating even the most antagonistic topics, ideas, and values, generates an overall sense of confusion that does nothing but reinforce the only interests that emerge from it: the interests of the dominant sectors of society (cf. Debord 2006: 9). Censorship, repugnant though it is, at least does knowledge a favour: the authorities assume knowledge must be so reserved, so critical, so different, that it must be monitored. Creative overproduction and the resulting redundancy neutralize and devalue: whatever its economic, “enrichment” potential, fanciful research devalues itself as knowledge and knowledge itself,—on the authorities’ behalf. The desolate counsel of desolate ruins Volney discovered during his nocturnal vigils amid the ruins of Palmyra is symptomatic of the anomie historicized culture induces, the real effect of the illusory nature of historical knowledge. Still, its illusoriness suits the totalitarian capitalism driving neo-liberal politics: it ideologically enforces historicization as a way of pursuing its socially eugenic objectives. After all, were it not illusory, it could not be ideological. In thereby cancelling history’s cognitive potential, it boosts its ideological persuasiveness,—thanks to history’s puzzling, still enduring aura of scholarly respectability. Insinuating history into everyday reality just reinforces the humanities as purely affi rmative technology. The history ideology thus subverts the one form of knowledge that enables existential self-reflection. It leaves human beings intellectually tranquillized in a world they confront with apprehension each day anew.

2


Ask what history does. The usual reply is: it shows how things turned out as they did; it shows how things got to be the way they are. The world we live in today has been shaped by history. History has made the world we live in what it is: our history tells us who we are and where we are from. Thus what was, produces what is; what is, comes from what was: history— present historical thinking and past historical acting alike—is coercive, incarcerating. It inculcates not just (1.) a coercive thought-style, but also (2.) rhetorical strategies of incarceration. Hence, historicization—the history-focussed behaviour and the cognitive practice that produce historical knowledge—imposes itself as (3.) a technology for incarcerating people, communities, societies, or states, for these historical agents to incarcerate themselves. As will become clear, through reinforcing a split between experiential truth [aesthesis] and social “reality” [illusio], it generates ‘a socially shared hallucination’, a ‘pseudo-reality’ that persuades everyone to believe everyone else believes in it (cf. Laing 1968: 11ff., 61, 66).

1. THE ANATOMY OF A COERCIVE THOUGHT-STYLE The historicizing mentality imposes binding coercion through identitary thinking. That explains why historicizing techniques are the supreme instrument of any dominating political or economic interest: dominant power needs coercive strategies. That makes historical culture nothing but ideology. It describes the already historicized, coercive culture historical interests enforce,—a historically hyperconscious, a historically self-conscious culture, since ‘the human “interwovenness” in history does not only mean that man is influenced by historical circumstances, but also that he influences his life and society by means of history; or rather of the past cultivated into meanings, memories, memorials, museums, myths and several other aspects of a historical culture’. It describes a self-historicizing culture, in which history ideologically instrumentalizes itself, in which ‘history has been transformed from a row of blind causes that have made us what we are, to a source of cultural or symbolic power that we can exert in order

Imprisoned by History 47 to further various interests and needs’ (Karlsson 2003: 11 (my italics)). On this basis history identifies historical topics, social values, traditional skills, typical artefacts, and local customs as constituent features of the past worth preserving. It produces national or community identity as a purely synthetic compound of accidental, heterogeneous elements. It neutralizes the actually liberating differences an open society generates. It locks each individual into his or her particular, self-same local community or ethnic narrative as a necessary part of the all-encompassing national story. (a) Official cultural policy, propagating the ideology of neo-liberalism, clearly evinces the coercion inherent in the historicizing mentality, as its policy documents confirm. The Historic Environment: A Force for Our Future, published in 2001 by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, announces ‘the beginning of a major drive to unlock the full potential of our historic assets’. The euphemistic style betrays the ideological stance: the ‘unlocking’ of historical potential really pens everyone into the same historicized enclosure. The opening section, ‘The Historic Environment—A New Vision’, blends difference into identity, personal initiative into coercive totality: ‘England’s history is a gradual accumulation of movement and arrivals, new stories attaching themselves to old. Urban and rural landscapes reflect this layering of experience and develop their own distinct characteristics.’ For this reason ‘the historic environment [ . . . ] is central to how we see ourselves, our identity as individuals, communities and as a nation’. This in turn explains why ‘the Government looks to a future in which [ . . . ] the historic environment is accessible to everybody and is seen as something with which the whole of society can identify and engage’ (DCMS 2001: 5, 7, 9 {my italics)). The Power of Place. The future of the historic environment, a report undertaken by English Heritage for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in 2000, is more blunt: ‘The historic environment is what generations of people have made of the places in which they lived. It is all about us’ (English Heritage 2000: 4 (my italics)). Further, in Better Places to Live, an essay meant both ‘as a reminder to Government of the importance of remembering who we are and where we came from’ and as an exhortation to English Heritage, the Historic Houses Association and the National Trust ‘to work with us’, Tessa Jowell, the then Culture Secretary, asserts: ‘Our buildings tell us so much about who we are because they tell us, visually and materially, where we have come from’. She takes it as axiomatic that ‘there is an inescapable human need to know where we have come from’, that ‘even more importantly, this in turn gives us a sense of who we are as a nation, our national identity’. Government investment in museums, as in the Renaissance in the Regions programme, is about ‘much more than education in the formal sense’: rather ‘it is about who we are’, about the ‘historic and built environment [that] connects us with other aspects of heritage—the memories, shared experiences, the oral history and the written records—that bind across the generations’ (Jowell 2005: 4, 8 (my italics)). Implicit in all these statements, in this historicizing ideology, is the vision of the total alignment [Ausgleich / Gleichschaltung] of private and

48 Imprisoned by History social consciousness, a coercive, ‘symbiotic relationship between identity and the public realm’ (Jowell 2006: 2). Here a rhetoric of ineluctability makes history coercive. It’s the product of the history ‘sociolect’,—the ‘sub-language’ that formulates historyfocussed behaviour and produces the obligatory, discursive features that make it possible, an essentially nonspecial, ‘encratic’ language articulating (as the examples above confi rm) state, institutional, or ideological power, the apparently natural language of the mass-media and public opinion, both insidious and inescapable (Barthes 1984: 123, 128–129). It implies there’s no getting out of history; nothing can be done about it. It just keeps accumulating; things develop themselves; bound by what they have made, present society is obliged to past generations; the human need for history is inescapable, because human beings are interwoven into it: history is central. Such thinking betrays the coercive, regressive instinct in neo-liberal culture. It characterizes what is in fact a deeply conservative ideology in which history (along with the past and heritage) functions as a quite irrational, numinous sphere, as a potentiality in its own right with its own laws, as inalienable, enduring value. It may well lie beyond the administrative reach of government, still it can be evoked by political authority (and endorsed by academics) as an ‘inherited instinct’ or a mystical, intangible ‘sense of community’, ‘power of place’, or ‘national spirit’ (e.g. “Britishness”). It enables it to bring within its reach those areas it cannot easily penetrate but must still enclose within its total sphere of control: individual consciousness and behaviour, social relationships, the public practices it designates as “social capital” as a means of regulating the social level. Further, sustained by the unproblematic congruence between consciousness and the reality it controls, this essentially conservative ideology naturally mobilizes historicized thinking. It reinforces the congruence between thinking and the way things are through historicizing affi rmations of how things came to be. It thereby emphasizes heritage and the historic environment as the manifestation [illusio] in the present of historical time and the traditions it invokes, as the incontrovertible evidence of the values that vindicate its methods of governance and it, through history-focussed behaviour, enforces as social practice (cf. Mannheim 1995: 104–105, 199, 204). (b) The rhetoric of ineluctability results from the convergence of several different coercive thought-styles. It is articulated through ‘words of command’ [mots d’ordre], words that establish order because they issue from an institution (the university) and an academic discipline (history) invested by state and society with the power to produce order,—words that, therefore, come laden with social and cognitive obligation (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 100). Historical thinking, therefore, can’t help being a coercive way of thinking, a matrix of binding configurations: (e.g.) ‘So we collectively abide in a secure location within time-space. We are locked into our temporal frame. Yet the experience is so normal that it generally does not seem like a constriction’ (Corfield 2007: 25 (my italics)). The

Imprisoned by History 49 implication here is that historical-temporal ‘constriction’ is all right, not only because it’s ‘normal’, but also because it’s normal for it to dissemble, to be a deception. All thinking is in some ways self-coercive, bound by its premises, tied to its internal logic. One can, though, decide how and where one starts: one can opt to be sceptical, critical, or affi rmative, depending on one’s strategy. Historical thinking, by contrast, has no choice. Whatever its stance, it has to start by presupposing its conclusion: that the past takes precedence. It must defer to the temporal, pre-emptive occlusion of the present that comes with already recognizing the precedence of the past. It, therefore, relies on such quiddities as “origins”, “historical context”, “temporal frame”, or even ‘historical a priori’ as a framework of discourse patterns, ordering words, applicable at any given, historical moment (cf. Foucault 1969: 166ff.; Hacking 2002: 5ff.). Historical thinking must put the past fi rst: a historicized world always defers to the past, evinces deference towards the past. Certainly, it seems natural for the past to take precedence, for a past to have preceded this present. That comes from consciousness having been already historicized, already socially predisposed to put it fi rst, to pay deference to it. Culture now is commemorative culture. Commemoration is no less coercive for coming naturally, below the threshold of consciousness, ‘substituting for the solidarity between past and future the solidarity between present and memory, a present the anticipatory gaze nails to the obligation to recollect [cloue à l’obligation du souvenir]’. The present, once rendered diaphanous by historical consciousness, has become a ‘category heavily laden with a totalized past an oppressive future forces it to carry’ (Nora 1994: 1009 (my italics)). Historical thinking anaesthetizes what it relies on: the self-consciousness of personal presence. It places a taboo on the immediately existential present [aesthesis], the moment marking the caesura between past and future, the intuited instant—now. What makes this historicizing thought-style coercive is its figurative character. It’s nothing but figures, nothing but images [illusio]. These figures work contrary to metaphor, a feature of poeticizing thought-styles. Metaphor de-familiarizes our experience of the world and shatters its conventionality in order to heighten awareness. The tautological figures of the historicizing thought-style conventionalize what happens in the world. They normalize it in order to anaesthetize its impact. That these figures are formal (i.e. void of specific cognitive content) yet compelling, advertises their function as purely coercive.

2. STRATEGIES OF INCARCERATION The coercive thought-styles behind the rhetoric of ineluctability constitute different, yet convergent expressions of historical precedence and

50 Imprisoned by History historicizing deference: the historicized mentality resorts to them instinctively to put the past fi rst. They are based on two types of figures, two categories of ‘ordering words’, two key categorical coordinators that make history make sense: process and identity. Comprising causality (making, shaping) and growth (accumulating, layering, generations, evolution, progress), (2.1) process is essentially a figure of dynamic trajectories. Identity (ourselves, us, where we come from, making the world what it is, memory) is a structural, logically formal figure, enforcing behavioural and cognitive compliance both (2.2) symbolically and (2.3) physically. Either seems persuasive; together they look invincible. In naturalizing the automatic precedence of history, the reflex of deference towards history, they apply a strategy of incarceration. The figures of process and identity enclose, order, and subjugate everything—individuals, communities, nations, ideas, tastes, intentions, alike. Their prevalence in historical discourse, in the disciplinary sociolect, is symptomatic of the ‘carceral universe’: the globally organized, technologically managed world that is now the human habitat (cf. Virilio 2007: 31).

2.1. Process thinking The figures of process, causality, and growth all represent forms of historicism: ‘Scientific historiography uses narrative sentences to inform us that an event it describes is connected with a process’ (Tucker 2004: 13). On the one hand, these figures validate the intrinsic significance of an issue “in its own time” by stressing its importance relative to the overall historical context, as the historian concerned defi nes it. On the other, they pre-insinuate into the historical situation the self-same sense historical research claims to extract from it. Within the formal figure of “process” causality seems self-evident,—as in this illustrative proposition: ‘Once the causal role played by Pietist norms in the creation of eighteenth-century Prussia has been established [ . . . ], the possibilities for viewing the Prussian legacy from a larger perspective are greatly enhanced. For Pietism was intimately related to a number of early modern Protestant and Catholic movements, all of which had a significant impact on the transition to modernity in their respective societies’ (Gawthrop 1993: xi (my italics)). Process, as a figure of thought, already presupposes a ‘legacy’ and ‘a larger perspective’ defined in historicist terms by the transition from ‘early modern’ to ‘modern’ (whatever these periodic terms precisely mean). Hence, it both pre-establishes the conditions for the eighteenth-century ‘creation’ and the ‘cause’ that triggers it and is further reinforced by them. The presumption of “process” pre-selects the evidence that substantiates it. It illustrates a typically academic illusion: that the truth found in the archive is less the truth itself [la vérité elle-même] than the evidence for it which admits and announces a different truth [une autre vérité], the individual creation of the historian’s own mind (Proust 1971a: 183).

Imprisoned by History 51 2.11. Figures of process These figures presuppose that the multifarious intentions driving human behaviour amount to a transcending purpose enacted by history in history. They imply, in other words, a further coercive reinforcement: impersonal agency. Action of historical significance can be initiated by particular ‘worldhistorical individuals’, social groups, institutions, multi-national businesses, or states, etc. Explaining it demands conceptual abstractions that assimilate its local arbitrariness to supra-individual, historical motivation. Impersonal agency exerts its coercive force through constructions of the passive. They make historical development unaccountable, hence irrational, yet still compelling, therefore, irresistible. The passive lends process the semblance of an impersonal, autotelic dynamic (‘has been established’; ‘are greatly enhanced’; ‘was intimately related’). It comes in many different forms. Explaining why history matters, the Director-General of the National Trust (a UK heritage corporation) remarks: ‘For me, it’s the stories that can be told from our landscapes’ (Reynolds 2006: 11 (my italics)). It can be reflexive (‘stories attach themselves’). It can be the improper (figurative) attribution of agency to an essentially inactive abstraction (‘landscapes [ . . . ] develop their own distinct characteristics’). Reflexivity and improper impersonal agency combine to express the historically coercive force of concepts, ideologies or mentalities (‘Enlightened nationalism manifested itself both at the level of political discourse and at the level of political practice’ (cf. Levinger 2000: 230 (my italics)). Passivity can produce a grammatically active statement with an impersonal, passive—even evasive—sense (‘The quest for a rational and harmonious national community had both positive and negative consequences for Prussian political culture’ (cf. Levinger 2000: 230 (my italics); ‘[ . . . ] all had a significant impact on the transition’). It becomes particularly apt when figures of industrialization impose historicization as a technological procedure (‘The growth in archaeological and architectural television history, the success of local and genealogical histories, can be attributed to their capacity for helping to cement the individual within a broader historical lineage’ (Hunt 2004: 97 (my italics)); ‘One foundational motive for the study of history globally is to provide an explanatory framework that welds the distant past [ . . . ] into lived experience’ (Corfield 2007: 195 (my italics)). The figure of growth delivers effective coercive force through impersonal formulations (‘history is a gradual accumulation’). The organic simile, expressed in the passive voice, enforces tautologically the phantasm of historical necessity (‘As a result of this process, by the end of the 1980s, the BBC World Service was positioned very clearly in a way that was consistent with its past and rooted in its own historical record’ (Tusa 2004: 135 (my italics)). The passive overstatement (‘rooted’) conveys exercitive force: managerial power and compulsion (cf. Austin 1989: 151, 155). As these typical examples show, figures of process are euphemisms for causal explanations: they provide sufficient reasons. Historical consciousness

52 Imprisoned by History in a historicized world is nothing if not sophisticated. Its foundation really is the conviction that ‘history is a system, the system of human experiences linked in a single, inexorable chain’ (Ortega y Gasset 1962: 221). This figure of thought really does present history as a universal chain-gang with a self-incriminating humanity shackled to it. But this vision is at once too crude and too preposterous for the historicized mind long since used to coping with its ‘burden of history’. Moreover, the chain’s constituent links may be too large to be visible. Instead, one sees through them; they frame what one sees. Then one discounts them since, in connection with any specific, specialized enquiry, one encounters a variety of contingent, causal “factors”. 2.12. Figures of making and shaping Conversely, implying intentional design and purposeful realization, these figures appear intellectually less clumsy but also historically more veracious. Just as some chains come plastic-coated to protect what they touch, so, in providing a synthetic fi nish to raw causality, making and shaping signify a mitigated, historicized version of already historical, causal explanation. For illustration: a monograph on early nineteenth-century Prussian nationalism may well wish—in the mechanistic terms of the chain-figure—to ‘forge a link between the idealist and materialist traditions of German historiography’. But demonstrating this causal coupling in the specific enquiry means inter alia showing how ‘the language of nineteenth-century Prussian politics was shaped by socio-economic interests’ (cf. Levinger 2000: 9 (my italics)). In fact, where mental or conceptual causality is postulated these figures transpose it into the image of necessary physical instrumentality,—as in the intention to ‘illuminate the full significance of Pietism in the making of eighteenth-century Prussia’ (Gawthrop 1993: 9). Coercive though they are, implying design and execution, making and shaping do not exclude arbitrariness and indeterminacy. They permit one at least to surmise that, if Prussia had emerged defeated from the Silesian Wars, or the 1848 Berlin Revolution had triumphed, modern Germany would have been “shaped” differently. But this suggestion is both self-evident and deceptive. Historical making and shaping are different from any other type of making and shaping (e.g. a potter at her wheel, the cabinet-maker at his lathe): the substances they start with (there an eighteenth-century state, here a piece of clay or wood) are incommensurable. If these artisans do not like the shape they’ve made, they start again. But history can’t really reshape eighteenth-century Prussia once it has “made” it (—though historians intimate difference by putting their particular gloss on it: e.g. stressing the philosopher in Frederick the Great rather than the Realpolitik). Nor can it ever become anything like a “fi nished object” the figure deceptively projects [illusio].

Imprisoned by History 53 2.13. The figure of organic growth In contrast, this figure in principle closes down each and every counterfactual alternative, whether it evokes opportunity lost (what if Mozart had lived to be eighty?) or catastrophe averted (what if the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the US and Russia into armed confl ict?). A figure so radical and comprehensive inevitably delivers a matching logical, explanatory force. For example, the argument that Auschwitz represents a new kind of society, a society of total domination, is reinforced by presenting it as the natural product of the ‘night-side’ of the entire ‘civilization process’: ‘in every organic process, the antitheses always reflect a unified totality, and civilization is an organic process. Mankind never emerges out of savagery into civilization. Mankind moved from one type of civilization involving its distinctive modes of both sanctity and inhumanity to another’ (Rubenstein 2001: 92 (my italics)). Certainly, Auschwitz does fatefully put civilization in question; but what proves that civilization is a constantly evolving play [illusio] of sanctity and inhumanity? The two propositions are not interdependent. Substituting a spatial metaphor for the coercive, temporal figure, one could just as credibly argue that barbarity is always immediately adjacent to the present, just next door, ‘a step away’, as in a parallel universe but demarcated by a porous, unstable partition (cf. Davies & Szejnmann 2007: xxxvi). Predicated on natural development, the figure of growth implies by defi nition absolute necessity, hence absolute coercion (cf. ‘unified totality’). As evinced in the figure of “rootedness”, its conviction derives from the “tree” as a dominant trope of western thought and reality: because it symbolizes human culture, intellectual self-awareness fostered by the “horticulture” of the mind, it can’t help denying the dark potential of the rhizome in the soil, the murky ramifications of its roots in the unconscious, by defi nition inaccessible to historical consciousness, let alone the historical hyperconsciousness of the already historicized world (cf. Cicero 1996: 158–159; II, v, 13; Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 27). Accordingly, it affi rms the self-interested, essentially conservative notion of ‘where we have come from’, the sense of being conditioned by and bound to the past, projected outward onto society, politics, the public realm. It generates a feeling for the everyday world [Weltgefühl] that reveals that individuals are not ‘absolutely free’. It diminishes expectations from history since it restricts the scope of personal or social action by implying that ‘not anything or everything is possible at any given moment in any given historical community’. Behind the spheres of personal or social initiative stand, as their innermost principle, numinous, collective forces like a national identity, a community, or simply the pressures of external circumstances. They predetermine that what historically develops can never be intentional, never be made to happen, but ‘simply grows like a plant out of its inner centre’ (cf. Mannheim 1995: 202–203).

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Further, projecting history as natural and organic, the figure of growth absorbs all the contradictory tensions historical explanation displays: freedom and necessity, change and permanence, difference and sameness, design and contingency, individual variation and inherited species characteristics. Ortega y Gasset’s assertion typically illustrates its formal properties: ‘Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is . . . history. Expressed differently: what nature is to things, history, res gestae, is to man.’ Man’s relationship to history is analogous to God’s relationship to the natural world He has created: ‘Man, likewise, fi nds he has no nature other than what he has himself done’ (Ortega y Gasset 1962; 217). Still, this figure is ambiguous,—both metaphysically and historically. As Whitehead points out, ‘it is a false dichotomy to think of Nature and Man. Mankind is a factor in Nature which exhibits in its most intense form the plasticity of nature. Plasticity is the introduction of novel law’ (Whitehead 1967b: 78). He thus rejects the idea of a nature bifurcated into immutable laws, on the one hand, and immediate sense experience, on the other. He argues that time-conscious human experience participates in, and is sustained by, the ultimate reality (physical and metaphysical) that nature is (cf. Whitehead 2004: 44–45). By implication he rejects the anthropic conceit evinced (e.g.) in Elias’s assertion that human society is the most complex, functionally differentiated life-form: this notion of complex, functional differentiation, what he calls ‘plasticity’, he attributes to nature in its entirety. This ecological conception of the unity of man and nature is quite different from the historical, historicizing identity of human nature with history. It differs in principle from the notion that history is the nature in which human beings naturally live, which is what the growth figure, as deployed from the time of Herder and Kant to Spengler and Jaspers (including Ortega y Gasset), implies. This notion takes several forms. It projects history as the natural habitat of homo sapiens and the natural matrix of individuals, communities, nations, and states. It imagines high culture to be ‘the consciousness of a single, gigantic organism [eines einzigen ungeheuren Organismus] that makes not just custom, myth, technology, and art, but also the peoples and classes incorporated into it, into the bearers of a uniform language of forms with a uniform history’ (Spengler 1976: 597). It turns human activity over time into a constantly evolving, organic entity, an ‘everlasting animal’ (cf. Orwell 2001: 89–90). This may be fanciful stuff, but it’s meant to be imposing. However, the figure’s more sinister implications come out in its corollary: once history is conceived as nature, nature can be conceived as historical. The ramifications are far-reaching. To begin with: both physically and metaphysically, history appears as the only reality. This represents egregious anthropic bias, even if it is unavoidable in a situation, engineered by the history technology in a historicized world, ‘where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself’ (Arendt 1993: 89). In other words, the increasing degrees of control human beings exert over nature at any given time mark stages in

Imprisoned by History 55 the growth-process of a complex, mass society, in the increasing degrees of control human beings at the same time have over themselves and each other (Elias 1983: 18–23). Further, through genetic and other forms of biotechnological manipulation (for example), enacting purely human needs and purposes, nature itself becomes a historicizing force, enforcing historical identities of its own,—as Fukuyama observes about a society which, through biotechnology, could routinely prolong the human life-span: ‘There are a number of unanswerable questions about what life in this kind of future would be like, since there have never in human history been societies with median ages of 60, 70, or higher. What would such a society’s selfimage be?’ (Fukuyama 2002: 70 (my italics)).—The outcome? Historicized nature, nature’s own historical identity, would be the ecologically damaged world in which natural, environmental disasters have historical implications for human existence,—as the recent growth in environmental history, responding to the apprehension history [rg] induces, suggests: ‘Ecological angst [ . . . ] has stimulated environmental history, just as it has stimulated every other kind of environmental study in a time of unprecedented human impact on our planet. The changes humans have wrought—and the damage they have inflicted—have become glaringly visible and measurable’ (Fernández-Armesto 2006b: 15 (my italics)). Here, ironically enough, the historicized world confronts itself in the environmental devastation its own “natural growth” has brought about (though Fernández-Armesto avoids that compromising connection). The sheer human power evinced in historicization means that human beings ‘are in effect terraforming Earth’, and ‘rather poorly so far’ (Brand 2000: 134). Wishing to meditate on the futility of history, a latter-day Volney need not gaze in melancholy at the ruined remains of a past civilization: he would only have to survey the deforestation of the Amazonian region, the melting polar ice-caps, the polluted atmosphere in Asian megalopolises, as the accumulated, present effects of the historicizing and historicized human presence. For what else, in the end, are the ‘impact’, the ‘changes’, and the ‘damage’ caused by ‘humans’, but historical, naturally historicizing effects? Finally, the figure of historical growth operates as the technological domination of nature in its ultimate form, even though the resulting, totally historicized world is ‘resplendent with triumphant disaster’ (cf. Horkheimer & Adorno 1972: 7). Reinforced by its coercive principle, history affi rms the most apprehensive implication of the figure of historical growth. In permitting the concepts of ‘history’ and ‘nature’ to collapse into each other, to merge human history with natural history, the growth figure suppresses any natural, let alone any specifically ethical, limitation on human capacities. Since, according to this figure, history is natural, any limitation on historical action (‘human impacts’) now looks unnatural. What nature is, what can be considered natural or unnatural, is defi ned and produced by mankind’s historical potential. So, towards nature, to which it owes its very existence, humans and their impact may well act as fatality—as ecological

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fatality—and historical explanation can still make it all look natural. Conversely, the unnatural realm of purely human needs and purposes thereby acquires a historical dynamic propelled metaphysically by the sublime force of nature. It creates in history as a historical fact an unnatural, unpredictable world that still seems natural precisely because it is totally historicized. Here more is always historically possible, but inconceivable, than is actually real or naturally conceivable. 2.14. The figure of evolution As a particular version of the conception of history as ‘organic natural growth’, this figure enforces a particularly coercive type of historical inevitability. For Elias (for example), evolution is such a basic figure connecting the most simple, functionally undifferentiated, and the most complex, functionally differentiated, life-forms that, he says, ‘it is difficult to repudiate the idea that there is continual, directional change’ [Es ist schwer, den Gedanken von sich zu weisen, daß es einen kontinuierlichen, gerichteten Wandel gibt] (Elias 1983: 196–197). Difficult perhaps, but by no means impossible. To take evolution for teleological development or for progress with humanity as its culmination is an anthropic conceit, an anthropocentric illusion. Human intelligence is no more a selective structural advantage than any other local advantage in any other species in the natural world; and human cultural priorities might anyway counteract the natural selection and adaptation involved in evolution: so further evolution in every other life form would be quite consonant with the demise of the human species itself (Schaeffer 2007: 188–189). In any case, the incarcerating effect of the figure is brilliantly exposed in a perceptive comment by Gertrude Stein: And I began with evolution. Most pleasant and exciting and decisive. It justified peace and justified war. It also justified life and it also justified death and it also justified life. Evolution did all that. And now. Evolution is no longer interesting. It is historical now and no longer actual. Not even pleasant or exciting, not at all. To those of us who were interested in science then it had to do tremendously with the history of the world, the history of all animals, the history of death and life, and all that had to do with the round world. Evolution was as exciting as the discovery of America, by Columbus quite as exciting, and quite as much an opening up and a limiting, quite as much an opening up and a limiting, quite as much. By that I mean that discovering America, by reasoning and then fi nding, opened up a new world and at the same time closed the circle, there was no longer any beyond. Evolution did the same thing, it opened up the history of all animals and vegetables and minerals, and man, and at the same time it made them all confi ned, confi ned within a circle, no excitement of creation any more (Stein 1984: 61).

Imprisoned by History 57 In historical discourse the figure of evolution works through being preinsinuated into the historical issue being analyzed. That reveals the circle to which it confi nes reality: there can no longer be any ‘change in the conditions of change’ (cf. Popper 1974: 130). Take the proposition: ‘This book traces the evolution of the concept “nation” in Prussia from the Napoleonic era up to the eve of the Revolution of 1848’ (Levinger 2000: 6). The intention to trace depends entirely on the preconception of ‘evolution’. Coercive force is here again evident as emphatic overstatement. Evolution and growth figures like it have a purely nominalistic relationship to the data they classify. They expand or contract as the historical evidence or argument requires. Nevertheless, presuming that history is driven by natural, evolutionary development massively reinforces its ineluctable dynamic. Presupposing that it is methodologically legitimate to regard history as a living organism (like a species or a language) affi rms its coercive intention by apparently enhancing its cognitive reliability: ‘Historians, evolutionary biologists, and linguists must examine the causal information chains that should connect hypothetical event with evidence. The more evidence there is for causal links (fossils, documents, languages, etc.) on that chain, the more certain is the historiographic assessment of the fidelity of the evidence’ (Tucker 2004: 131 (my italics)). Configured as natural evolution, history ensures the past obligates, constrains, shackles, and binds us here and now, in the present. It predisposes present historical knowledge to impose itself by means of evidential fidelities, calculable probabilities, and judiciously determined best explanations. It projects it as virtually unimpeachable certainty. It ensures its correctional authority. 2.15. Biological and geological figures of process and growth These, in particular, are frequently deployed ideologically because they are so coercive,—as when the then British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, asserts: ‘What has emerged from the long tidal fl ows of British history [ . . . ] is a distinctive set of values which influence British institutions’, i.e. the values New Labour claims as its own (Brown 2006a). Moreover, the same discourse, the same historicized thinking, blends seamlessly into the discourse of the dominant, national cultural institutions (e.g. universities, museums, galleries, and archives), themselves in any case compliant instruments of government cultural policies and the neo-liberal ideology that drives them. That it forsakes the incendiary jargon of, say, nineteenth-century race-theories only makes it more insidious,—as is demonstrated by an article in the National Trust Magazine (Summer 2006), launching the Trust’s summer campaign ‘History matters—pass it on’. It describes how a ‘silent army’ (—a distinctly aggressive, coercive image), consisting of ‘the National Trust, English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Historic Houses Association, the Civic Trust and myriad other conservation organizations’, wants to

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encourage people ‘to stand up for history’. Sanctifying history here too, treating its fascination in terms of irrationality as ‘subliminal’, ‘mystical’, and ‘magic’, it takes a populist, commonplace, cliché-bound, antiintellectual line, asserting that ‘history is far too important to be left in the cobwebbed studies of historians’ just as it needs to be taken away from ‘the bilious world of intellectuals’. Instead, it presents history ‘for us, the common citizenry’ as something quite inescapable, as a ‘living, omnipresent thing’,—as the quintessential expression of a ConservativeRomantic Volksgeist (cf. Mannheim 1995: 209). Though it recognizes that ‘each of our personal histories is different’, it insists: ‘There is no question that the collective whole is greater than the parts,—particularly in terms of commercial, public value. What we share is what unites us and is one of the greatest of Great Britain plc’s Unique Selling Points’ (my italics). History here emerges as the ideal, virtual-reality agora or public meeting-place for the mass-populations of the postmodern metropolis. It forms a vast, imaginary arena, a mass rallying-point, for history’s ‘huge fan base’, for the ‘millions of souls’ who ‘are uplifted by heart-stopping places’, and the ‘millions more’ who ‘watch history programmes on television or buy books about art or the past’. Thus another ‘major drive to unlock the full potential of our historic assets’ requires the total mobilization of popular nostalgia to reinforce the dictatorship of commodified history, to enforce the mass consumption of ‘heritage “goods”’, ultimately to promote totalitarian capitalism (Dawnay 2006: 20–23; cf. National Trust + Accenture 2006: 6). A heterogeneous range of biological and geological figures enforces the essentially totalitarian notions of common citizenry, historical collectivity, social unity, and mass-interests. The figure starts botanical: ‘countless onion layers of immigration are a central part of the national story’; turns geological: ‘like the debris from a momentous glacier of time, history has left its mark almost everywhere’; then genetic and psychological: ‘[history] is our cultural DNA—the mystical playing field for [ . . . ] the collective unconscious’; then again botanical: ‘history is a wallflower in a cacophonous world’; then nutritive: ‘we can give [people] [ . . . ] a pause from our fast food culture, [ . . . ] and [ . . . ] a chance to slow down and savour our great and precious historical stew’; finally, genealogical: ‘we want history to span the generations, inspiring mother and daughter, grandfather and grandson to talk about what history and heritage means to them. Perhaps, they might take a trip to see some place or thing that their grandchildren’s grandchildren might also still be able to enjoy in a far distant and incomparably different future’ (my italics). The figures’ gratuitous mutability rams home history’s social-psychological domination: it enforces affirmative, history-focussed behaviour as a public, socio-economic obligation (Dawnay 2006: 20–23). Finally, these figures themselves reinforce their own ineluctability. In particular, their underlying principle of evolutionary process operates as ‘the model of models’ [Modell der Modelle] in a cosmological, biological,

Imprisoned by History 59 social, and historical sense. It applies to anything and everything. In permitting a ‘much more comprehensive synthesis’, cognitively speaking, than possible hitherto, accommodating highly differentiated degrees of integration, hence being able to absorb elements of disorder and disintegration, this historicizing thought-style makes itself unfalsifiable (Elias 1983: 222– 225). It enforces itself as incontrovertible, indisputable. Thus historicized thinking not least coerces itself. It backs itself up; it affi rms and validates itself fi rst (cf. Davies 2006a: 125, 137ff.). So (to quote Elias) ‘the use of such figures from the realms of nature and technology is “unavoidable” [unvermeidlich] until language develops a clear and specific vocabulary for historical-social processes’. That the lack of a specific terminology might indicate the lack of an object to apply it to or that these figures [Bilder] are nothing but ways of picturing [illusio] history, don’t count. Recourse to such figures is ‘easily understandable’: ‘they do at least adequately express the coercive character of social processes in history [das Zwingende der gesellschaftlichen Prozesse in der Geschichte]’. They may well imply that ‘social processes and their constraints [Zwänge], rooted in the way human beings are bound up with each other [stammend aus der Verfl echtung der Menschen]’, work essentially just like the earth’s orbital motion or a mechanical lever-action. Still (Elias insists), they do clearly articulate the struggle for a new way of examining issues in the structure of history. The issue in question is the strict order immanent in socio-historical transformations, the fact that changes have occurred whether anyone liked them or not [ob es ihnen lieb war oder nicht] (Elias 1976b: 38–39).1 Whether coercive thinking such as this produces a socio-historical world in its own image or whether the social world makes historical sense only as a result of self-inflicted, correctional constraint, is ultimately unclear. That’s the existential dilemma of the historicized consciousness that coerces and incarcerates itself,—that so much needs to coerce and incarcerate itself as to perpetrate ‘misunderstandings of an astonishing crudity’ that are ‘characteristic of the scientistic misuse of the examples of physics and astronomy’. It certainly is ‘a mistake to suppose that these dynamical longterm predictions of a stationary system [e.g. the solar-system] establish the possibility of large-scale historical prophecies of non-stationary social-systems’ (Popper 1974: 112–113). It certainly is, too, a sophistical deception to assimilate the contingencies and accidents in the human world to the deterministic ‘mega-machine’ [vaste automate] of the Newtonian system when the instability of nature they suggest is symptomatic of a relativistic universe, implicitly irreversible, essentially chaotic, ultimately entropic (cf. Prigogine 1994: 96ff.).

2.2. Identitary thinking (1): enforcing symbolic compliance Identitary thinking is in its own right a form of thought-coercion. Moreover, the concept of identity which, in its various ideological forms (i.e.

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ethnic, social, political, or national), offers a sense of belonging, a common place, thereby enforces compliance through violence, symbolic as well as physical. Employing ‘ordering words’, ‘identity’ compels social and cognitive obligation. Historical information exists to enforce identity as a totally binding but totally redundant condition (I = I; A = A) (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 100). With identitary thought-forms such as equivalence and analogy, and reinforced by the principle of sufficient reason, identity is the foundational principle of historical knowledge: it is sophistical, therefore, to pretend that ‘history has always been inimical to defi nitions of the logician’ (Tosh 1999: 212). 2.21. History and the identity principle As a form of thought-coercion identitary thinking relies on the identity principle (A = A). This is the ‘supreme law of thinking’ [das oberste Denkgesetz], given that tautological propositions (e.g. A = A) ‘may be held to inform western criteria of intelligibility’ (Heidegger 2002, 9; Steiner 1997a: 353). Identity is, therefore, an expression of self-consciousness, since subjectivity knows itself, becomes real for itself, only by means of the significances through which it duplicates itself, reflects itself, and confi rms itself (e.g. “my passport” confi rms “who I am”). This self-confi rmation needs a system of intelligibility predicated on tautological propositions such as rationality, sequentiality, causality, segmentation, objectivity, likeness,—a system that remains the self-same, a system such as history [crg] or a state’s frontiercontrol authority. That is the pre-condition for the authentic self-duplication that constitutes identity; but it’s also, inevitably, an opportunity for deceptive duplicity [illusio] that constantly threatens to compromise it (e.g. false passports),—or would do if that threat didn’t offer identitary thinking a further, necessarily correctional motive for self-vindication. Identity also implies the principle of non-contradiction: it asserts the stability of the world. It ensures that the same substances have the same attributes and names; it generates concepts to identify objects of consciousness in terms of their accidental similarities. It here too affi rms the existence of intelligible structures, logical inferences, sufficient reasons, and associated norms, concepts, causes, or laws, immanent in the phenomenal variety of experience. It underpins the convergence of knowing and Being, of mind and world. A metaphysical guarantee backs it up, the tautological self-affirmation of Being as the source of all created substance. It may come as the self-assertion by God Himself in Exodus (3, 14): ‘I am that I am’; or as the self-affirming activity of Aristotle’s first principle, in Metaphysics (Bk. XII). Its eternal existence and essential actuality are rational thought that ‘thinks itself through participation in the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought by the act of apprehension and thinking, so that thought and the object of thought are the same, because that which is receptive of the object of

Imprisoned by History 61 thought, i.e. essence, is thought’ (Aristotle 1997a: 148–151; 1072 b 15ff.). It also comes as a self-reproductive principle in Nature, by the fact that ‘Nature is intent on multiplying severally her types’, ‘that that which generates is of the same kind as that which is generated—not however identical with it, nor numerically one with it, but formally one’ (Aristotle 1996a: 348–349; 1033 b 30; Aristotle 1997b: 330–331; 1343 b 10). Hence, human production follows the same natural, identitary model ‘since all artificial things are generated either from something which bears the same name (as is the case with natural objects) or from part of themselves which bears the same name as themselves’ (Aristotle 1996a: 350–351; 1034 a 20). However, precisely the reproduction of the same, but in terms of the human production of reality, suggests ideological coercion. The reproduction of the same is sociogenic: driven by their own identitary logic, social institutions (including, e.g., universities, museums, galleries, and archives) reproduce their own ethos and purpose: they perpetuate their own sense of things. One cannot help internalizing it, being permeated by it: they generate in one’s imagination dominant, regulative images of society as such (Castoriadis 1990: 130ff., 152ff.; cf. Castoriadis 1975: 282–285, 311ff., 359ff.). Moreover, this suspicion is confi rmed by actual political and economic forces. The totalitarianism of both managerial governance and global capitalism, empowered by their massive technological potential, by their ever-extending administrative reach, ensures their limitless capacity to perpetuate always the same thing, to reduce everything to the same indifferent value [das maßlose Und-so-weiter des Immergleichen und Gleichgültigen]. These forces monopolize human reality by subverting all forms of value other than their own, by perpetuating the heterogeneous indifference of all things. They also neutralize dissidence with strategies of pacification: fostering a shallow, passive-reactive intellectualism, promoting instrumentalized thinking, exploiting the commodification of culture, applying heritage as a political cosmetic, and encouraging the conspicuous consumption of cultural capital (Heidegger 1998: 35–38). Informing both perspectives is surely a common, identitary principle, inherent in society: society as such is ‘self-sustaining’, i.e. ‘it is its own reason’, a reason sufficient for itself. That means ‘a society is more than a set of [actual] entities to which the same class-name applies: that is to say, it involves more than a merely mathematical conception of “order”. To constitute a society, the class-name has got to apply to each member, by reason of genetic derivation from other members of that same society. The members of the society are alike because, by reason of their common character, they impose on other members of the society the conditions which lead to that likeness’ (Whitehead 1967b: 203–204 (my italics)). This principle also explains why history is ideology, a self-vindicating projection of whatever is: the socially affi rmative character of history mirrors the self-affi rmative character of society as society. The identitary principle behind both society and history cannot but keep reproducing likenesses, aligning everything as

62 Imprisoned by History the same [Gleichschaltung], enforcing a social level [Ausgleich]: ‘Bourgeois society is dominated by equivalence [beherrscht vom Äquivalent]. It makes uncommon denominators [Ungleichnamiges] comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities’ (Horkheimer & Adorno 1973: 11). In thus enforcing conventional behaviour and normal thought, it regulates the scope for selfdifferentiation in contemporary, multicultural societies. A report such as Curriculum Review. Diversity and Citizenship, produced by the Department for Education and Science, is an illustrative case. It shows not just ‘likeness’ being imposed, abstract equivalences being worked out, and the social level being adjusted, but also the coercive discourse that operates this socio-historical technology. On the one hand it acknowledges: ‘UK society is made up of many ethnicities, cultures, languages and religions, and it is constantly evolving. The UK has a rich heritage of cultural and ethnic diversity, stretching back over many centuries. However, so many of the people we talked to discussed the complexity of the world we live in and the many identities that children inhabit. There is a moral imperative to address issues of disparity and commonality and how we live together’. What is described here is nothing but the sociopathology of the historicized world: historical evolution, a heritage accumulated over centuries, producing a world too complex to cope with, immediately, existentially speaking. Hence, a good dose of likeness is required to even things out [Ausgleich]: ‘The changing nature of the UK and potential for tension to arise now makes it ever more pressing for us to work towards community cohesion, fostering mutual understanding within schools so that valuing difference and understanding what binds us together become part of the way pupils think and behave’ (DfES 2007: 16 (my italics)). Real diversity that might be really liberating, that could make society really open, is a freedom too far. Instead, as it is now, it stands as an incontrovertible reproach to neo-liberal society’s self-image as the best of all possible worlds: it exposes the real, material, ineradicable inequalities implicit in it. Hence, the need for sedative, abstract quantities (‘community cohesion’), backed up by the coercive alignment of personal consciousness (‘understanding what binds’), to anaesthetize people’s own sense of things. History, then, is the identity principle (A = A) in historicized form (Athen = A now). That it shows how things turned out as they did, how things got to be the way they are, is the effect of its identitary logic. The identity principle provides sufficient reason for making past and present reversible, interchangeable: tendencies, therefore, can be traced back deep into the past; conversely, the past thereby reveals how the present came about. It thus sufficiently justifies the inference that, since history has made the world we live in what it is, it must self-evidently be ‘about us’. That it thus tells us who we are, conflates the identity principle in its historical form with the identity principle as such ([Athen = A now] = [A=A]). So persuasive is it, even a perceptive thinker such as Whitehead momentarily succumbs, as when he remarks: ‘Each age deposits its message as to the secret character

Imprisoned by History 63 of the nature of things. Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized. And they have this property, that the appropriation of them in the understanding unveils truths concerning our own natures. [ . . . ] the great periods of history act as an enlightenment. They reveal ourselves to ourselves’ (Whitehead 1967b: 164). The identity principle is thus the epistemological principle of a historicized world, its ultimate ideological conviction: only what can be historicized is intelligible, anything is intelligible only if it can be historicized. 2.22. Identitary thought and symbolic compliance Figures of process, growth, and evolution make past action obligatory; identitary thinking makes the present analysis of past action compelling. Its compulsive force derives from its purely formal, logical character. The identity principle, it cannot be overemphasized, is “just” a self-referential ‘truth relation’, i.e.: ‘A truth-relation will be said to connect the objective contents of two prehensions when one and the same identical pattern can be abstracted from both of them. [ . . . ] two objective contents are united in a truth relation when they severally participate in the same pattern. Either illustrates what in part the other is. Thus they interpret each other [ . . . ]’ (Whitehead 1967b: 242). Its empty, formal character also suggests why the historicized world, mesmerized by its own catastrophically resplendent selfimage, is a disconsolate place. A diverse, open society, particularly in libidinal terms, negates the ego-principle, the narcissism enforcing the anthropic bias that sustains the historicizing mentality. It challenges ‘the demand for identity [Forderung nach Identität]’, that ‘invariable [Invariant] of bourgeois society in the widest sense, intent on integration’. The very fact that collective identities have to be enforced, testifies to an instinctive suspicion that ‘what is merely identical with itself is devoid of happiness’ [was bloß identisch ist mit sich, ist ohne Glück] (Adorno 2003: 538). The identity principle organizes historical discourse in a number of ways: they reinforce each other and, in so doing, reinforce its characteristic anomie: (a) The identity principle in its logically “pure” form invests history with metaphysical equivalence. What (according to Ortega y Gasset) justifies history as mankind’s self-created human nature is its analogical identity to the nature created by God out of His own essence. This metaphysical equivalence comes out of identitary thinking. With it history justifies itself as a human science, as The New Science, as in Vico’s basic, identitary premise: ‘this world of nations has certainly been made by men and its guise must be found in the modifications of our own human mind. And history cannot be more certain than when he who creates the things also narrates them’ (Vico 1984, 104; §349). Here the historical identity principle, in converging with the formal-logical identity principle, is already an ideological fait accompli. This defi nition has world and mind mirroring

64 Imprisoned by History each other, offering both ultimate certainty and ultimate thought-coercion. The illusion is complete. (b) The identity principle also vindicates history’s epistemological consistency. The very discipline is based on self-referential denomination since “history” refers both to what happened in the past [res gestae] and the present knowledge of what happened in the past [cognitio rerum gestarum]. There is no diremption between the discipline and its object: without the past there could be no history; without history there could be no past. To say that a city (e.g. Jerusalem) is “steeped in history” illustrates this selfreflexive convergence. In such formulations “history” refers to past events and the recognition of them alike. History, as a discipline, is thus the paradigmatic example of the Aristotelian observation that ‘knowledge when actively operative is identical with its object’ (Aristotle 1964: 174–175; 431 a 1ff.). Accordingly, as with any other discipline [Wissenschaft], history is predicated on and presupposes the self-sameness of its object [die Selbigkeit ihres Gegenstandes] (Heidegger 2002: 13, 43ff.). Certainly, doubts may well be raised about how adequately the historicizing mind can know the historicizable world. This is the metaphysical suspicion behind historical hermeneutics. That goes for Gadamer, as much as for Dilthey, Droysen, or Vico, for example. It even leads, with Theodor Lessing, to simply recognizing that history is a means of attributing meaning to what is essentially meaningless [Sinngebung des Sinnlosen]. However, the basic possibility of identity can be presumed, because the identity principle actually guarantees epistemological consistency, however deceptive the data it works with. It is a most effective remedy for the epistemological dilemma the historicized world represents. The point is: the historicized world is the product not just of human action and thought, but of human action and thought conditioned by history,—by historical knowledge as much as by historical conditions. Writing about or representing history are historical acts happening now, literally history-making acts. The attempt to represent historical reality comprehensively (which also necessarily includes historians and their work) becomes a further historical fact in historical reality that, in its turn, needs to be integrated into the total historical reality being represented by each and every historian, which creates a new historical reality requiring a new representation, and so on. The result is: the total reality of the historicized world becomes inconceivable; the historicized world remains unconscious of the ramifications of its historicization. In the historicized world, history [crg] discovers its own redundancy. History’s own identical, self-object (history [crg]) is, objectively, constantly receding. Much more of it exists than ever emerges into consciousness: ‘the suspicion grows that the historical process is something more inclusive than all the existing individual standpoints, and that our basis of thought, demonstrably atomized as it is, has not kept up with what can be experienced. The horizon of what is visible [i.e.: ‘the mass of facts and points of view’] is greater than the intensity

Imprisoned by History 65 for systematization and constructive thinking achievable at present’ (Mannheim 1995: 217; cf. Mannheim 1979: 226). 2 This dilemma makes the identity principle indispensable. In these illusionary circumstances, history’s informative content as well as the corrective certainty based on it are really nothing substantial: they’re just illusions of definitiveness projected by the logical character of the identity principle itself. It ensures that, through the historian, history thinks self-referentially about itself. It makes thinking synonymous with historicizing. So what enables historians to construct historical frameworks of intelligibility is the historicized mind’s reflexive predisposition to historicize, not their particular technical expertise which is merely ancillary to the historicizing reflex. In this way too historicized thought puts the past first, defers automatically to the past. (c) Identitary thinking ensures that historical knowledge remains selfidentical, that it reproduces the same old thing. It also guarantees that the objects of historical knowledge, the objects it historicizes, are in some way or other historical. Since there is nothing that cannot be historicized, history is the indiscriminate, universal category. Whatever it identifies as historical, becomes ipso facto the same as any other historical object. History’s lack of discrimination turns the most heterogeneous objects into the same historical stuff. For illustration, take the BBC History Magazine (June 2006): it holds up to historicized society a mirror of the heterogeneous equivalence [Ausgleich] of all things it perpetuates. It comprises, amongst others, articles on 1950s skiffle (under the rubric ‘All our yesterdays’), Richard III, the Berlin Olympic Stadium as a Nazi legacy in connection with the football World Cup, Pontefract liquorice cakes, mass-killing in the twentieth century, and the Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume’s, adventures in Paris. These are all historical issues represented by historians with the relevant specialized historical knowledge, topical commonplaces of the same comprehensive discipline, identical components of the self-same universal category. They reveal why history is the ultimate principle of stability and intelligibility. Whatever is, is historical. Whatever happens, is historicizable. It’s reassuring, recognizable,—after all, it’s all the same. This same stability also means that heterogeneous objects within the same universal category are interchangeable. It produces a conspicuous feature of historicized consciousness, its predilection for anachronistic equivalences. Hence, described as the ‘Ferrari of the high seas’, a tea-clipper, vintage 1869 (The Cutty Sark), is made the same [gleich], put on the same level, as a luxury sports car, vintage 2007 (e.g. the Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorani Coupé F1?) delivering a maximum speed of 218 mph.3 Equivalences such as these come out routinely as the banalities of the historicized mentality—as is evident, e.g., in the information-sheet distributed by the City Council of Leicester, Leicester Link (March 2007). A two-page, lavishly illustrated spread profiles the £1.5 million revamp of its Newark Houses Museum (along the “inclusive”, socially “stabilizing” lines advocated for the ‘hub museums’ participating in the Renaissance in the Regions programme). It

66 Imprisoned by History traces the history of Leicester from the 1970s back to Tudor times, including reconstructed rooms and streets, dating from the 1970s, 1950s, and 1920s and a First World War trench. Its curator enthuses: ‘“it’s not just about walking in and looking at objects in a case. It’s about getting involved in the experience.”’ The reorganization is designed so that ‘you’ll soon be able to fi nd out about the past in unusual, hands-on ways’ (LCC 2007: 10). Unusual, but not too unusual. It concludes by mentioning a wood panelled room ‘in the oldest part of the building’ which will be the setting for a night with the Tudors: ‘Fitted out with period furniture, it seems a world apart from our own lives. But says Nick [the curator], “They lived more than 400 years ago but had the same concerns as us—work, food, health. It’s not that different really”’ (LCC 2007: 11).4 Here too history turns out to be nothing if not the usual, the same old thing: the equivalence of everything. The same newspaper contains an example of a further variation on the logic of the same in historicized thinking: the convertible character of past and present. An editorial, entitled ‘Looking forward into the past . . . ’ by the Leader of the City Council stresses that ‘we must never forget that we are one of England’s great historic cities with a wealth of historic buildings to explore’. On the one hand, it refers to archaeological evidence uncovered in excavations for a new John Lewis store that indicate Leicester’s ‘major significance in Roman times’ (thereby vindicating what Baudrillard calls the link between postmodernity and the Palaeolithic: i.e. the past emerges only by excavating for the present (Baudrillard 1992: 108)). On the other, it anticipates the opening of St. Pancras International Station which will link the city to Paris and Brussels ‘with only a change of platforms required’. It concludes: ‘Four hours to do a journey which took the Romans 40 days’ (LCC 2007: 3). Converted into the past, the conceited present always relies on history for its self-enhancement. In case this banal example should lack the unimpeachable credibility only academic status confers: the identical device also appears in quite sophisticated arguments. The same presumption of trans-historical convertibility is implicit in the reported comparison (sustained by the underlying structure of nomadic culture) that makes ancient bronze axes and iron swords the same as small atomic bombs (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 503). Or again in Elias’s assertions: that nations can be described as ‘everlasting’ for those who constitute them, since in their essence they are ‘always the same’ [immer das gleiche] whether one is speaking of the tenth or the twentieth century’; that, similarly, it is ‘more than a fortuitous analogy’ that the relationship between lords in feudal society is like that between states in the modern industrial world (Elias 1976a: XXXIV; 1976b: 85; Elias 2000: 235, 463); or that the ‘escalation of terror’ in aggressive, North American Indian tribal society is mutatis mutandis ‘closely related’ to the escalation of terror in international politics in the age of atomic weapons (Elias 1988: 140). What binds them together is the ‘developmental curve of Western society itself’ due to the ‘distanciating’ perspective from the ‘higher level

Imprisoned by History 67 synthesis’ offered by Elias’ developmental sociology (Elias 1988: 179). Further, the same convertible equivalences produce categorical coordinators, the familiar stabilizing mechanisms, commonplaces, regularities [Gesetzmäßigkeiten], ‘expository devices’, within historical explanation (cf. Thomas 2006: 4). These comprise sources, origins, traditions, trajectories, heritages, legacies, precedents, identities; disciplinary types (e.g. military history, local history, etc.), or disciplinary categorizations (e.g. ‘early modern history’ or ‘late modern history’, the oxymoronic ‘contemporary history’, or the tautological ‘ancient history’). They also include nominalistic entities, ideal-types, narrative substances, such as ‘revolution’ (that can be ‘Glorious’, ‘French’, ‘Russian’, or ‘Velvet’), ‘war’ (that can be ‘Phoney’ or ‘Cold’), or ‘feudalism’, ‘absolutism’, or ‘nation’, ‘state’, etc. They all generate the self-consistent equivalence of historical objects. Identitary constants, anachronistic equivalences, and categorical coordinators such as these all enforce the recurrence of the same. They establish in the chaos of events interchangeable regularities indispensable for making history make sense. Without them it would be impossible to assert that the historical process shapes human behaviour, the very idea of the ‘fundamental historicity of human beings’ would vanish immediately, and no-one would realize ‘that the possibilities for constructing human existence conform to a law that remains self-identical [die sich gleich bleibt]’ (Elias 1976b: 379).5 But with them, with these indiscriminate equivalences, historical explanation displays its coercive force. It reveals itself as pure ideology. (d) Identitary thinking ensures the alleged objectivity of historical knowledge. Ranke’s paradigmatic injunction, that the historian should represent the past ‘as it actually was’, is an identitary formulation. To portray the past in its own particularity, in its authenticity [Eigentlichkeit], is to portray it the way it was: to show that it was the way it was. Here, though, a crucial distinction must be made. As mentioned earlier, history operates not like a sculptor shaping a substance (e.g. marble) that could arbitrarily take many different forms into a specific form (e.g. Rodin’s sculpture, Thought) that then becomes, in its own right, an object in the world, for the world. Instead, it works according to its underlying identity principle. Its self-constituting tautology makes history (knowledge of the past) the same as history (the past). It substitutes its own historical sign of the past for the past itself. History appears as authentic signs—as sites (e.g. a vast field of long narrow huts), artefacts (e.g. glass show-cases with babies’ clothes, or suitcases, or shoes in them), documents (e.g. a list of badges identifying categories of prisoner), testimonies (dog-eared postcards, identity-papers scorched at the edges) that have to be read and interpreted. Historians substitute other authentic signs for them—exhibition catalogues, monographs, essays and articles, documentary films, historical maps, statistical tables—his or her readings and interpretations of the authentic signs, that in turn are read and interpreted by other historians.

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To conclude: in all these ways identitary thinking makes history ultimately persuasive, utterly dominant. Since the ‘grand narratives’ that once held the world together with a binding sense have apparently lost credibility, historical identity alone remains to make reality real. It responds to a ‘quasi-theological need for certainty’ in society on a par with religious fundamentalism (cf. Jameson 1988: 35). So it enlists in its cause the already coercive figures of process, growth, making, and shaping, themselves configurations of historical identity. It fi xes its object as it actually was: it keeps it stable, holds it steady, however much it is revised, however much it may change (cf. Greimas 1970: 104, 110–111). Certainly, as a procedure for selfcategorization or for being socially categorized, identity seems extremely mutable in this ‘liquid modernity’ that is the historicized world (Bauman 2006: 24ff., 29ff). But identity was always mutable: like some high-grade polymer it is both immensely resilient and immensely flexible. Under the appropriate social- and psychopathological conditions anything can be identified with virtually anything,—as in the case (mentioned by Freud) of the child who, having lost the kitten he loved, so much identified with it that he actually became the lost kitten, crawling around, mewing, eating from a saucer, etc. (Freud 1973: 48). What social- and psychopathological conditions could be more conducive than the historicized world? Precisely here, where mankind fi nally faces its own self-reflection, it fi nds itself in a vast phantasmagoria containing the most heterogeneous objects of its narcissistic desire (cf. Buck-Morss 1993: 92). Further, the identity principle guarantees that historical discourse remains identical with itself. It ensures that the conditions for the semiotic substitution of itself (as the reconstructed historical knowledge of the past) for itself (the past) remain the same. Its constantly self-consistent, self-referential character ensures history dominates. History is a thought-style that confi nes itself and its objects ‘within a circle’, within the same old circle, a type of discourse that produces meaning by substituting itself for itself. Either way, ‘it closes the door to new significations contained, like virtual entities, in the structure it discloses’. Hence, ‘far from being a motor, it is more like a brake’ [loin d’être un moteur, elle serait plutôt un frein] (cf. Greimas 1970: 110–111). Most importantly, in substituting semiotically the same thing for the same thing, the identity principle convinces us that history’s illusory objectivity produces truth. It does so by fabricating not merely a ‘likeness’ of the past (as historians believe (Black & MacRaild 2000: 129)),—but its simulacrum. It reveals that history was never anything but ‘an immense model of simulation’ (Baudrillard 1992: 19). Clearly, though history is a comprehensive and heterogeneous form of knowledge, ‘the texture of what actually did happen is remarkably thin’(cf. Gay 1979: 9). History has arbitrarily decided what evidential traces of itself ultimately survive: the order and meaning it imposes arise from what it declares redundant. Clearly, the existential reality of the world that existed before our own conscious

Imprisoned by History 69 life-time is unimaginably more intensive and extensive than the totality of its historical representation. The total historical representation is not ‘like’ that pre-existing existential reality, since that reality is not there to reveal how ‘like it’ it really is. Instead, based on the identity principle, the historical representation stands in for it, substitutes itself for it, as its exact, but virtual replica (like the historicized commodities on sale in museum shops). In fact, the more exactly replicated, the more perfect the simulacrum becomes, the less it ceases to be seen as a representation, the more it replaces reality. Ultimately historical representation eliminates the past entirely (just as the live, real-time TV transmission of a news event eliminates the event in itself for the viewers watching it) (Baudrillard 1981: 76, 160). History, as a technology of technologies, with its absolute grasp of reality, makes it the way it was by substituting itself for it. It is the ultimate identitary form (A=A), both ultimate truth and ultimate narcissistic illusion (cf. Baudrillard 1999: 71–72).

2.3. Identitary thinking (2): enforcing physical compliance The identity principle, being absolutely coercive, must both symbolically and physically—in ethical, social, and political terms—be absolutely violent. It comes out in the ideological identities identitary thinking forges and the structures of political and social domination it affi rms. These have real, visceral power to enforce behavioural compliance. They need this power, since it takes repressive force to create a ‘fi xed subject’, tied to its commonplace in time (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 34). They need the violence it represents to ‘acquire an intellectual and social character’ as the working subject (e.g. the skilled factory worker, the office administrator, the IT technician etc.) becomes intellectualized and socialized, as evinced in particular by history-focussed behaviour and the public value it produces (cf. Negri 2005: 59). Here, through identitary thinking and the sufficient reasons backing it up, history transmits politically, ideologically coercive force through the generalized social violence it inflicts. Here it really bares its claws: here it induces real apprehension. (a) To see this involves distinguishing between self-identity as constituting one’s ‘personal unity’; and historical or social identity. These are different things: though the imprecise, indiscriminate terminology of historical discourse often conflates them. Indeed, promoting integration and equalization, the history ideology has a distinct interest in conflating them. The ‘unity of each human life’ is ‘our consciousness of the self-identity pervading our life-thread of occasions’; it is ‘nothing other than knowledge of a special strand of unity within the general unity of nature’ (Whitehead 1967c: 187). But historical identity is an instrument for managing social organization, a form of socio-historical categorization of human beings. Identification, as such, involves classification, a logical procedure. It means recognizing a given object by reference to a larger conceptual

70 Imprisoned by History scheme (e.g. apples, pears, tomatoes = fruit; this mushroom—unlike all the other fungi on the table—is edible; Pluto, the object orbiting the Sun at the outer edge of the Solar System, is no longer a planet but a large asteroid amongst others in the Kuyper Belt). Identitary thinking is the formal principle of concept-formation: it produces an ordered, rationalized world. In enveloping the world with skeins of conceptualization, it makes human self-orientation possible, even though living in a totally rationalized world constantly generates, rather than diminishes, apprehension. As the ultimate repository of all heterogeneous values, as the technology of technologies with the capacity of rationalizing everything, equalizing everything, history monopolizes identity production, the fabrication of socio-historical categories. History, being history, uniquely, incontrovertibly, authorizes itself not just to produce identities to impose on the kaleidoscopic profusion of human existence, not just to confiscate one’s ‘life-thread of occasions’ and substitute for it socio-historical categories and trends; but to dictate arbitrarily which types of identity, which varieties of categorical coordinator, will be available at any one moment for the purpose of classifying people, for attributing identity. (b) The notion of historical context is the most familiar form of historical categorization. It coincides with the carceral mentality that pervades the administered world. The rationalizing assumption it rests on is the conviction that everything has a historical context which alone gives it meaning, that everything has a place where it belongs. But context itself is nothing if not a self-referential category: who a historical figure is, defi nes his or her context; what the context is, defi nes the historical figure. In that it restricts the possibilities through which this figure manifests him- or herself, it functions as thought-coercion (cf. Greimas 1970: 110). In general, ‘historians must submit their work to the discipline of historical context. The case against “presentism” and “deconstructionism” is that they remove events from their real time and place, forcing them into a conceptual framework which would have meant nothing to the age in question’ (Tosh 1999: 132). So, commenting on Wolfgang Mommsen’s work on Max Weber, Richard Evans remarks: ‘it revolutionised our understanding of the 20th century’s most influential sociologist by setting him firmly in the context of his times and showing him to be a liberal nationalist and imperialist’ (Evans 2004). Implicit in this carceral attitude is the presumption that ‘on the whole people live in environments that suit them’ (Fernández-Armesto 2006a: 7); that ‘however, bold and profusive the imagination of an individual even in thinking might be, he cannot move too far from the contemporary standard of thought and speech. He remains bound [verhaftet] to this standard quite simply by the linguistic instruments at his disposal. If he moves too far away from the dominant usages of language and thought, he ceases to be intelligible’ (Elias 2003: 128). Historical classifications, therefore, have a socially coercive function (that, by the way, negates the very idea of an artistic, aesthetic avant-garde).

Imprisoned by History 71 They are not just strategies of historical explanation (relating to the past), but political propositions (bearing immediately on the present). History thus arrogates uniquely to itself the right to identify everyone, to tell them what and where their place in the present—now—is. Through social relationships, Elias insists, ‘every person in this thronging crowd belongs in a particular place. [ . . . ] Everyone of the people who walk past each other on the street as strangers apparently without any connection with each other is [ . . . ] bound by meshes of invisible chains to other people [durch eine Fülle von unsichtbaren Ketten an andere Menschen gebunden], be it chains to do with work or property, or chains to do with their desires or affects’ (Elias 2003: 30). Historical relationships only reinforce this social bondage. They offer the individual a collective ‘we-image’ [Wir-Bild]. This provides him or her with a past far beyond his or her own personal, individual past and, at the same time [zugleich (i.e. equivalent to it)], permits something of past people to live on in those present’. So, ‘due to the continuity of tradition, belonging to a “we-group” offers the individual a chance of survival beyond his or her limited physical existence, of survival in the memory of the chain of generations [Generationenskette] living on in the future’ (Elias 2003: 297). (c) This socio-historical bondage operates most effectively in traditional societies. However, because it is an inherently compulsive, universal referent in modern mass-society, history is employed ideologically to the same effect. It operates on the self-serving presumption that, unless ‘people can place themselves and their communities within a sweep of time’, they will fi nd ‘no way out for their disembodied existence’. History, like some kind of narcotic, is ‘satisfying that craving for a place in time’. History is a synthetic stand-in for ‘the ties that once bound people to their pasts [ . . . ] [that] have now broken down’: such as ‘a sense of social class; an active religious faith; a tight-knit labour-market’, etc. Precisely because of ‘an ever less defi ned sense of one’s place in time and space, it is natural to seek out a deeper sense of belonging’. For this reason too the National Trust’s History Matters campaign confi rms its coercive intent: it offers ‘a rich opportunity to help in the ongoing struggle to strengthen the ties that can bind people to place and past’ (Hunt 2006: 27 (my italics)). With its unique right to determine the identity of anyone, to categorize everyone in terms of the place where they belong, history affi rms its propensity for ideological coercion. A British Chancellor of the Exchequer (and, subsequently, Prime Minister) would naturally endorse the formation of a British national veterans archive ‘as a thread that will bind generations together for many years to come’ (Brown 2006b); he would naturally assert ‘that our success as Great Britain [ . . . ] requires us to rediscover and build from our history and apply in our own time the shared values that bind us together and give us common purpose’; he would naturally advocate ‘rediscovering the roots of our identity in our shared beliefs’ and want to ‘root the teaching of citizenship more closely in history’ (Brown

72 Imprisoned by History 2006a). Where history is concerned, academic and political discourses have the same ideological foundation, the same ideological intent,—a bourgeois ideal of pacified, tranquillized happiness, given that ‘that’s the only way we have of knowing how to be happy—to believe that we are identical. It’s the delusion of the poor in spirit. It’s like Purgatory equipped with electric fans and streamline furniture. It’s the caricature of joyousness. Joy means unity; happiness means plurality’ (Miller 2006a: 422). To see the ideological violence in identitary thinking, to gauge its sheer, brute force, one needs to realize (as Nietzsche pointed out) that ‘one must call on enormous, countervailing forces in order to confront the natural, all-too-natural progression towards the same [progressus in simile], this training of human beings to make them all similar, usual, average, herdlike—to make them common’ (Nietzsche 1988a: 222; §268). Or, conversely, just invert the perspective. Replace the impression of dislocation personal existence assumes from the historian’s own disembodied, temporally transcendent perspective [illusio]. Take instead the way history bears down on very much embodied, personal existence, its overwhelming force wrenching it from its “roots” [aesthesis]. (For the rootless, “disembodied” social predicament historians bemoan and historical identity allegedly corrects, is—in a historicized world already steeped in ‘historical culture’—nothing if not a historical phenomenon, caused by history, history’s responsibility, history must take the blame for.) In 1935 in a coffee-house in Vienna Hanns Maier reads in the newspaper that he is now identifiable, categorizable as Jewish, according to the Nuremberg Laws just come into force ‘over in Germany’ (Améry 2002: 153). Three years or so later he is a refugee in Belgium, then a displaced alien in a French detention camp by the Spanish border, then a member of the Belgian partisans, then a torture-victim in a Gestapo interrogation-centre, then a prisoner in Auschwitz and in BergenBelsen. A decade later, he emerges as Jean Améry, his French name repudiating his Austrian “roots”, a would-be German-language author resident in Brussels. Now, immediately post-war, the socio-political environment does not allow the former concentration-camp inmate to be Non-Jewish. What now identifies him as Jewish, is his ‘Not Non-Jewishness’ (Améry 2002: 167). Now no-one listens to his resentment towards Germany: the Cold War has begun, the ex-Nazi state is the West’s front-line. From now on, thanks to history, he leads the life of an exile, bereft of any ‘trust in the world’, ‘at home in his homelessness’ [die Einrichtung in der Fremdheit], until his last suicide-attempt in Salzburg in 1978 (Améry 2002: 168–169). The violence history infl icts is not just visceral (as in the flailing Améry received at the hands of the Gestapo), nor just symbolic (as in its ability to dictate to you who you are and put you in the place where you belong), but also existential (since historical identity ideologically blocks your refusal to identify or be identified). Confronted by the ‘objective insanity of history’ [von dem objektiven Wahnwitz der Geschichte], you are rendered powerless: history’s identitary thinking negates your existential choice not to be

Imprisoned by History 73 the person its remorseless, identitary rationale stipulates you are (cf. Sebald 2006: 158, 162).

3. HISTORICIZATION AS SELF-INCARCERATION ‘The writing of history requires the utmost precision in the handling of language. Easily said but very hard work to achieve. Nothing is easier than to slip into weary cliché [ . . . ]. This is one of the ways in which a work of history differs totally from a novel or a poem: a creative writer may quite legitimately exploit the ambiguities and resonances of language, but a historian should make special efforts to be as clear and as explicit as possible, and to separate out unambiguously what is securely established from what is basically speculation’ (Marwick 2001: 215 (my italics)). But for historicized consciousness cliché and precision, ambiguity and clarity, resonance and explicitness, really can’t be mutually exclusive: being ‘clear and explicit’ is itself nothing other than a ‘resonance of language’,—a rhetorical strategy, a sophistical ‘verbal effect’ [effet de dire] (cf. Cassin 1995: 73)! The conventional distinction between historical content and linguistic form collapses. Underlying both is historicized thinking. That comes out of the analysis of the figures of process and identity. Before a single word is written, they have already decided what constitutes clarity. The coercive thought-style they represent has already decided what establishes security. Marwick’s exhortation is symptomatic. Precision and clarity result from coerced behaviour ( ‘very hard work’, ‘special efforts’) deriving from both a confi ning self-identity (‘historian’ and ‘creative writer’ are not the same) and a binding obligation (‘securely established’). Moreover, as an exhortation it has its own resonance and ambiguity. The historian dismissing creative writing, aesthetic innovation, as being “insecure” is a sophistical stricture symptomatic of historicized consciousness. But the aesthetic dimension is the only real touchstone of existential veracity. It alone offers the means of articulating precisely how things feel, what one really feels about things. It alone can shatter ‘the mirror of habit and rationalization [raisonnement] that immediately takes itself for reality and ensures that we never see it’ (Proust 1971b: 304). The very artefacts it produces enact human situatedness: they lend immediate, but transient sentience an incontrovertible ‘factological’ presence.6 History’s coercive, security-conscious thought-style anaesthetizes this indispensable, cognitive aptitude. It represents wilful mental impairment on a par with routine narcotics abuse. In the historicized world historicizing may come instinctively, like a sixth sense, enveloping the world we experience in shrouds of habitual processes and identities: all the more reason to dread it; all the more reason for history to forfeit its liberal-humanistic charisma. Historicized consciousness and the historical knowledge it affords resemble forms of parapraxis

74 Imprisoned by History [Fehlleistung], psychopathological symptoms of a ‘normal’ neurotic dysfunctionality in contemporary culture and society. It breeds a mentally selfrestricting, self-inhibiting complex it takes reference to Classical thought to reveal. Classical humanistic learning relies essentially on the innate eclecticism of the mind, since the ‘power of the human mind’ makes it ‘so nimble and quick, so ready [ . . . ] to look in all directions, that it cannot even concentrate exclusively on one thing at a time, but applies its powers to many objects, not only on the same day but at the same moment’ (Quintilian 2001: I, 245; 1.12.2). But with its coercive thought-style historicized consciousness compromises mainly thinking itself. A case in point is Elias’s The Civilizing Process where the ethical aspirations of human sociability are negated by the historicist apparatus designed to produce them. But then Elias’s sociology is a distinctly historicized sociology. For him it is axiomatic: ‘Research into long-term structural changes in societies, constantly drawing on historical detail, is one of the central tasks of sociology’ (Elias 2006: 296). (a) Certainly, the ‘civilizing process’ culminates in the idea of a civilized humanity. It presupposes ‘a more durable balance, a better attunement, between the overall demands of people’s social existence on the one hand, and their personal needs and inclinations on the other’. Like Freud, Elias sees the possibility of happiness and freedom arising from social and political arrangements that would reduce sociogenic and psychogenic pressures, since ‘then it may even be the rule, that an individual person can attain the optimal balance between his or her imperative drives claiming satisfaction and fulfilment and the constraints imposed upon them (and without which human beings would remain brutish animals and a danger as much to themselves as to others)’ (Elias 1976b: 453–454; Elias 2000: 446–447). The historicist dynamic is meant to clarify the sense of ambivalence that seems to contaminate the whole idea of Western civilization. If it is possible to understand more clearly why with ‘gradual civilization a series of specific civilizational difficulties arise’, it may be possible ‘to make them amenable to being steered in a more conscious way’ (Elias 1976a: LXXX; Elias 2000: xiv). Conversely the ‘process’ itself is irresistible and all embracing, ‘hardly different from natural events’ (Elias 1976a: LXXX; Elias 2000: xiv). It must start with the premise that individuals are totally historicized entities whose totally historicized existence seems totally natural to them. It must immediately exclude the idea that the organization of human life can be attributed to physical, chemical, biological, or psychological factors. It must result ‘from contexts of events that regulate and perpetuate themselves’, from self-identical, societal factors (Elias 2006: 56–57, 59, 71). It has to, otherwise the civilizational discontent it addresses would be neither entirely accessible to, nor entirely explicable by, socio-historical analysis. So the individual’s personal development does not just recapitulate the entire civilizing process (Elias 1976a: LXXIV–LXXV; Elias 2000: xi). The

Imprisoned by History 75 behavioural patterns that ‘shape’ [cf. Modellierung] him from his early years like a ‘second nature’ [eine Art von zweiter Natur], have been ‘imprinted’ on him and kept operative within him by ‘an ever more powerful, strictly organized social control’. Typically, significantly, they have nothing to do with any general, a-historical purposes of the human species, as a species. They have developed through history, out of the total, coherent structure of Western history, out of the specific forms of relationship that are shaped [bilden] in its course and the constraints binding people together [Verfl echtungszwängen] they transform and re-form [um- und weiterbilden] (Elias 1976b: 443–444; cf. Elias 2000: 441). (b) Accordingly, therefore, in becoming socialized, individuals never attain total autonomy. As they develop they realize they are dependent on each other. To stress this necessarily self-imposed, social interdependence of human beings, Elias sees human relationships as ‘figurations’, social bonds independent of the individuals constituting them yet unrealizable without them. A ludic analogy illustrates the concept. The ‘easiest example one can choose’ is dancing. Dances such as a mazurka, a minuet, a polonaise, a tango, rock’n roll are each, in figurational terms, analogous to states, cities, families or capitalist, communist, or feudal-systems: both offer dynamic structures that co-ordinate and regulate the movements of individual but interdependent agents (Elias 1976a: LXVIII; Elias 2000: 482). Elias brings out these figurations in a comprehensive survey of the conventions regulating social manners since the Renaissance and of the rituals of Mediaeval courtly society and the practices of state governance in the era of Absolutism. They have a pacifying effect, he argues. The changing social or political conventions make coarse or aggressive behaviour a source of embarrassment for others. They exert coercive pressure through the guilt and anxiety they induce. They also make “uncivilized” behaviour self-incriminating. Be it from socially uncouth individuals or politically rebellious knights, it is repaid with shame and catastrophe. These figurations drive the ‘civilizing process’ by means of a sophisticated social ‘mechanism’, a productive tension between ‘coercion by others’, the imprint of society on the inner self’ [Fremdzwang], and self-coercion, the ‘smooth, often unconscious internalized reproduction of the social imprint’ [Selbstzwang] (Elias 1976a: 173–174; Elias 2000: 109). On the one hand, Elias rejects the notion of the socialized individual as a homo clausus essentially distinct from the social process in which he (or she) is implicated. On the other, the mutating social figurations do produce a historicized type with a characteristic psychopathology. This type understands itself as an “ego” divided by a continually mounting wall of shame from others. These civilizational self-controls, functioning in part automatically, are experienced in individual self-perception as a wall, either between “subject” and “object” or between one’s own “self” and other people (“society”) (Elias 1976a: LXI– LXII, 230; Elias 2000: 142, 478–479). The “civilized” individual, subject to a high degree of ‘regulation and restraint’ [Regelung und Einklammerung],

76 Imprisoned by History has a peculiarly divided self. He becomes an inhibited, apprehensive, duplicitous creature, adopting a public persona that can be socially validated while retaining for his own privacy his socially despicable inner-self (Elias 1976a: 261–263; Elias 1976b: 398ff.; Elias 2000: 159–160, 415ff.). Social figurations in this historicized form demonstrate that the ‘civilizing process’ offers only relative forms of liberation. Just as an inmate’s release from a prison-house does not mean absolute freedom but merely different and less onerous restraints imposed by society as a whole, so it facilitates through internalized forms of self-coercion a smoother, but ultimately no less coercive interplay of social relationships. There is no behaviour without social moulding: ‘the person without restrictions is a phantom’ (Elias 1976a: 254–245, 298; Elias 2000: 156, 181). The historicist vision is nothing if not coercive. No society can exist without human drives being channelled and regulated by the coercive pressures people impose on each other. No society can become civilized without the shame and apprehension generated by human co-existence. The tension between political and economic power that creates the social fabric at any given time, forms ‘the lock on the chains by which people bind themselves to each other’. Even the concluding vision of a civilized society of pacified individuals has them ‘working together hand in hand in a richly interlinked chain’ [die in der reichgegliederten Kette der gemeinsamen Aufgaben Hand in Hand arbeiten] (Elias 1976b: 437, 447, 454; Elias 2000: 437, 443, 447).7 Civilization, in other words, has all the appeal of an industrious chaingang with, at any one time, some detainees wishing to get involved and others pretending to distanciate themselves. An individual may well insist on stressing his independence without realizing that, ‘through social needs he himself has generated, he is locked into an immense network of chains of dependencies’, that the very sense of personal freedom he enjoys is the reverse side not only of the social regulation of his behaviour, but also of his own self-control, of feeling solitary and self-immured, of him being his own ‘prison-warder’ [Kerkermeister] (Elias 2003: 177, 203–204). It generates a specific personality type, with its own psychopathology,—an apprehensive, repressed homunculus, bred in the laboratory of history, mass-produced by the process of civilization. It exemplifies what history does, what its outcomes are. Synonymous with ‘postmodern man’ him- or herself, it is a furtive, devious, repressed, oppressed, apprehensive, inhibited, passive-reactive creature, others have variously described as a ‘little man’ (Reich 1975), a ‘mass man’ (Ortega y Gasset 1993), a ‘man without qualities’ (Musil 1978), as the ‘colorless individuals who make up the world of engineers, architects, dentists, pharmacists, teachers, etc.’ (Miller 1982a: 274), a ‘one-dimensional man’ (Marcuse 1986), homo oeconomicus (Horkheimer & Adorno 1973), homo laborans (Arendt 1974), ‘organization man’ (Whyte 2002), ‘posthistoric man’ (Seidenberg 1950), the ‘last man’ (Nietzsche 1988d; Fukuyama 1992).

Imprisoned by History 77 As a result of behaviour being conditioned by history and its continuum of “processes”, of understanding their social self-organization through the focus of history, human beings present themselves in this historicized type as ‘the units with the highest degree of integration that we know of’ [Menschen sind die höchsten Integrationseinheiten, die wir kennen] (Elias 1983: 236). ‘No human being,’ says Elias, ‘lacks the capacity for self-restraint’. Becoming socialized means internalizing patterns of self-regulation and self-coercion: ‘Characteristic of the restraint-pattern of civilizing processes at the later stages is the tendency to be temperate in almost all respects and on almost all occasions’ (Elias 1992: 146–147; cf. Elias 1988: 128–129). Utterly affi rmative, identitary in principle, Elias’ concept of self-coercion is far removed from, say, Nietzsche’s self-coercive, ascetic idealism dedicated to resisting the life-diminishing forms of existence available in the historicized world. Instead, it affi rms precisely the historicized type that is reinforced ideologically by political exhortations to pursue history-focussed behaviour as a means of self-integration into an ‘inclusive’, stabilized society. A living symptom of history’s actual psycho- and sociopathological effects, this historicized, integrated, human type represents the equalized, social level of human existence in the historicized world. However, the extremely adaptive ‘plasticity’ this human type evinces through self-coercion is deceptive: it is evinced just as much (e.g.) in insect-species in their phylogenetic (as opposed to an individualized) plasticity. Furthermore, in (e.g.) circumstances of large-scale environmental change, its cognitive and social limits would soon be reached. So given that a line of descent becomes poorer in species as it approaches extinction, the fact that homo sapiens is the sole survivor of the family of hominids suggests that, in phylogenetic terms, if not on the individual scale, its adaptive capacities may be a biological liability (Schaeffer 2007: 192–194). Hence, the very existence of this historicized, socially integrated human type refutes the claim that history humanizes. It demonstrates that the “civilizing process” with its penitential restraints was never ever a process because it was never civilizing: it never civilized anyone. No wonder history’s humanistic pretensions are spurious. (c) As the Civilizing Process confi rms, all historical constructions operate in the ludic mode [illusio] (rather than in the existentially immediate, aesthetic mode [aesthesis]), enforcing a schism between pseudo-reality on the one hand, and experiential estrangement on the other (cf. Davies 2006a: 252–253; Davies 2004: 5–15). For Elias it is axiomatic that ‘playmodels’ [Spielmodelle], as part of ‘the resources of all human relationships’, are ‘models of relatively regulated social relationships’. Figurations of ludic interaction represent patterns which human behaviour can’t help assuming. They come, in other words, with illusion built in. What from the perspective of any individual “player” may well seem to be disorder, represents order in terms of society as whole. Hence, he asserts: ‘amongst people, as in the rest of the world, there is no such thing as absolute chaos’ (Elias 2006:

78


94–97). Moreover, in that it would seal itself off from being falsified, this type of argument is in itself self-deluding. In this way, the very idea of a civilizing “process” exemplifies the illusory nature of historicized thinking. Figuration, as its essential structural element, conceived as a form of dance, sets up the ludic system. But that is by no means all: Elias sees all action in history in terms of ‘play’. He is concerned (e.g.) with the ‘whole play of processes’ [im gesamten Spiel der Prozesse] that permits individual behaviour to have a wide social impact. He describes the state’s monopoly of power in terms of it helping to maintain the ‘fundamental rules of the games [Spielregeln] it plays’ (Elias 1976b: 62, 159; Elias 2000: 222, 277). ‘Play’ also applies most frequently to historical action seen as depending on the mechanical coordination of various component parts, as in clockwork, or in the ‘dynamics of interweaving’ various strands of behaviour into a tight social fabric (Elias 1976b: 135, 434ff.; Elias 2000: 264, 436ff.). Underpinning this thinking is the principle that the socio-historical braiding of human relationships, operating as it does under its own rules [Eigengesetzlichkeit des Menschengefl echts], is incomparably more powerful than any single individual involved in it (Elias 2003: 82). However, what ultimately is presented as an objective, evidentially verified account of socio-historical tendencies, boils down to a sequence of images [Bilder]. Thus Elias’s civilizing process betrays its sophistical character: it’s nothing more than Volney’s ‘magic lantern’, a form of nostalgic story-telling, the mesmerizing outcome of deceptive practice, all based on the cognitive paradigm of representation, of pictorial likeness. The account of the “process” relies paradigmatically on images drawn from the realms of nature and technology, so that it ipso facto presents itself figuratively, rather than literally. The historical survey discloses social developments in ‘outline’ [Umrisse] as it surveys ‘the whole sequence of images’ [die Bilderreihe als Ganzes] the successive centuries represent. The work concludes by showing how it contributes a ‘more “closed” (i.e. comprehensive) image [einem geschlossenerem Bild] of the total structure of history and of the human cosmos in general’ (Elias 1976a: XX–XXI, 144; Elias 1976b: 39, 434; Elias 2000: 92, 209, 436, 456–457). Any construction in the ludic mode, like any game with its constitutive rules, projects its own inherent necessity, its own coercive dynamic. As La Bruyère, that incomparable observer of social manners, remarks, no assembly debating an affair of capital importance can compare with the seriousness and severity that grips the players of a game of cards or dice over which pure chance, ‘this blind and fierce divinity’, presides (La Bruyère 2003: 138–139). That’s what makes it highly absorbing and intensely enthralling. Historical constructions are no different. The analysis of process and identity shows: once one starts to historicize, one can’t help thinking coercively,—in accordance with the pre-disposition of the sociolect. One has to come up with a ‘shaping process’, figures of ‘growth’, or identitary categorizations; one inevitably resorts to naturally or technically coercive vocabulary: these are the rules that generate the game, the ludic

Imprisoned by History 79 illusion. But it is only an illusion: there are always different games producing different illusions. The key issue is always to discover why, in any given situation, one type of ludic construction has preference: that’s how to expose its ideological agenda. Clearly, Elias’ civilizing process plays with eschatalogical models. It has a Biblical resonance with its implication of a self-incriminating humanity that finds redemption in a balance of social bonds and personal interests. It resonates with pre-established harmonies of the best of all possible worlds since, in Leibniz’s Essays on Theodicy (1710) as in neo-liberal ideology, there is no historical disorder that cannot be shown to evince an affi rmative, transcendental design. It has a Kantian tone, redolent of his essay ‘Idea of a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784), where the hypothetical vision of a harmonious world in which everyone has equal citizenship is realized through a dialectic of ‘unsocial sociability’ [ungesellige Geselligkeit], precisely the ‘polyphonic’ interplay of ‘social coercion’ and ‘self-coercion’ Elias stresses in his historicized sociological analysis (cf. Elias 1976b: 96; Elias 2000: 241; cf. Kant 1977a: 37). But it makes no mention of natural rights theories or of the contractual basis of social relationships entailing duties and entitlements, as proposed (e.g.) by Pufendorf or Rousseau, hence no concession to the conviction that ‘no society ever was, or ever can be, really held together by force’ (Huxley 1893b: 272). Certainly, it strikes anything but a Marxist note. Elias affi rms his own sociological interest in social structures and functions as well as the economies of power they’re involved in by censuring Marx for his politically dogmatic and propagandistic tendencies and the narrowness of his economic vision. Since it confl icts with his own, processual conception of social change (expressed in terms of the gradually changing rules of the games played by individuals as social actors in various social configurations), he suppresses Marx’s interest in situated knowledge and existential issues as imperative motives for changing the world (Elias 2006: 298–299). So, what Marx, in the name of liberation, in the Communist Party Manifesto (1848) would have people lose from the start, Elias retains and reinforces to the end: their chains. Ultimately all The Civilizing Process shows is that the past is really only a vast Lego Technics kit from which one can construct the most elaborate, the most ingenious, working historical models. The historical hyperconsciousness such playful modelling requires typifies historical thinking in a historicized world. (d) Furthermore, the coercive models historicized thinking inevitably fabricates compromise the sociological analysis. If figuration is the key social agent, there’s no more reason to historicize it than there is to historicize (e.g.) the agency of ‘world-historical’ individuals. The social bonds that create figurations of human behaviour may well be absolutely binding. To historicize them comprehensively through an ‘identitary process’ is like giving them a fail-safe, high security back-up. It blocks any objection to its identitary proposition that totally assimilates individuals to social groups. It eradicates entirely the tendency for social self-differentiation that seems

80 Imprisoned by History to be inherent in organic life, let alone an existential human reflex (cf. Simmel 1989b: 136–137; Simmel 2000: 9ff.). It obliterates the perceptive insight that the self of the poet in the act of creation has nothing to do with his routine, moral (i.e. socio-historical) person (cf. Proust 1971b: 248–249). It negates the fact that the social environment itself can generate dissidence as ‘its better self-consciousness’ (cf. Durkheim 1996: 96). It excludes the idea that any given individual may be unable to identify with any of the social groups available at any given moment. But in stressing the ‘malleability’ [Modellierbarkeit] of human beings as an indispensable prerequisite of the historical processes that “shape” them, it clearly shows it excludes human species-essential interests (Elias 1976b: 377–379, 443; Elias 2000: 402– 403, 441). Produced by coercive social figurations and internal constraints, the historicizing mentality [illusio] thus remains unconscious of the tragic, existential pathos of alienated consciousness [aesthesis] these self-same constraints produce. It has no apprehension of the alienation its domination generates. It withholds from consciousness the ideational capacity to differentiate between human existence (as it already exists) [Existenz] and what it is to be a human being [Wesen], hence, on that basis, to dissent from any prevailing reality structure (Scheler 1978: 52–53). It’s blind to its capacity to estrange people from their present surroundings, let alone from themselves and their own existence. In this respect Kafka’s diary entry for 8 January 1914 is existentially paradigmatic: ‘What have I in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself [ . . . ]’(Kafka 1981: 219). Certainly, there is no historical compulsion for anyone to identify with anything, least of all with whom one already is, let alone with whom one once was. But alienation, even self-alienation, is the price of rejecting the dominant, historical pseudo-reality of the already historicized world. Conversely, The Civilizing Process exemplifies historicized thinking, both coercive and illusory, coercive because illusory. So absorbed is it in the process thought-style and in the construction of its self-perpetuating logic, that everything it considers is ‘degraded into functions of an over-all process’: it simply loses touch with existence. As Hannah Arendt explains: ‘What the concept of process implies is that the concrete and the general, the single thing or event and the universal meaning have parted company. The process, which alone makes meaningful whatever it happens to carry along, has thus acquired a monopoly of universality and experience’ (Arendt 1993: 63, 64). Having a universal monopoly on sense and meaning makes it ipso facto ideologically compelling; that to this end it must lose touch with concrete existence makes it illusory. It also shows, paradigmatically, how in a historicized world the historicized mind, the mind that sees its historical consciousness as a product of history, becomes forcibly mired in its self-induced illusions, and so succumbs to a characteristic time-sickness, a symptomatic psychopathology. In the postmodern situation there are ample reasons for being apprehensive. Beyond the usual international political economic crises with their running sores of warfare and terrorism, there are

Imprisoned by History 81 also the familiar risks of environmental disaster, technological catastrophe, even the subversion of the genetic integrity of the human species itself. This ruined world is also a historical outcome. This is the historicized world, this is the world in which history dominates. But where else can the historicized mind, itself an agency integral to this world, look for reassurance than to history itself? It helplessly seeks self-redemption from the identical coercive processes that brought it to this point now. All it fi nds is the inherent redundancy of historical thinking, the fruitless, tautological, identity principle that dispels whatever humanistic charisma remains. The Civilizing Process may well see history as a smoothly organized open-prison for a self-incriminated, but ultimately constrained and pacified humanity. But it also reveals that all the historicized mind can come up with is a vision of the world that projects its own pacified self-constraint. The world becomes truly history’s internment-camp, doubly secure. The historicized thinking that condemns itself to incarceration, inevitably incarcerates us all.

3


Historicized consciousness is consciousness of being historically conscious, a historical hyper-consciousness. All the origins, precedents, periods, traditions, trajectories, heritages, legacies, identities, causes, products, and contexts which make history make sense, have become things of the past with a history of their own. These historical categories have solidified into historical fact, have affi rmed themselves as affi rmative categorical coordinators. As an apprehension, now, that everything of value now has historical value, is either in the past or from the past, historical hyper-consciousness can’t help putting the past fi rst, prioritizing remembrance. Hence, the present, now, is engulfed by history: history is not just the past, but also the always present,—life lived perpetually in the illusory mode of déjà-vu, careless with its actuality (cf. Bergson 2006: 123–124). It can’t be otherwise. The more history [crg] itself becomes historical, historical knowledge spreads, the forms it takes vary, and historical representations self-replicate virus-like through the population: the more thinking historically seems natural, the same things seem always to have happened before, and the more history-focussed behaviour is enforced. As history becomes more and more absorbed in itself, the now dissolves. Inevitably, the knowledge generated not just by professional historians, but by history-focussed behaviour in general, determines historical action and in turn becomes an historical object. The result is: history studies its own knowledge of itself; it enacts and studies itself. A world produced by self-consciously historical action, a society saturated with historical self-consciousness, a mind obsessed with historical representations: these all ensure the total historicization of reality and experience. Reality and experience, once totally historicized, transform historical knowledge. Henceforth, (1.) history [crg] works ideologically. Its ideological instrumentalization in neo-liberal politics exposes its essentially ideological nature: its attributions of sufficient reason operate self-referentially; it works in its own self-interest, a self-centred science; it makes redundant what it classifies as non-historical. However, though comprehensive, historical hyperconsciousness can recognize only how things have got to be the way they are. Certainly, by conjecturing possible future trajectories of past events, it


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might attempt to pre-empt them, but it can’t recognize the “not yet” it nevertheless incubates within itself. Consequently, the totally historicized world creates for itself (2.) an historical unconscious that not only expresses itself symbolically as the unintended or unforeseen accidental consequences of history-focussed behaviour, but turns out to have embodied in them ‘the actual essential forces of the age’ (Heidegger 1972: 89). Though it cannot imagine the possible realities it might be nurturing, historicized consciousness still senses their influence in (3.) everyday life, as configured institutionally by the prison, the laboratory, and the work-place. These are coercive environments, perpetuated by history-focussed behaviour and regulated by history as a management-technology, as a technology of technologies.

1. HISTORY AS IDEOLOGY In a totally historicized world, the idea that the historian-function can have a clear, objective view is not tenable. In fact, when it thinks it clearly views an object “out there”, or “back there”, in the past, it’s at its most deceptive: the whole technology which locates and identifies that object, it has created for itself, within its own cognitive situation, as a result of its own cognitive intention (as Chapters 4 and 5 will demonstrate). History [rg], it’s commonly held, “shapes” the world; hence history [crg] “shapes” our knowledge of the world history [rg] “shaped”. These circumstances certainly suggest the historian-function enjoys a clear view. However, they were already set up ideologically for it to see nothing clearly but itself. The historian’s apparent clarity works only in its specific cognitive situation, sustained by the principles of identity and sufficient reason. But, from a more sceptical, non-ideological standpoint, this alleged “objective clarity” proves hardly value-free. Actually it licences: (1.1) history’s self-reinforcing deviousness and (1.2) its ideological reconfiguration of everyday experience. Both culminate in (1.3) history [crg] revealing itself in the historicized world as a technological ‘singularity’. These inherent distortions can’t help working in historians’ own self-interest.

1.1. History’s self-reinforcing deviousness In the historicized world history feeds on and feeds into itself [l’histoire alimente l’histoire],—and in various different ways (Valéry 1960a: 917): (a) History [rg] historicizes itself,—as when on 25 September 2006 BBC London News reported that Young’s, the beer brewers, in closing its Ram Brewery in Wandsworth and moving out of London, was ending ‘a 400-year-old brewing tradition’. Beer had been brewed continuously on this site since 1581 and Young’s had been brewing beer there since it bought the site in 1831 when it was founded.1 However, the report did not state that the sale of the site would earn £80 million–£100 million for Young’s,

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its directors, shareholders, and new partners, since (as Time Out reported) ‘Wandsworth is a boomtown for property developers’. 2 This is just one example of ‘history feeding on history’ in a historicized world. Historically speaking, booming property prices in London are a historical situation produced by recent economic developments. These historical events motivate a business to realize the cash-value of its property assets. They also terminate other historical values that consumers of “real ale” might appreciate, such as a sense of tradition. Hence, history (as continuity) becomes a victim of history (as change). Furthermore, if the TV audience did not know about the history of beer-brewing in Wandsworth and its social-historical ramifications, then that history was disseminated precisely when it itself had come to an end, when it had become historicized. In a historicized world, there is increasingly only history for history to impact on. There is only history to be historicized. (b) History is conventionally presented as socially and personally “enriching”. It offers itself to the historicized mind as a valuable symbolic resource that can be exploited, like coal, oil, or natural gas, the products of millennia. Particularly the heritage and culture industries, the epitome of imperialist enterprise, plunder this lucrative ‘congo’ for its wealth of ideas and images, for its ‘public value’ (cf. Anders 1993: 71). History’s cognitive value is, therefore, reinforced not just by the public value generated by socialized history-focussed behaviour, but also by its economic value in the capitalist system, by money,—as exemplified by the profitability of ‘dead celebrities’, reported by Forbes magazine: ‘the 13 members of our annual Highest Earning Dead Celebrities list brought in a collective $186 million in the last year. They, or more accurately, their estates, earned that money by selling their work—both written and recorded—or just the rights to use their likenesses on T-shirts, posters or in advertisements’. The 13 include John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley. As Peter Kafka, the article’s author, points out: ‘They’re famous across the globe. Their work is treasured by millions. And they’re rolling in cash— they just can’t spend any of it’ (Kafka 2005). This self-same idea of the ‘enrichment value’ of the past is formally, structurally, identical to the values promoted by the heritage industry, as evinced, e.g., in the philosophy espoused by the Heritage Education Trust: ‘The stories encountered within the historic environment are of value in a broad range of curriculum subjects and long remembered after the initial encounter. These encounters with the past help to put our role in society into a context that shows the value of actions of an individual within a community can be used to enrich the life of all. There is a vast resource of heritage educational opportunities in the British Isles that individually and collectively offer children from all backgrounds the potential to learn about the common culture we all share’ (HET 2006 (my italics)). Thus, both the culture of commercialism and the commercialization of culture invert Marx’s proposition that living labour creates dead commodities. Not only does the work of the dead produce


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commodities for the living, but also the dead live on in the commodities the living produce. (c) Feeding on itself, the historicized world is a treacherous place and history a liability. So, e.g., the ongoing international tension involving Iran is the consequence of the West’s interventions over the preceding century: backing the Shah’s dictatorship by default bequeathed Iran’s future to the clerics. As a result, ‘the world is faced with the challenge of how best to dig itself out of the unintended consequences of past political and military adventures without ending up, through future action or inaction, sinking deeper into the quicksands of history’ (Keys 2006: 11 (my italics)). This historical assessment evinces the redundancy of historicized thinking. The ‘quicksands’ image belongs with those figures, already mentioned (cf. Chapter 2), that affi rm history as a coercive, “natural” force. It has the world already deeply mired in treacherous historical terrain. But it also suggests—improbably—that someone already deeply embedded in history’s quicksand could escape from it. In reality, energetic movement lets the quicksand victim sink more rapidly. Deconstructed, these concluding remarks affi rm the fatal character of historicized consciousness and behaviour in an already historicized world. They are a further instance of history’s discourse of coercion. (d) In historicized consciousness, history [crg] now pre-empts judgement rather than creates lucidity. Far from offering lessons for the future, the past projects false precedents. So, e.g., unprepared for trench warfare in 1914–1918, the French decided to anticipate it in future confl ict with Germany by building underground fortifications, the Maginot Line, on its Eastern flank. Once constructed, though, it handicapped French foreign policy and the development of military strategy in the late 1930s. Then, due to advances in tank technology and air-warfare, the Nazi attack came in 1940 with lightening speed through the Ardennes, as it was not historically “supposed” to do, and outflanked it (Horne 1979: 58–64, 68, 70, 73). This example also demonstrates that the ultimate agent of historicization, the ultimate producer of a historicized world, is the state, its representatives, and its self-affi rming strategies. This social institution operates on both history as knowledge and history as action. Hence, in enlisting history in his own political cause, truly the ‘statesman is the practical historian’, focussed as he must be on the prevailing ‘sense for realities’ (Droysen 1977: 64; cf. Brown 2006a, 2006b, 2007). His or her historical knowledge, be it extensive or not, impacts on the history he or she would make. The historian is, therefore, the statesman’s mirror-image (only recollect the many statesmen—e.g. inter alia Frederick the Great, Sir Winston Churchill— who were also historians). Imbued with a sense of reality, of how things were, the historian too reconfigures historical continuities and contexts, reassesses the outcomes (both intended and unforeseen) of political action to produce historical knowledge that, in its turn too, will subsequently feed back into history,—and not necessarily as the historian might have

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intended. Affi rmative as their identitary logic is, historians (be they academics or statesmen) can’t but affi rm prevailing power relations and their ideological formulation (cf. Benjamin 1977b: 254; §VI). (e) Finally, the historicized world is, as Elias confi rms, a highly organized, comprehensively self-regulating, absolutely self-implicating structure. It is so highly intellectualized, because history organizes it according to identitary categories and invests in it reasons sufficient for it to make sense. In this historicizing practice the historian-function is crucial: no wonder existence is now pervaded with ‘academic studiousness’ (Nietzsche 1998a: 157; §223; cf. Davies 2008: 468–469). Historical knowledge is, therefore, the warp and weft of the social fabric. It establishes the reality principle: history [rg] as the sole, exclusive reality, its comprehensive self-image. The world becomes assimilated to the synthetic image of itself society assembles from all the various types of historical knowledge it has at its disposal and keeps on reaffi rming through history-focussed behaviour. (“Society” here implies not just academic historians, but also opinion-formers of all kinds—journalists, fi lm directors, heritage administrators, museum curators, media personalities, etc.—as well as history’s ‘huge fan base’, the ‘millions of souls’ who ‘watch history programmes on television or buy books about art or the past’ (Dawnay 2006: 22).) In other words, the historicized world assumes an ‘integrated spectacular’ character. As history [crg] blends into social reality as an agency that, with its own naturalized, self-evident positivity, displaces all other reality, it installs itself as the sense and purpose of social activity: its illusory appearance [illusio] imposes itself as a counterfeit reality-substitute (cf. Debord 1992: 19–20; Debord 1996: 20). This social self-delusion has a fail-safe back-up in the further psychopathological effect of historicized thinking: not just the scholastic reformulation of experience, but its scholastic pre-emption. Magnified demographically by the wide dissemination of historical ideas and representations in the population, replicated extensively by history-focussed behaviour, the technical academicism that otherwise sustains the specialized historical disciplines also affi rms itself broadly as common-sense.3 Ensuring that ‘everyone is to a certain extent a historian’, it promotes the historian now as the exemplary ‘existential paradigm’ (cf. Droysen 1977: 28; Davies 2006b: 40).

1.2. History’s ideological effects In the historicized world history is ideology, as its neo-liberal political exploitation suggests. Its function as an instrument of social control (through regulating the ‘social level’), its discourse of incarceration predicated on identitary thinking, coincide with its predisposition to promote its self-interest, with its scholastic pre-emption of reality. In thus substituting itself [illusio] for experience [aesthesis], it operates ideologically: nothing can exist that isn’t history. Conversely, what history can’t comprehend, what it denies, sinks into


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its unconscious as something historically incomprehensible that, therefore, seethes with the potential eventually to return and disrupt it. History’s ideological function emerges clearly where, as in culture-management, the state’s symbolic capital is invested in its social goals. To this end and with the support of a wide range of academic experts and resource managers, it incites the total mobilization of the government, educational institutions, heritage organizations, and the media,—as in the ‘History Matters’ campaign (2006/2007), which was ‘all about raising awareness of the importance of history in our everyday lives and encouraging involvement in heritage’.4 But ideological tendencies, enclosing all reality within their comprehensive identitary categories, are evinced whenever the history discipline affi rms itself. Their characteristics are typical: (a) The ideological thought is inculcated by mass, history-focussed behaviour,—fostered in connection with ‘History Matters’ by The National Trust: the ‘1.2 million people pledging their support and getting involved in events and activities across the country’, the 46,000 who wrote ‘“One Day in History” diaries (now archived in the British Library)’, and ‘the 20,000 declarations of support and 10,000 postcards’ affirming the ‘need’ for history (NT 2007: 1).5 It thus confirms the observation that ‘all those people who seek to control the behaviour of large numbers of people work on the experience of those people,’ since ‘once people can be induced to experience a situation in a certain way, they can be expected to behave in similar ways’ (Laing 1968: 80). (b) In scholastically pre-empting reality, history reads into it the selfsame, self-affi rming tendencies it would elicit from it. So (e.g.) asserting in self-justification that ‘all people and peoples are living histories’ both presumes that their attributes, their language, culture, and ‘genetic template’, have already been historicized, and ipso facto blocks linguistics, anthropology, geography, or biology as more appropriate means of accessing them (Corfield 2008: 1). In reinforcing its own self-interests, history ideologically precludes both the autonomy of other knowledge disciplines and non-historical forms of ideation. (c) The recourse to the figure of “rootedness” also offers a compelling ideological assertion of history’s cognitive priority. Allegedly, the study of the past ‘is essential for “rooting” people in time’, particularly since ‘people who feel themselves to be rootless live rootless lies, often causing a lot of damage to themselves and others in the process’. In particular, having ‘secure roots’ will ‘allow for continuity, but also for growth and change’ (Corfield 2008: 1, 6). Here combining moral authoritarianism with social conservatism, this ideological stance blocks the liberating insight that the human species is defi ned by its ideational capacity to refuse any given reality, to suspend the character of the reality enclosing it, for its own speciesessential imperatives (Scheler 1978: 52). (d) As ideology, history deliberately reduces the existence of human beings [Wesen] to the way human beings happen to exist [Dasein] at any

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given moment, by dogmatically asserting unverifiable propositions, which makes a mockery of historians’ professed critical attitude to evidence and sources,—such as ‘understanding the linkages between past and present is absolutely basic for a good understanding of being human’ (Corfield 2008: 1; cf. Scheler 1978: 52–53). Such self-referential tenets are meaningless: e.g. ‘how we got from ‘then’ to ‘now’ enables us to define where we are more exactly’; ‘understanding how we got from ‘then’ to ‘now’ gives us some grasp of where our world has come from’ (Tosh 2008: 43–44, 60). Curiously, they don’t actually reveal how humanity is actually understood or where “we” actually are: their unintelligibility is the indispensable precondition of their ideological force. (e) Pure ideology is the assertion of history’s comprehensive scope as vindication of its cognitive supremacy, as in: ‘history is unique among the disciplines in bringing every area of life and mode of thought within the scope of its enquiries’ (Tosh 2008: 38). So too is the assertion that ‘history is inescapable’, given that ‘from a historian’s point of view, much of what is studied under the rubric of (for example) Anthropology or Politics or Sociology or Law can be regarded as specialist sub-sets of History, which takes as its remit the whole of human experience’ (Corfield 2008: 5). These assertions are nothing if not sophistical: in thus historicizing everything, history becomes a purely self-referential, reality-substitute, having reconfigured the world in its own self-image [illusio]. (f) Finally, history couldn’t operate ideologically if its disciplinary discourse couldn’t count on language being more a ‘system of commands’ than ‘a means of information’ (cf. Deleuze 2003: 60). These ‘commands’ ideologically reinforce the scholastic pre-emptions affi rming history’s professed cognitive supremacy,—as in ‘all people have a full historical context’ (Corfield 2008: 1); or ‘history [ . . . ] helps us understand how our world got to be the way it is’ (Cannadine 1999: 8); or ‘the National Trust’s History Matters campaign offers a rich opportunity to help in the ongoing struggle to strengthen the ties that can bind people to place and past’ (Hunt 2006: 27). Thus, confi ning people to a preconceived context, imposing what has ‘got to be’, selecting existential constraints for them, these commanding words project the historian-function as the commanding position in culture and society. In its self-affi rming capacity to reconfigure reality for everyone, it exercises cultural authoritarianism.

1.3. The historicized world as a technological “singularity” In the historicized world, that keeps historicizing itself, history [crg] as a technology for managing human reality runs away with itself: it resembles a technological ‘singularity’. This notion expresses the inconceivable potential of artificial intelligence (of “intelligent” technology). It proposes hypothetically that the last invention human beings would ever make would be a super-intelligent machine. This machine would “wake up” and, surpassing


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anything human intelligence alone could create, generate even more intelligent machines that would in turn wake up and create exponentially, on to infi nity, more intelligent machines still (Rees 2004: 19; Brand 2000: 20ff.). According to the principle of self-organized criticality derived from its own, internal dynamic, it would produce a ‘technological runaway’ beyond human control. The term ‘singularity’ comes from the mathematician, Vernor Vinge. He defi nes it by analogy to the evolutionary past: whereas animals adapt and make inventions ‘often no faster than natural selection’ operates, humans ‘have the ability to internalize the world and conduct “what ifs” in our heads’, and thereby ‘solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection’. His point is: ‘by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals’ (Vinge 1993: 1–2 (my italics)). In one obvious sense, a singularity has already occurred in humanity’s existence: we live daily with its extravagant spectacle [illusio] (cf. Debord 1996: 17, 21, 45 (§§ 6, 14, 49, 50)). Capitalism, as the ‘singular conjunction’ of various different forms of socio-economic flux (e.g. sales of property, the circulation of money, migrant workers) offers an example. The constitutive elements of capitalism as a ‘social machine’ were already present in Ancient Rome, in feudalism, or in the dynastic states of China or Japan. What they produced beyond basic needs could be consumed extravagantly in public festivals or regal display. Capitalism becomes a singularity once its surpluses are reinvested in the production-process, producing production for its own sake, the dazzling prospect of ever increasing consumption, ever faster circulation, ever growing accumulation, constantly shifting social norms and limits (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 264–266). The underlying principle here both refutes the idea of history as a longterm, self-consistent, self-identical ‘evolutionary process’ (as maintained, e.g., by Elias), and stresses the existential implications of historical knowledge in a historicized world. As the example of capitalism suggests, the singularity would be triggered by human beings in history creating a historical situation—a history mega-machine—that, at one and the same moment, surpassed and invalidated the history that had produced it (e.g. World War I, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, 9/11). So Ernst Jünger refers to the rapid transformation of living conditions after the First World War, driven by the ‘total mobilization’ of social resources, not as ‘history beginning to alter its sense’, but as ‘series of events that no longer constitute history’ [Nicht die Geschichte beginnt den Sinn zu ändern, sondern das Geschehen ist nicht Geschichte mehr] (Jünger 1983: 16). The feverish tempo of change is ‘historically unparalleled’ [ohne geschichtliches Beispiel] (Jünger 1982: 183). As applied to the historicizing of the world, the singularity proposes that in history human achievement is not simply accumulative and additive, not a legacy or a heritage affi rming one’s identity

90 Imprisoned by History (in the historians’ jargon), broadening the idea of what it is to be human, or enlarging the scope of human nature (as e.g. Kant, Droysen, or Ortega y Gasset assert). Instead, it implies that history [rg] repeatedly transforms itself totally. At a given point, history [rg] supersedes its own past, traditions become obsolete, the past sets no precedents for the future: it de-territorializes itself. What happens and historians’ interpretations of what happens impact on a world already “shaped” by historical events and their interpretations. Two historicizing tendencies converge,—as in optical illusions when the eye reads the same image in different ways since the image itself makes it keep shifting its visual intention: the totality of historical reality (i.e. historical action plus historical knowledge of it) defying any possibility of itself being objectively, comprehensively historically represented; the historical world, the inevitable product of identitary thinking, enveloping itself narcissistically, in the synthetic self-image [illusio] it has managed to create for itself. This convergence produces the historicized world. The two, quite different illusions, though produced by the same image, make each other redundant. In the historicized world, therefore, even though the world we experience is transforming itself totally, there is only the past to see,—or rather only heterogeneous, specialized perspectives on the past [illusio]. Whatever one sees, however modern or avant-garde, one still sees it as past, in terms of what used to be or what it replaces, or of how it will appear retrospectively to future generations. The past ceases to be past and becomes always present: there is nothing, nowhere, now that cannot be a ‘site of memory’ [lieu de mémoire], as the continuing proliferation of Nora’s concept demonstrates,—nothing that cannot present itself as déjà-vu. This seeing only the past creates apprehension about what it now conceals. It deflects interest from what the dominant economic and political powers are doing now, just as it pacifies any anxiety about the incomprehensible potential they are unconsciously incubating. History [crg] in the historicized world is the ideology of the ‘totalitarian order of democratic-capitalist society’ (cf. Allott 2002: 277). It doesn’t just represent an invaluable resource for the advertising, tourist, and culture industries. Rather, the production processes and corporate management strategies neo-liberalism enforces are replicated intellectually, symbolically, both in the way historicized thinking constructs reality (e.g. as a process, as product, as performance outturn) and in the way historians analyze, arrange, and account for their resources. Capitalism generates historical illusions as an alibi for its own terrorizing machinations (—as when a Chancellor of the Exchequer invokes equalizing ‘common values’ from the nation’s past even while his government promotes “economic modernization” that values uncommon inequality in the nation’s present).6 It needs the illusion of a historicized world for its ideological self-legitimization. This schizoid mentality ravaging the planet needs the cosmetic of history [crg] to make it normal and understandable. A historicized society naturally obliges.


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2. THE HISTORICAL UNCONSCIOUS (1): ‘THE ACTUAL, ESSENTIAL FORCES OF THE AGE’ ‘The mind has transformed the world and the world is repaying it well’ (Valéry 1960a: 1059): this is the premise of the historicized world. The historical world is the product of human action as an expression of intentions, motives, and strategies,—of reflexes of thought. The historicized world is the product of human action and thought conditioned by history,—specifically by historical knowledge, by its ideological reconfiguration of reality. Hence its determining characteristic: immediate experience as déjà-vu, naïve intuition pre-empted by scholastic habituation. What characterizes the historicized world, what reinforces the intuition of déjà-vu, is the ‘explosion’, the massive amplification, of historical knowledge. Historical knowledge, allegedly, tells us how things were: it’s humanity’s essential self-truth,—apparently. However, the totality of available historical knowledge, of the truth so far acquired, far exceeds the scope of a whole life-time of consciousness. This predicament confirms here too Mannheim’s suspicion ‘that the historical process is something more inclusive than all the existing individual standpoints, and that our basis of thought, demonstrably atomized as it is, has not kept up with what can be experienced’, that ‘the mass of facts and points of view are far greater than the intensity for systematization and constructive thinking achievable at present’ (Mannheim 1995: 217; cf. 1979: 226). The historicizing illumination of human development cannot, therefore, help producing its own obscurities in the present, now. Historicized consciousness necessarily implies now an ever-present historical unconscious. Lying submerged in the murk of historicized reality, the historical unconscious takes two forms. There is the historical unconscious proper, as the unconscious or unintended intentions of historical action (history [rg]); it implies: “we cannot know as a historical outcome (as history [rg]) what we are doing now”. There is also the methodological unconscious, as the a priori assumptions and conditions behind the construction of historical knowledge (history [crg]); it implies: “we are doing now with historical knowledge (as history [crg]) what we cannot know”. (This latter form, discussed later (cf. Chapters 4 and 5), reveals history [crg] as a self-centred practice, sustained by the principles of identity and sufficient reason, that denies its own chaotic dynamic within a chaotic universe where the referential reach of any event into its past or future is limited.) Here, it’s necessary to show that the historical unconscious develops precisely through the historical hyperconsciousness of the historicized world that, in constantly historicizing itself, (2.1.) takes human beings beyond experiential precedent. As one result, (2.2) the historical unconscious represents ‘the essential forces of the age’ (as opposed to those same old forces the historicized world already comprehends); as another, (2.3) the historical unconscious predisposes historical representation to be a deceptive illusion, something typically sophistical.

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2.1. The unintended intentions of historical action The historical unconscious expresses the apprehension that ‘all we have stifled, you me, all of us, ever since civilization began, has got to be lived out’ (Miller 2006c: 31): (a) The historical unconscious induces apprehension, since historicized consciousness cannot foresee the potential for catastrophe generated necessarily by ‘the irritating incompatibility between the actual power of modern man (greater than ever before, great to the point where he might challenge the very existence of his own universe) and the impotence of modern men to live in, and understand the sense of, a world which their own strength has established’ (Arendt 1986: viii). It designates the unintended, hence often unprecedented, historical consequences of human intentions. These intentions may be pre-conscious intimations of adverse consequences that are being denied; they may be driven by impulses in the historical agency it needs to repress; they may be oversights or lacunae generated by conscious activity that remain latent (given that consciousness can attend at any one moment only to a selection of the representations available to it). These unintended intentions show: action derived from historicized knowledge evinces self-delusion. The blinkered historical projection of intentions and outcomes expresses anthropic bias: it blocks any allowance for the indispensable, biological preconditions of human cognition. It anaesthetizes the misgiving that human technological potentiality (e.g. the speed of travel and communications) exceeds the natural limits of the planet (cf. Virilio 1996: 26). In the totally historicized world, this warping-effect recedes from perceptual range, beyond the scope of historical consciousness. What’s left, prompted by a dim sense of some pre-conscious latency, is the apprehension that in history [rg] ‘we are embroiled in experimentation: we are getting up to things that have no foundation in experience’ (Jünger 1982: 203). Nevertheless, the ramifications of what we are now ‘getting up to’ always do emerge (i.e. become encoded as history) at some point in the future. The procedures of the unconscious, even of the historical unconscious, may be timeless: the denied historical eventuality, the repressed historical possibility, can return at any moment. (b) So temporality enables the historical unconscious to emerge into consciousness. Time functions not just as the cosmological principle of irreversibility; nor just as the natural phasing of biological life; nor just as a recording or management-system (as a chronology or a time-line); nor just as a necessary, self-coercive means of coordinating social activities (as Elias argues (cf. Elias 1988: 129–131)). It also bears within itself the potentiality that generates actuality. Commenting on the concept of action in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Paolo Virno argues that action, as the basis of actuality, of presence, suggests the very idea of “now”. But actuality “now” is by defi nition ephemeral, a succession of present actions, of momentary incidents of “now”. Actuality now exists only because it always derives from something


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essentially ‘eternal non-actual’, i.e. timeless. That’s to say: ‘Potentiality [puissance] is the enduring not-now against which the different hic et nunc are displayed, the immutable latency which constitutes the horizon (or context) of every event identifiable by a date’ (Virno 1999: 70). Underlying this potentiality as the everlasting ‘not now’ is time itself, time as a whole [le temps tout entier], comprising both succession and simultaneity. This position implies that time is not homogeneous. There is, on the one hand, a series of actions and events, linked by the inference of a cause-and-effect, engendered by the acts themselves (i.e. b-type sequences). There is, on the other hand, a set of apparently unrelated actions and events connected not by a causal scheme, but signifying in their temporal unfolding an underlying, ever-present potentiality that engenders them (cf. Virno 1999: 74, 78). It could be described as a c-type sequence: e.g. E/x1→S/x2→L/x3→Q/ x4. Apparently random occurrences (E, S, L, Q) derive from an unseen, potential connection (x1→ x4) that only becomes manifest later, post festum: ‘the not-now is comprehensible only in relation to the particular actuality towards which it seems to be tending.’ Conversely, ‘what is present diverges from the non-actuality of [temporal] potential and not as something opposed to past and future on the calendar’ (Virno 1999: 76, 81). The identitary coherence of action is thus ambivalent. Certainly, in historical terms, it can apparently be achieved through ongoing, provisional, causal sequences. But it can also be construed in terms of the actual, fi nal outcome of its underlying potentiality. As Aristotle points out, potentiality derives from some prior act,—in the last analysis, from the eternally reiterated act of a Supreme Being and Prime Mover, ‘something eternal which is both substance and actuality’ (Aristotle 1997a: 146–147; 1072 a 25). Hence, ‘everything which is generated moves towards its principle, i.e. its end. For the object of a thing is its principle; and generation has as its object the end. And the actuality is the end, and it is for the sake of this that the potentiality is required’ (Aristotle 1996a: 458–459; 1050 a 9–10). However, it’s one thing to build a house, another to build a ‘house of history’. The potentiality to build can be actualized in the edifice fi nally constructed; the history potential is never realized because it never fi nds fi nality—even though historians and cultural theorists can’t stop applying a glossy “fi nish” to events or fabricating “ends” of history, for history, to vindicate the contingent political or economic strategies they advocate (cf. Fukuyama 1992). The historical potential is inexhaustible; it is never fully ‘actualisable’ (Virno 1999: 86). Unconscious though this numinous, temporal potential may be, it does produce haunting, fatalistic apprehensions of its sublime, but sinister force when (as Jünger’s observations suggest) history is experienced as an old epoch closing or a new era dawning. (c) So too the historical unconscious reinforces history as a self-induced, psychopathological condition. For this reason the elaboration of a ‘psychoanalytic meaning of history’ is illuminating (cf. Brown 1970; Davies 2006a: 115–119, 236–245). The issue here, though, has less to do with

94 Imprisoned by History identifying characteristics of the ‘psychopathology of historicized life’ than with the psychic ‘machine’ that drives the psychopathological predisposition to historicize. For a start: historicization is repressive. The formation of memory, the appreciation of the past, the construction of a temporal scheme for coordinating the future with past and present, for distinguishing between necessity and contingency, between means and ends, the aptitude for thinking causally, the ‘constant intention to reassert the same old intentions’ [ein Fort und Fort Wollen des ein Mal Gewollten]: in short, the propensity to historicize derives from the same coercive practices in state and society that socialize human beings, burden them with a guilty conscience, and constrict them in a ‘social straitjacket’ [einer sozialen Zwangsjacke] of accountability (Nietzsche 1988b: 291–293; II, §§1–2). To do history—to research into history, to write history, to historicize by explaining the present in terms of the past—is, therefore, to maintain the power-system through which dominant social practices and practices of social domination affirm themselves. Revealing how things were the way they were, asserting how things are in terms of how things were, showing how things have got to be the way they are: this is how a self-validating authority position does assert itself. It expresses itself in ‘words of command’ [mots d’ordre], heavy with social and cognitive obligation (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 100). Like the priest, swathing himself in the mystique of clericalism, the historian appears as the guardian of fundamental or universal significances (cf. Snowman 2007: 13–14). In particular (as demonstrated earlier), the neo-liberal state, intent on mobilizing the total social, productive capacity, encodes as history the norms and values it prizes (e.g. identity, community, inclusiveness, roots, commonplaces, etc.) as essential for stabilizing itself. History’s power derives from it functioning as the absolute signifier, with the capacity to assess the significance of any and every thing. To the constantly self-modernizing processes of socio-economic production and the concomitant selfdislocation infl icted by the dynamics of capitalism, it applies its reassuring, synthetic gloss: no sudden, disruptive change ever occurs that cannot historically appear as the same old continuity. Historicizing, therefore, operates as rational, conscious order, as repressed unconscious potential, according to the Oedipal model of the libidinal economy of social relationships. The historical order, as revealed in its capacity for its own self-representation, is predicated on making redundant, on denying, repressing, or placing under taboo, anything—any apprehension—that could threaten it (e.g. the conventionality of historical discourse, the fictional coherence of historical narrative, the factitiousness of historical facts). Historical representation enables history to make sense of itself only because its conscious self-defi nition involves unconscious self-repression. ‘To narrate’ is indeed ‘to give representative value’, but it is certainly legitimate to ask ‘how [ . . . ] our confl icting claims on such phenomena themselves, as claims, become selected’ (Cohen 2006:


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3). History’s self-representation ipso facto makes redundant what it can’t recognize, represses what it can’t identify with, and denies what can’t be encoded as affi rmative discourse. The historian thus appropriately appears in ecclesiastical garb: under these Oedipal conditions, historical representation is essentially a matter of faith [représentation-croyance], substituting a system of tenets [un système de croyances] for what through being repressed the (historical) unconscious actually does, for what it actually produces (Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 202, 352–353; cf. Snowman 2007: 13–14). With its ‘narrative smoothness’ implicitly operating with ‘functions of exclusion’, historical discourse thereby locates itself in a ‘schizo zone’ (Cohen 2006: 118). Given the intensity of historicizing activity in the already historicized world, the exponential development of history-focussed behaviour, the sheer mass and volume of historicizing agencies exceeds any systematic historical self-representation (as Mannheim confi rms). No wonder Keith Thomas’s logic splits apart when he applauds ‘the way in which the subject matter of history has broadened beyond recognition (my italics)’ even while he deplores ‘the impossibility of embodying in a single, selective account the infi nitely numerous points of view from which it [the past] can be legitimately surveyed’ (Thomas 2006: 4).—The more history amplifies itself and produces its redundancy in extending its supervision of human activity, refi ning its representation criteria, polishing its synthetic, narrative “fi nish”: so the more extensive and potent the historical unconscious becomes (as its accumulating repressed implications), the more it induces apprehension, the more intense its dislocating delusions. From the psychoanalytical standpoint, conscious (historical) sense is just a surface-effect of unconscious (historical) senselessness. Conscious sense and unconscious senselessness differ by only a hair’s breadth,—as when a historian inanely decrees: ‘Historians use causation to explain why, or how, an event happened. Since history involves the study of change over time, causes must precede events chronologically’ (Williams 2007: 104). This inference may be justifiable, logically, ideally; however, the cause is known only after the event: hence the discrepancy between events as they happen and as they are known ensures reality is never comprehensively realized (cf. Baudrillard 1983: 231).7 Sequentiality as comprehensive explanation is here deduced from a self-referential premise. The a priori assumption, ‘change over time’, must demand chronological causality otherwise historical knowledge collapses. But change over time is ever only chronological. Rather, there are no grounds for accepting that a particular historical phase is causally connected to any phase that preceded it or is likely to succeed it: ‘Nothing assures us that the facts as realized express adequately enough the nature of the tendency to permit us to anticipate the end it aspires to on the basis of those through which it has successively passed’ (Durkheim 1997: 116–117). Evidently, ‘an event’s sense simply does not mesh with narration or succession’ (Cohen 2006: 16). Events derive from an underlying potentiality driven by the dynamics of apprehension, compulsion, desire, mental

96 Imprisoned by History dislocation or schism.8 So, everyday a person thinks, speaks, analyzes, calculates, decides, acts—always with sufficient cause. But this ratiocination is an epiphenomenon of a voiceless, physiological machine, fuelled with its own, libidinal energy and governed by its own, instinctual apprehensiveness, that keeps the heart pumping, the body-organs functioning, the limbs energized, the brain stimulated. Onto this machine, the Oedipus complex, as a structure of signification, has already bolted a coercive, rational order of social arrangements and fi nal causes, such as family relationships, moral precepts, legal injunctions, myths, traditions and customs, as a means of producing, identifying, and encoding, but also of repressing its desires (Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 189–190). By extension, therefore, the totality of human arrangements (causality included) projected into a temporal dimension (i.e. the whole of history) expresses the rationalizing, repressive Oedipal scheme. (d) Representing a dominant, universal management-system, the Oedipal structure configures itself as history [crg]. The Oedipal catastrophe has always already happened. Its mythic force, an image of its historical remoteness, signifies its historical potential. What it projects as its shadow, is the already historicized world, the world not just shaped by history [rg], but by historical knowledge [crg], the knowledge of inevitable human self-incrimination (cf. Davies 2006a: 70–71). It produces a characteristic, schizoid propensity within experience: adherence to its coercive, self-incriminating, but essentially conventional order [illusio], on the one hand; on the other, an intuitive inclination to lapse into self-liberating, “irrational” acts of deviance. So what happens in history [rg] appears as the incessant, unconscious product of a ‘mega-machine’ of desire and apprehension: after all ‘the unconscious says nothing, it just keeps on functioning’ [L’inconscient ne dit rien, il machine] (Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 213). But what makes it make sense, is the ways in which it’s encoded and represented as history [crg]. History [crg] operates coercively, with martial imperiousness, as a ‘war machine’, complicit in strategies of state and industry that manage its political and economic resources. From its unique vantage-point, akin to high-altitude or space-satellite surveillance (what Braudel calls the ‘position of God’ [Braudel 1994: 15]), it surveys the entire, undifferentiated phenomenal expanse of events. It orientates itself by reference to a pre-defi ned grid-system, segmented into various fields: origins, precedents, periods, traditions, trajectories, heritages, legacies, identities, causes, and contexts, etc. It thus affi rms the jargon of the ‘administered world’, this social space of managerial regulation ‘striated’ with pre-set programmes, schemes, frameworks, targets, or objectives, calibrated according to ‘value drivers’, ‘optimized delivery’, ‘benchmark performance’, ‘indicative measures’, ‘sector outputs’, ‘cost effectiveness scores’, etc (cf. Adorno 1979: 122ff.; cf. Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 479ff). It constructs its sense [illusio] by encoding what happens in bureaucratic, technical, or clerical forms of prose that in themselves enforce coherence and meaning, thereby


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‘connecting cognition, power, and obedience’. Hence, its recourse to allpurpose psychologistic categories (e.g. ‘greed’, ‘ambition’, ‘panic’), general descriptions based on identitary logic (e.g. ‘British values’), or to ‘substituting a true body of words’, void of reference, for erratic fluxes and intensities of opinion and behaviour (e.g. reports in the US or UK media rationalizing the post-war anarchy in Iraq) (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 458, 465ff., 479, 598ff.; Cohen 2006: 5, 9; Rancière 1992: 111, 180). From the Oedipal standpoint the “end” [telos] of history manifests itself as capitalism. Capitalism is not just the result now of a ‘long history of contingencies and accidents’, itself ‘ushering in this end’. It also makes it possible ‘retrospectively to read the whole of history as a function of capitalism’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 180). As a reproductive mega-machine capitalism is a social, global materialization of the desiring machine, the unconscious. Capitalist social reproduction does not just address basic human needs. Its self-consolidation, let alone its expansion, relies on its capacity for generating new ways of circulating and reinvesting capital, which requires generating new needs, the self-disclosure of new desires. But just as unconscious desire comes encoded in an Oedipal structure of repression and taboo, so capitalism encodes its own desire-machinations in terms of structures of surveillance, management, and control (such as auditing procedures, legal-systems, ethical conventions, historical justifications). It produces a reality constantly historicizing itself, because its principle is a constantly shifting, schizoid parameter, a kaleidoscopically mutating sequence of affi rmative self-representations [illusio]. Synchronically and diachronically the whole sphere of human behaviour is constantly displacing and sublimating itself in its incessant drive for new satisfactions, yet dislocated and deterritorialized by the transformations its unconscious tendencies inflict on it. Under these socio-economic conditions human behaviour is inevitably duplicitous as it negotiates the schizoid structure through which its unconscious motivations are both driven and policed. In acknowledging the existence of the unconscious through the managerial technology that regulates it, historicization only affi rms this schizoid structure. History [rg] is the capitalist mega-machine in its ideal form, a constantly self-perpetuating, self-mutating production-system. Historical knowledge (history [crg]) is its supervisory-system that represses and taboos everything that is not the same. It ensures actuality already appears as the same old thing after all, since it reduces vital self-differentiation to historicized reality, to a common, archaic denominator (Oedipus) (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 118, 291). Constantly historicizing the world with the same old invention of new ideas, generating obsolescence with novel commodities, projecting archaic desires into ephemeral fashions, ruining the world so as to reconstruct it in its own modernized self-image, its own self-historicized image (e.g. as ‘heritage dividend’),—the capitalist production-machine is inevitably mentally dislocating. Infl icting a sickening, schizoidal disorientation, it sustains

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itself. Typically, it manifests itself in ‘the department-store life—with flimsy silks on one counter and bombs on the other counter’ (Miller 2006a: 343). That’s how it turns the world into a ‘mad-house’ [Irrenhaus] (Nietzsche 1988b: 333, 368, 371; II, §22, III, §14). As an Oedipal formation, the historicized world denies the adventure of hope. It classifies it as mental aberration. It criminalizes existential aspiration for being absolutely disruptive. It prohibits the realization that ‘everything lies ahead’, that ‘the way is endless, and the farther one reaches the more the road opens up’. Instead, it offers only the dilapidated world of capitalist production. In dislocated, self-incriminated consciousness this historicizing psychopathology sustains historical knowledge as historical truth. Through the identity principle the historicizing mentality ensures that this historicized truth can ever only “shape the world” in its own dislocated, self-incriminating self-image. It cannot help binding “us” to “our” “common place” in the past. It cannot be other than coercive: ‘the bogs and quagmires, the marshes and sinkholes, the pits and snares are all in the mind. They lurk in waiting, ready to swallow one up the moment one ceases to advance.’ It cannot but project a ‘phantasmal world which has not been conquered over [ . . . ] the world of the past, never of the future.’ And no wonder: ‘To move forward clinging to the past is like dragging a ball and chain. The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime over and over. We are all guilty of crime, the great crime of not living life to the full’ (Miller 2006a: 312–313). The historicizing psychopathology imprisons ordinary life in history.

2.2. ‘The actual essential forces of the age’ From within historicized life, from the commanding vantage-point of the history management-system, one can only infer the historical unconscious exists: by defi nition, no-one experiences it directly, consciously. In Oedipal terms, in terms of the ‘actual structural functions of the vanished archaic despot to which we are chained’, one intuits only its gravitational pull,—as repetition-compulsion, as phobia, as parapraxis, as mental schism, or as sublimated displacement, as a disjunction between content and expression, as a predilection for identitary nominations that close down referential differences (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 291). Accordingly, the historical unconscious is, if anything, over-determined. It so much eludes being represented that no single representation denominates it and, further, the representations it does generate neutralize each other, thereby sabotaging representation itself. Conversely, it produces the apprehension endemic in historicized life. What is historically (consciously) represented [crg] can never totally comprehend the productive potential of history [rg] since that is driven remorselessly by its unconscious, a potent mix of the unintended consequences of human action, the information repressed or made redundant by historicized order, the blind impulses of human collectivities, and,


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stoking all that, human drives. Thus human beings are bonded to a numinous historical production-system they cannot know, mesmerized by a sublime, history-making machine they can barely imagine. ‘What spectacle can be imagined so magnificent, so various, so interesting?’ Hume remarked on the study of history, ‘to see all the human race, from the beginning of time, pass, as it were, in review before us, appearing in their true colours’ (Hume 1971: 560). But history’s spectacular appearance is now, in the historicized world, for historicized life, only the façade of a ‘generalized secret’ [secret généralisé] that ‘stands behind it as the decisive complement of what it displays and, if you go down into the depth of things, as its most important operation’ (Debord 1992: 23). In the historicized world, therefore, the unconscious is experienced indirectly, through displacements of thought and behaviour: (a) One indication of the historical unconscious: ‘history emerges to human beings as an alien factor [facteur étranger], as something they did not want, as something from which they thought themselves protected’. What comes back to them as the exuberant ‘surplus-value of history’, with its own socially transcendent time-scales and its socially disruptive consequences, is nothing but the ‘negative anxiety of what it is to be human’ [l’inquiétude négative de l’humain] in which the whole historical development had originated but ‘which had become sedated’ [qui s’était endormi] (Debord 1996: 128; §128). Another indication is provided by Elias’s ludic, figurative conception of social action: the more ‘players’ are involved in the game in question, the more it (i.e. its social-behavioural possibilities) ‘takes a course none of the players planned, intended, or anticipated’ (Elias 2006: 122). People do not realize (Elias asserts) that, with their interdependent activities, they initiate and ‘keep in motion processes which are hardly any less unplanned and unintended than natural processes’, the highly developed sense of time being an example of ‘an aspect of social development no-one planned or intended to come about’. In other words, people’s lives are constrained by ‘a long, blind social development’ (Elias 1992: 161–162; 1988: 145, 146). This view derives from conceiving society as a natural organism with a collective life of its own, inaccessible to any of the particular elements that compose it. Hence (to take an example from Herbert Spencer) industrial organization based on the division of labour, arising ‘under the pressure of human wants and resulting activities’, becomes ‘ever [ . . . ] more complete’ through ‘each citizen [ . . . ] pursuing his individual welfare and none taking thought about the division of labour, or conscious of the need of it’. This natural process (for such it allegedly is) has been operating ‘slowly and silently: few having observed it until quite modern times’. Once it does emerge into consciousness, it has already crystallized and imposed itself: ‘By steps so small, that year after year the industrial arrangements have seemed just what they were before—by changes as insensible as those through which a seed passes into a tree, society has become the complex body of mutually-dependent workers we now see.

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And this economic organization, mark, is the all-essential organization’ (Spencer 1992: 385 (my italics)). In other words, ‘beyond the events there seems to be an ‘unconscious history’ [histoire inconsciente] [ . . . ] that largely escapes the lucidity of the actors, be they perpetrators or victims: they make history, but history carries them along’ [ils font l’histoire, mais l’histoire les emporte] (Braudel 1984: 103). (b) The historical unconscious thus turns present populations now into somnambulists, just like the protagonists of Hermann Broch’s novel-trilogy The Sleepwalkers [Die Schlafwandler] (1931/1932). Because one’s thoughts and actions are being “shaped” now by historical factors all but inaccessible to personal consciousness, historical sleepwalking becomes inevitable. It’s inevitable, since to become aware of the full historical potential of the present situation, now, one would have to foresee precisely what, when they come to write the history of the late 20th and early 21st century, future historians would say twenty, forty, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, two thousand or more years from now,—when they might have the same historicized perspective on us as we have on (e.g.) Elizabethan London or Periclean Athens (—assuming, rashly, there will be historians in the future). So, pointing out ‘that, in the year 1000, we in Europe did not know the idea of zero in mathematics; that we did not even have an agreed way of representing the numerals from 1 to 10’, Allott insists that then, ‘ten centuries ago’, there must still have been ‘a latent and obscure potentiality’ to develop all the scientific, cultural, and social knowledge ‘which have made a new human world in the course of these last ten centuries, a ten century frenzy of human self-evolving’ which could continue for ten centuries more ‘transforming human reality everywhere’ (Allott 2002: 135–136). By the same identitary logic, one would also have to predict what historical events, triggered by the unconscious potential of the historical knowledge available in the historical situation now, would “shape” future historians’ historical mentality and the perspectives it would then offer. After all, history does claim to say how things were, to expose the unconscious tendencies of an age, to disclose the unconscious logic of social and political developments implicit in the heterogeneous contents of successive experiences (cf. b-type sequences, already mentioned). However (as Allott suggests), even though the present can be totally historicized (“having been shaped by the past to make it what it is”), history [crg] cannot know what history [rg] it is “shaping” in its unconscious now, what future history lies there already submerged beneath the present, now. Not least because ‘forecasting is intrinsically limited: what today is concealed in the background noise of our observations will reveal itself tomorrow as playing a crucial role’ (Prigogine & Stengers 2001: 102–103). Somnambulism is inevitably the form personal action takes now, in a historicized world, because history, its guide to life (magistra vitae) on the basis of the past, fi nds the present disorientating. (It can orientate itself in the present only by seeing it in terms of the past, as a product of the past,


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not as a present already hollowed out unconsciously by trends only the future might retrospectively discern and encode as its history.) (c) The historicized world consists of nothing but heterogeneous values, due to the scope, variety, and detail of historical research. History [crg] may well unearth a plethora of values, customs, and practices, but it cannot discriminate between them. It suffices for them to be historical; being heterogeneous they can all be treated the same (cf. Davies 2006a: 2, 31, 62f., 87). In the historicized world reality consists of countless, discrete ‘value-realities’ [Wertwirklichkeiten], the ‘atomized’ remains of the cultural spheres and values propagated by the great thought-systems which, since the Renaissance, metaphysically sustained human existence, invested it with meaning, but have now fragmented into countless particles of absolute rationality (Broch 1978a: 533, 536). The constant inspection and re-inspection, the incessant categorizing and re-categorizing, of these myriad bits and pieces of heterogeneous, but logically self-contained, rationally vindicated ‘value realities’ actually constitutes historical research. That is what historical research is, and it drives the exponential growth of historical knowledge, the amplification of history in the social imagination. This, in turn, keeps reinforcing the total historicization of reality: ‘all the epochs in which values collapsed are historically orientated’ [Alle Epochen des Wertzerfalls sind historisch orientiert] (Broch 1978e: 65). The pressure of the historical unconscious released by the fragmentation of all values [Wertzersplitterung] and the total promiscuity of rationality betray themselves in a pervasive social atmosphere of helplessness, discontent, despair, or anxiety (Broch 1978d: 734; 1978a: 437, 445, 498, 714–715). It creates an existential fissure [Zerspaltung]: both indifference towards others and indifference to oneself. The normality of one’s own life, its reassuring banality even, seems quite removed from the pathological abnormalities (e.g. war, terrorism, economic exploitation) that constitute the already historicized world. Yet one can never dismiss the apprehension that these abhorrent abnormalities only come about through the banal activities of “normal people”, of the colourless, repressed, one-dimensional homunculi historicization has produced (e.g. ‘be-spectacled school-teachers leading their storm-troopers’; or—more recently—the diligent youth-worker volunteering as a suicide-bomber) (cf. Broch 1978a: 418–420). It makes everyday life deceptive. Where the sheer heterogeneity of historical meanings and values ultimately disorientates individual existence, it ends up as hostage to their unconscious, “irrational” urgings, by default mesmerized by their fundamental certainties. Hence, a historicized world cannot help inducing in its inhabitants an irresistible susceptibility to unconscious and irrational drives and to the political or theologized fundamentalisms that sustain them. In this predicament, the value-system one espouses betrays the underlying irrationalism that drives it; the rationalizing that makes it plausible only reinforces the individual’s self-deception, immures him or her in his or her own psychotic isolation (Broch 1978a: 689–691).

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(d) In this deceptiveness, in the possibility of deceptiveness, the gravitational pull of the historical unconscious really makes itself felt. Its most familiar form is the dialectic, be it the idealist Hegelian or materialist Marxist version. It embeds thinking—intention and motivation for oneself—in history, thus preventing it from consciously determining itself. As a result, the world becomes an automatic mechanism predisposed to being what it will be, a self-production machine. Thinking for oneself shrinks to being just a product of forces beyond the scope of consciousness to recognize or control. It is reduced to becoming just their symptomatic expression, just their automatic mouthpiece or agent. At most this syndrome appears in crises of motivation, symptomatic of a radical mistrust of any dominant or orthodox rationale, particularly of one’s own guiding rationale: to be totally committed means having been duped by the ‘cunning of reason’ [List der Vernunft]. Should the dialectic prevail, it’s axiomatic that whatever one does is tracked by the shadow of its antithesis. Certainly this gravitational pull pervades certain crises of apprehension, since the historical unconscious can operate uncannily, ‘just below the surface of consciousness’ or as ‘embodied in special expression after special expression’, in the form of a ‘general idea’. This (according to Whitehead) ‘is a hidden driving force, haunting humanity, and ever appearing in specialized guise as compulsory action by reason of its appeal to the uneasy conscience of the age. The force of the appeal lies in the fact that the specialized principle of immediate conduct exemplifies the grandeur of the wider truth arising from the very nature of the order of things. Whitehead is thinking about how belief-systems (here specifically Christianity) impose themselves and “improve” civilization. But the concept of a ‘general idea’ applies equally to nefarious ideologies as they manifest themselves, to thought itself as it decays. The underlying principle is that the present ‘order of things’, now, harbours ‘a truth which mankind has grown to the stature of being able to feel though perhaps as yet unable to frame in fortunate expression’. Whether this ‘general idea’ will be beneficial or harmful becomes clear only once it has crystallized. The present moment, now, is still a nodal point on which converge fateful historicizing tendencies still too elusive for conscious representation or formulation: ‘Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language’ (Whitehead 1967b: 16, 24). (e) Since the historicized mind cannot comprehend a world in which it itself plays an integral role, since its full historical potential is inconceivable to itself, all it can do is defer to the past, to what it already knows (cf. Valéry 1960a: 917). Unconscious of when it became historicized, unaware of its own historicized predicament, the mind can, therefore, only persist with its already received historical consciousness, infatuated as it is with all things past. It can only keep deluding itself: history [crg] can only keep functioning ideologically. It expresses itself in the coercive concepts of ‘shared values’, ‘social identity’, or ‘cultural DNA’, espoused by state


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power but formulated by academic historians, and endorsed by the ‘millions of souls’ responding to them. In proposing the need for more history [crg] to remedy a historical situation history [rg] has produced, historians both reinforce the historicizing reflexes in history-focussed behaviour and amplify the already inconceivable scope of the historical unconscious. It all comes down to them collectively affi rming the pervasive illusion of a historicized world: the idea that the only common sense is a sense of history, the only common place for everyone is history. The existence of the historical unconscious suggests, therefore, that history [rg] itself produces the ultimate, radical crisis of apprehension. As Heidegger remarks, ‘To reflect on the essence of modernity moves thought and judgment into the sphere of influence of the actual, essential forces of this age [der eigentlichen Wesenskräfte dieses Zeitalters]. These forces operate, as they operate, unaffected by being assessed in everyday terms’ (Heidegger 1972: 89). Between the historicizing conceptualizations available to historians now, in the present social reality in which they find themselves (on the one hand) and the past they disclose or the ongoing “historical processes” they describe (on the other), there can be no ‘pre-established harmony’. To maintain that there is, is a vicious, identitary assumption: the very misgiving that there isn’t, vindicates the apprehension. Not only has the mass of historical data become unmanageable (as Mannheim suggests), but also in a constantly self-historicizing world the eidetic structures needed to understand it always lag “behind the times”, are always out of sync—as (e.g.) Scheler’s insight from 1927 confi rms: ‘The ideas of our time about Man and the Deity [ . . . ] are in fact such that they no longer correspond to the world-historical grade of Being or to the current social structure of humanity. They put Man’s relationship to the world on a basis [Weltgrund] that corresponds to those periods of time inhabited by a less mature humanity with its own clearly demarcated spheres of culture and not yet pushing towards establishing a common level [Ausgleich]’ (Scheler 1968: 116). In the historicized world, the same old things keep recurring because they are explained by the same old categories in the same old words.

2.3. The historical unconscious and historical representation The historical unconscious haunts the representation of history, in whatever media represent it. Though its influence prevents history’s components from synchronizing, the historical representation must produce coherence. Hence, it becomes structurally duplicitous: it works deceptively, sophistically. It must “save appearances”, but also guarantee its truthfulness. (a) Evidently, history is composed after the event. Historical consciousness, therefore, historicizes by constructing historical knowledge about, or producing the historical context for, an object or an issue. Historical representation thus compensates for social amnesia: it’s what shouldn’t be forgotten. Still, the historical unconscious will not be discounted. It exerts its

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presence indirectly, symbolically, because, according to its Oedipal organization, it is unconscious. The historical unconscious makes its numinous presence felt in this self-incriminating, Oedipal sense, of not knowing, of not having known,—at least, not until it was too late, far too late. Hence, as the instrument of postponed justification, historical representation works as a reproach or, at least, a deferred recognition: it’s what should have been known. This apprehension occurs typically whenever hitherto secret statepapers are made public or major archives opened up (as with the Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War). Representation might, therefore, seem to facilitate historical consciousness by enlarging its scope,—except that, in doing so, historical consciousness, being historical, at the same time can’t help encoding its discoveries in the same old language with the same old categorical coordinators, thereby blocking cognizance of any emerging difference. Further, like any form of consciousness, historical consciousness can never know how conscious it is or should be. Historicization can, therefore, never guarantee that the historical account adequately represents its object, even if the recourse to the same old identitary constructions creates the illusion of adequate comprehension. In any case, the historical unconscious hovering in its shadow deters finality; with its numinous scope and potential, it eludes history’s powers of representation or expression (as Whitehead and Heidegger in their different ways confirm). Historicization, it seems, is inherently problematic. Because one cannot be conscious of it, the “historical moment” when historicization occurred is irretrievable. In the historicized world where the past is always present, and even though historicized, hyperconscious of itself as a historical product, historical consciousness is still not identical to, or coincident with, the history that, according to its own identitary logic, “shaped” it. Even when involved in historical events, immediate experience—the historian’s in particular—must be repressed by, or sublimated into, an ideological assertion of cognitive supremacy, sanctioned by privileged access to the sources, or by disciplinary conformity. Hence, in the historicized world for historicized consciousness, the historical representation is still out of phase with what is being represented. With its comprehensive “look” it saves historical appearances [illusio]. In doing so, it denies itself as a compromise formation produced by conflicting, displaced interests. (b) But the historical unconscious imposes itself more through the reception of historical representations than through their production. It comes back to the relationship between appearance and truth, an issue that lies at the heart of sophistry. In the historicized world, all there ever is, is representation [illusio]. The historical account, as received by the reader or viewer, is nothing but image, ‘the appearance of the past’ (Downing 2004: 14). The problem is how to differentiate the specifically historical from other forms of representation. Logologically speaking, all words, all grammars generate a ‘real world effect’ [un effet monde] that produces the reality of an external world (Cassin 1995: 69, 73). Conversely, all words, all


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grammars represent indifferently history (which did happen), fiction (which might have happened), and myths and legends (which never happened) (cf. Sextus Empiricus 2000b:140–149; §§249, 254, 259–260). The problem is exacerbated when historians themselves are received as ‘the storytellers of the age’, mobilizing ‘spectacular visual imagination’ (Downing 2004: 16; Schama 2004: 33). It becomes critical when history, fiction, and myth all legitimately claim to disclose truth [aletheia],—timeless, universal insights into the nature of reality. The sophistical issue, therefore, comes down to the defi nition of prose discourses, devoid of any particular art [techne], that fit into neither the existing categories of rhetoric nor the existing genres of poetry (Cassin 1995: 481ff., 487ff.; cf. Sextus Empiricus 2000b:150–153; §§267–269). Due to the historical unconscious, historical representation is asynchronous both with its object (always coming after), and with its means (preemptive forms of comprehension and expression). So its truth can reside only in the ‘shrewdness and skill’ needed for ‘putting together the more credible story’, in its—inherently ludic—‘fine arrangement’ and ‘vivid illumination’ of events (Lucian 1999: 60–61; §§47–48; 64–65; §51). The logological (or discursive) nature of history, far from subverting its truth (as deconstructionism suggests), becomes its precondition. There is only representation: from that the “objective” existence of the past must be inferred. The truth of historical discourse is in the illusion of knowledge it projects. Lucian states that the historian should ‘bring a mirror, clear, gleaming bright, accurately centred, displaying the shape of things as he receives them, free from distortion, false colouring, and misrepresentation’. He thus confi rms that history is predicated on identitary thinking, since facilitating the recognition of likeness (whatever ‘being like’ actually means here) is integral to his definition of the ‘purpose of sound history’,—namely ‘that if ever again men find themselves in a like situation they may be able [ . . . ] from a consideration of the records of the past to handle rightly what now confronts them’ (Lucian 1999: 56–59; §42; 62–63; §50 (my italics)). Thus, as the sole guarantor of historical truth, of its capacity to represent its objects exactly as they were, the identitary imperative demands truth as accuracy, as ‘factual conformity’ [akribeia] (Lucian 1999: 52–53; §38; 58–59; §44; Cassin 1995: 491). However, because, as the later Sophists discovered, “fact” is ambivalent, referring to both “what happened” and what is “fabricated” (what Lucian calls ‘fashioned’), factual conformity, the precondition of verisimilitude, requires reinforcement (Lucian 1999: 64–65; §50; cf. Cassin 1995: 492). Hence, in historical representation the recourse to the same old categorical coordinators; to self-substantiating, ample discourse; to sufficient reasons deployed into sequentiality and serialization, forms of necessary succession; to words of command creating the ideology of cognitive supremacy; to the figures of coercion and incarceration (the ultimate sanctions),—all of them symptoms of historical hyperconsciousness and signs of cultural authoritarianism. Through them historicized thought denies the non-historical it cannot comprehend, banishes it beyond

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the scope of consciousness, declares it redundant. Even so, the disruptive potential of this non-historical gathers unnoticed, its historical incomprehensibility still exerting an uncanny apprehension, evident not least in the historicizing effort needed to keep it repressed: the undiminished ‘torrent’ of historical publications, the socialized mass-addiction to history-focussed behaviour.

3. THE HISTORICAL UNCONSCIOUS (2): SOCIAL CONFIGURATIONS Haunted by its historical unconscious, the historicized world clings to (ultimately deceptive) identitary precedents from the past. However, it thereby only succumbs to another unconscious effect: the apprehension of existential constraint that comes from inhabiting the binding commonplaces of historicized life. In the historicized world, this claustrophobia, a symptomatic time-sickness, is thus always already socialized. With its ideology of cognitive privilege, historicized thought imposes on the unconscious desires driving vital human interests a stabilizing, self-identical, historicized order. However, since it makes itself the vital interest of a now historicized humanity, it discovers that its imperious order transmits historicized desires it stimulates but cannot contain. In the historicized world, historical interests, therefore, proliferate gratuitously, becoming thereby atomized, amplified, ephemeralized, redundant. The historicized world becomes a force-field of confl icting historicizations: unconscious compulsions, regressive fundamentalisms, masquerading as objective, cognitive imperatives. It generates the accidents and spectacular catastrophes [parapraxis] that constitute the historical record (history [rg]). Further, in asserting the conceit of cognitive privilege, in thereby betraying its conviction as ideological, it can only vindicate the insight that ‘we are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong’ (Bateson 2000: 493). Enforcing the coercive arrangements of everyday life, it can’t help promoting the ‘erroneousness of the world [die Irrthümlichkeit der Welt] we believe we live in’ (Nietzsche 1988a: 52, §34). This recognition of history’s wrongness,—of the wrongness it infl icts and of being wronged by history—reveals its repressive, ideological authority. Accordingly, the historicized world incarcerates everyone in identical commonplaces, principally symbolized by the prison, the laboratory, and the work-place, hypostases of the coercive rhetoric, the categorical coordinators, and the ‘commanding words’ of historicizing discourse. These commonplace social institutions (these institutions of discursive commonplaces) configure historicized thinking without it being aware of it. They have already set up self-consciousness as a projection of the unconscious machinations the already historicized world represses (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 86). They produce structures of historical meaning and significance


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that automatically reinforce historicized consciousness and historicized thought. They reveal the rippling surface of history [rg], conventionally assumed to vindicate human freedom, as pure illusion. By sublimating the latent behavioural tropes that actually both drive it and compromise it, into rationalized cognitive patterns, they construct historical action and historicized knowledge as affi rmative order. As figures of coercive practice and commonplace thinking in a historicized world, (3.1) “prison” stands for the collective, binding common places history has ready for those it apprehends; (3.2) “laboratory” designates the experiential conditioning operative in historicized society and culture; and (3.3) “work-place” symbolizes the mass-mobilization of history-focussed behaviour.

3.1. Social figures of unconscious historical coercion (i): the prison Prison is the dominant figure: the others are variations on it. Prison predominates because a sense of being incarcerated stimulates self-awareness. It legitimates the idea that ‘it’s not so terrible to spend your life in prison . . . if you have an active mind. What is terrible is to make a prisoner of yourself. And that’s what most of us are—self-made prisoners’ (Miller 2006c: 27). Conversely, coercion is conducive to historicization: Braudel as a prisoner-of-war in northern Germany from 1940 to 1945 contemplating the Mediterranean, affi rming a ‘spectacle’ that no ‘traditional history could capture’, but also ‘partly as the only existential response to the tragic times’ that he was going through (Braudel 1994: 15); in extremis Simon Dubnow, in Riga in 1941, before being taken off to be murdered, urging his fellow Jews to ‘write and record’ (Marrus 1993: xiii). The degree to which history amplifies itself, the intensity of history-focussed behaviour, indicates the severity of social repressiveness. The prison is, therefore, an ambivalent figure: confi nement may well be conducive to intellectual realization; but historicization makes incarceration seem so natural that it disarms resistance to the coercive effects of historicized thought. (a) Self-awareness (being conscious of oneself [Ich]) immediately posits everything as being either not conscious (i.e. matter, the external world) or as not oneself (i.e. other people, other attitudes, other things) [Nicht-Ich]. This is not just about mind-body dualism. Idealist philosophy formulates a characteristic human pathos, an inherent ambivalence, suffusing consciousness. With being self-conscious comes a sense of eternal potential and infi nite scope: what eventually could consciousness not encompass? There also comes a sense of constraint: all the material, biological, cultural and political obstacles obscuring this sublime prospect and blocking access to it; all the personal choices or inhibitions frustrating one’s own opportunities for self-fulfilment. To be conscious means being aware of one’s existential destitution: ‘the self feels a longing within itself, it feels necessitous.’ It means being confronted by, and surmounting, the constraints this ambivalence reveals: ‘Since there can be no longing in the self without a feeling of

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constraint [Zwang], and vice versa, the self is synthetically united in both, one and the same self’ (Fichte 1970: 196–198; 221, 229; §§5; 10). Prison is a basic metaphor for this ambivalence. Paradoxically, in his prison-cell Camus’ étranger, facing imminent execution but contemplating the night sky ‘freighted with signs and stars’, becomes conscious of human freedom. Not in a pragmatic sense that might indicate belated remorse, but in an existential sense, this moment of self-awareness is absurd. It recognizes the natural world’s ‘tender indifference’ towards the cosmically insignificant individual; it rejects totally the conventions that construct and constrain human social behaviour, that establish the norms of incriminating behaviour that ultimately have condemned him (Camus 1964: 178–179). Only the prospect of certain death realizes this hopelessly defiant sense of personal freedom intrinsic in Being [l’être] itself, in the fact that one exists at all. This absurd standpoint reveals how closely civic freedoms are tied to the illusions that preoccupy routine living: the social roles, occupations, enterprises, ambitions, hopes, and fears that both give meaning to one’s life and constitute the social-historical world [illusio]. These objectives are illusory since with them one effectively erects ‘barriers that constrain one’s life’ [je me crée des barrières entre quoi je me resserre ma vie]. They allow no more freedom than ‘a prisoner could conceive of or a modern individual in the bosom of the state’ [Je ne puis avoir de la liberté que la conception du prisonnier ou de l’individu moderne au sein de l’État] (Camus 1972: 80, 82). The consciousness that grasps its own absurdity must reject the existential palliatives history keeps pushing,—the same old constraints, the same old pacifying reassurances, enforcing resignation to things having always been the way they are. Prison, as a metaphor, opens up a perspective suggested by the anthropic principle. It reveals what Pascal calls the ‘disproportion of man’, the indeterminacy that characterizes human existence positioned in the infi nite cosmos ‘mid-way between nothing and everything’: ‘May man, having come back to himself, consider what he is in terms of what is, may he regard himself as adrift and, from the tiny cell he happens to be living in, by that I mean the universe [ce petit cachot où il se trouve logé, j’entends l’univers], may he learn to value the earth, its kingdoms, its cities, its houses and himself in their proper terms’ (Pascal 1963a: 526; §199–72). Being existentially ‘disproportionate’ to mankind’s physical state, consciousness cannot avoid gambling on the existence of a transcendental reality (e.g. a divinity). If human existence were concerned solely with mundane occupations, objectives, and entertainments, it would be too terrifying: ‘Imagine a number of men in chains and all of them condemned to death, some of whom are each day butchered in full view of the others, those remaining see their own predicament in that of their fellow men and, looking at one another in pain and bereft of hope, await their turn. This is the image of the human condition’ (Pascal 1963a: 556; §434–199 (my italics)). Conversely, the reductive mentality implicit in modern cosmology that produces this anthropic


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disproportion is itself incarcerating,—as when D. H. Lawrence observes: ‘It is a strange thing, but when science extends space ad infinitum, and we get the terrible sense of limitlessness, we have at the same time a secret sense of imprisonment. Three-dimensional space is homogeneous, and no matter how big it is, it is a kind of prison. No matter how vast the range of space, there is no release’ (Lawrence 1995: 46). Prison, fi nally, operates metaphorically as both an impediment to, and a catalyst for, acquiring knowledge, for discovering what Plato calls ‘an eternal reality, the realm unaffected by change and decay’ (Plato 1965: 245; Bk.VI. 485). Its Classical expression is the simile of the cave in The Republic. It reduces ordinary life (life uninterested in truth or virtue) to servitude, and the sophistical knowledge it utilizes to illusion. The cave holds ‘men who have been prisoners there since they were children, their legs and necks so fastened that they can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads’. Constrained by their mundane preoccupations, unable to see either themselves or their fellows, they cannot help regarding the shadows projected onto the cave-wall in front of them as reality (Plato 1965: 278– 279; Bk.VII. 514–515 (my italics)). To be able to emerge into the sunlight of absolute truth, they would need to undertake an arduous journey of self-liberation. Prison thus exposes metaphorically the physiological, material, social, and political resistances to the transcendent scope of consciousness. Still, whatever historical circumstances impose themselves, these constraints can never be binding. This is confi rmed by another criminal, condemned to death for challenging civic conventions: Socrates. Socrates pushes this disproportionate consciousness to its logical and existential conclusion. He can face his official murder with equanimity because to practice true philosophy is to prepare for death (Plato 2001a: 234–235; 67.E). His execution ultimately vindicates his beliefs, ultimately demonstrates his existential logic. ‘The lovers of knowledge,’ (says Socrates), ‘perceive that when philosophy fi rst takes possession of their soul it is entirely fastened and welded to the body and is compelled to regard realities through the body as through prison bars [ . . . ].’ Furthermore, philosophy sees ‘that the most dreadful thing about the imprisonment is the fact that it is caused by the lusts of the flesh, so that the prisoner is the chief assistant of his own imprisonment’ (Plato 2001a: 286–289; 82D–83.A). More is at stake here too than conventional dualism. Consciousness is always free not to identify with the contingent situations in which it finds itself. It’s free to assert its difference, and to express its difference as refusal. (b) However, as a symbol of the historicized world, the prison-figure loses its metaphysical aura. Historicization is an instrument for reducing this “disproportionate”, existential consciousness. Prison symbolizes a historicized human existence so diminished that, having lost all sense of freedom, it’s now unconscious of its self-incarceration. Historicized consciousness, manifested through history-focussed behaviour, is now so

110 Imprisoned by History socially naturalized as to be oblivious to the unnatural constraints it continually imposes, it continually imposes on itself. Historicization can’t help being inimical to differing personal consciousness: only consciousness—taking a vigilant stance—can resist it. Historically, one can know everything there is to know about a person [illusio] and still not know what it is actually to exist as that person [aesthesis]. One could have the most complete set of historical data about a social group and the most comprehensive, historical evidence concerning its mentality,—as with the tightly coordinated, inter-personal behaviour in Elias’s ludic figurations: still one has no sense of what it is to look out on the world as that person opposite, to be that person opposite, in the same way as one looks out on the world oneself, as the person one is. As Merleau-Ponty remarks, what makes the person opposite truly ‘other’ (i.e. who he or she is for him or herself [Pour Soi]), cannot by defi nition be accessible to anyone else. But what prevents the self and the other from being incarcerated each in their own selfhood, what establishes a dialectical, self-decentring relationship between them, is that they are two access-points to the same, underlying Being [deux entrées vers le même Être] (Merleau-Ponty 1995b: 110, 114). It takes this phenomenological-existential standpoint to reveal historicization totally dominating consciousness. The everyday world, as integral existence [l’être intégrale], is constituted by the intersecting relationships between the self and others. They generate the atmosphere of human social life with its own cohesion: its multifarious aspects are all ‘differences, extreme divergences of the same thing’. This, existentially speaking, is how an interpersonal world arises, what he designates as ‘the world of the senses or the historical world’ (i.e. history [rg]) (Merleau-Ponty 1995b: 116–117). But this phenomenological position reveals the existentially impoverished reality of the historicized world. With its identitary thinking, reinforced by its coercive thought-styles, its ‘words of command’, and its rhetoric of ineluctability, historicization (history [crg]) ignores difference. In putting people in their proper place, in their historical context, its totally comprehensive scope negates what others could be for themselves [être pour soi]. It traps everyone in the same, historicized ‘universe of thought’: it thus ‘marks the triumph of solipsism in disguise’ (Merleau-Ponty 1995b: 110). As an expression of historical consciousness, to assert that ‘man is born free but lives everywhere in chains’ still acknowledges an originating, archaic residue external and resistant to the self-same process of historicization (Rousseau 1966: 41). By contrast, from the vast ‘sweeps of time’ of the historicized world which confi nes you, chained together with others by common bonds, that resistant residue has disappeared: incarceration is a socialized experience. The totally historicized mentality affi rms history as the ‘self-same universe of thought’. It inevitably configures society as a ‘human zoo’ [Menschenpark] governed by a technocratic elite for the “common good” (cf. Sloterdijk, P. 1999: 45ff.; Plato 2001b: 70ff, 136–137; 275. Eff., 295.A). As a regime of supervision, historicized society has something


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of the aroma of the mental-asylum or the hospital about it (Nietzsche 1988b: 368; III, §14). The historicized world, dominated by history as a technology of technologies, has become increasingly a ‘massive prison’, an ‘open prison’ bristling with surveillance cameras, with everything going on in it, not least our own bodies, being comprehensively screened by a 24/7 control-system (cf. Schmidt 1996: 28; Adorno 1976: 30; cf. Baudrillard 1983: 92).9 Moreover, the prison-figure in this historically hyperconscious perspective transforms the template of the classical polis, the epitome of civilized existence, into the design-concept for the concentration-camp: ‘Auschwitz had its emporium, its necropolis and its Acropolis, its Agora and its houses.’ That’s to say, ‘Auschwitz was to the topsy-turvy city Hitler built what the theatre was to the classical city [ . . . ]’, except that ‘if the theatre [ . . . ] recapitulated the real into representation, Auschwitz gave reality to what seemed in Munich, Nuremberg and Berlin [i.e. the mythical sites of Nazism] an innocent performance reprieved within the historicist court of academic historiography’. So the prison-figure symbolizes an unconscious, traumatizing tendency within historicized thinking, within a historicized world. Auschwitz is a ‘caesura in its history’, ‘the fissure where the West reveals its terrible essence’,—where the barbarity its cultural aspirations necessarily generate, expresses itself symbolically as cultural aspirations. The Nazis had physically, as a historically cathartic act, to remove all traces of the intervening Judeo-Christian history, were they to realize German culture’s persistent narcissistic infatuation with classical Greece and, on that basis, found a new history for Germany and the West (van Pelt & Westfall 1993: 339, 344–345, 348). Prison also symbolizes the psychopathology of historicized existence, characteristic of its typical inmate, an apprehensive homunculus, identified by Reich—here too in evolutionary terms—as the ‘little man’, a member of a species ‘it took many million years to develop [ . . . ] from a jelly-fish to a terrestrian biped’, but now become a ‘biological aberration, in the form of rigidity, [that] has lasted only six thousand years’ (Reich 1975: 35). This is also homo clausus, a creature who regards his ‘authentic self, his self as such, his very soul, as being locked up in something foreign and external, known as “society”, as if it were a prison’ (Elias 2003: 52). According to Elias, this particular psychopathology is an ‘artificial product’ [Kunstprodukt] of human history, principally the result of the trend towards scientific self-distanciation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but still reflecting a ‘long tradition’ from Plato to Parsons. With the discovery of the heliocentric universe by Copernicus, the hitherto geocentric conception of the universe could survive only as an anthropically biased, egocentric conception of experience. Homo clausus inevitably regards himself as a microcosm, separated objectively from others by an ‘invisible wall’. Constrained to be self-inhibiting, he inevitably experiences his own life ‘as though it were an actually existing cage’ (Elias 1976a: XLVI, IL, LIII, LV, LVIII–LXI,

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LXV). That human behaviour, thus misconceived, compromises the human sciences, Elias justifiably argues. But his remedy is hardly better. He may well wish to free this apprehensive hermit from the solitary confinement of his own historicized life, to make him an ‘open personality’, but only to buckle him straight into an intricately woven harness of interdependencies (Elias 1976a: LXVII–LXVIII). The mind–body, subjective–objective, involvement–detachment syndrome is retained, but reformulated: homo clausus needs merely to realize that society does not imprison him alone, but rather that he, along with all those to whom he is bonded, imprisons others too. Elias offers a conception of humanity that, morally speaking, couldn’t be more unlike the Socratic model. His historicized vision a priori reduces existential self-consciousness to a mere index of human behaviour and psychology at any given phase of civilization, (Elias 2003: 49). Operating through dynamic historical processes, his is a highly conformist vision that suits the regressive fundamentalism of the historicized world. Prison, though, still is the appropriate place for this latest, devious humanoid. Furtive, repressed, oppressed, inhibited, passive, reactive, obliging, adaptable as it is, it certainly seems tame. But it’s also a ‘cowardly, homicidal bundle of appetites endowed with seemingly limitless instincts of destruction and self-destruction’, ‘a fairly cruel carnivore built to move forward, and built to move over and against obstacles’: it self-deceptively enlists the most humanistic values—democracy, human rights, freedom—to justify the disinhibited violence it chases its political and cultural objectives with (Steiner 1997b: 274; 1997c: 60). It has a history that actually brought Classical humanism and authoritarian bestiality into fascistic alignment (cf. Sloterdijk 1999: 30–31). The main obstacle it faces is the obstacle it poses for itself, for its capacity to nurture a possible moral self-transfiguration, for its survival. Clearly, what it calls a ‘civilizing process’ is a conjecture floated by its own, innate biological bias, an anthropic conceit. The more homo clausus unconsciously immures himself in, or chains himself to, historical culture, the more violently his frustration is vented. The very coexistence of this homunculus and its historicized habitat refutes the claim that history humanizes, especially when it requires nothing less than the prison-figure to back up this claim,—as when a historian of religion (who else?) declares historians to be ‘the gate-keepers of society’s psychological health’ (cf. Musgrove 2006: 7 (my italics)). Like hard-pressed psychiatric warders—probably—ready, at the fi rst sign of resistance, to restrain and sedate. . . .

3.2. Social figures of unconscious historical coercion (ii): the laboratory The laboratory, like the prison, is a coercive environment. They go together: the Nazi concentration camp as a locus of biological experiment; the panopticon as a ‘privileged site for making human experimentation possible’, as a


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‘laboratory of power’, thereby broadening knowledge and generating new objects of scientific interest (cf. Foucault 1975: 205–206). In the laboratory the unconscious potential of a totally historicized social reality emerges in two basic modes (3.21) as a conditioning-system (i.e. an apparatus for manipulating or modifying mental and behavioural reflexes); and (3.22) as an experimentation-facility (i.e. an environment for testing, trying out, experiencing). 3.21. The historicized world as a conditioning-system The laboratory models the historicized world as a conditioning-system whenever history appears as ‘evolution’ or ‘shaping’, or as ‘accumulation’ (i.e. sedimentation) or ‘tidal flows’,—as impersonal, natural or naturalized agency. So the ‘process of civilization’ works like the growth of a crystal in a saturated solution (Elias 1976a: 156). In attributing European decadence to its ‘natural history’ or the ‘genealogy’ of its moral codes, Nietzsche presents the cultural environment as a brutal, human breeding-facility (Nietzsche 1988a: 108–110; §188; 1988b: 291ff; II, §§1ff.). This eugenic perspective seems repugnant now, even though, as Plato and Nietzsche confi rm, it operates within an archaic semantic field of animal husbandry, prototypical, human zoo-keeping. But it’s no less coercive than the thoughtstyle of ‘natural’ coercion historians normally adopt. A Chancellor of the Exchequer’s affi rmation of British values shaped by ‘long tidal flows’ of history matches the eugenic perspective on ‘each individual as something not wholly detached from its parent source,—as a wave that has been lifted and shaped by normal conditions in an unknown, illimitable ocean’ (Galton 1972: 428). Similarly, the National Trust’s comparison of history with a ‘momentous glacier of time’ supports the eugenic conception of civilisation (as formulated by the eugenicist Francis Galton) as ‘a new condition imposed upon man by the course of events, just as in the history of geological changes new conditions have continually been imposed on different races and animals’ (Galton 1972: 399). Both the historicized and eugenic perspective see ‘each human [ . . . ] as a segregation of what already existed, under a new shape, and as a regular consequence of previous conditions’ (Galton 1972: 428). The only difference: this ultra-conservative nineteenthcentury concept now comes with a re-cycled, euphemistic wrapping. The laboratory as a conditioning system derives from the archaic trope the ‘culture’ metaphor articulates. Culture is horticulture: ‘just as a field, however good the ground, cannot be productive without cultivation, so the soul cannot be productive without teaching. Now the cultivation of the soul is philosophy’ (Cicero 1996: 158–159; II.V.13). It suits contemporary totalitarian politics, as Bauman points out: ‘Modern genocide, like modern culture in general, is a gardener’s job. It is just one of the many chores that people who treat society as a garden need to undertake.’ If the soul or society are seen as gardens, then ‘weeding out is a creative, not a

114 Imprisoned by History destructive activity. It does not differ in kind from other activities which combine in the construction and sustenance of the perfect garden’. In particular, ‘all visions of society-as-garden defi ne parts of the social habitat as weeds’ (Bauman 1996: 92). Moreover, be it in the soul or in society, the task of weeding, of ‘pulling out vices by the roots’ falls to the “queen of the humanities”, philosophy (Cicero 1996: ibid.). The aim is commendably humane: to become more ‘cultured’, to grow ‘seed of a kind to bear the richest fruit’, to produce ‘men of a high type’ (Cicero 1996: ibid.; Galton 1907: 30). The laboratory figure can treat homo sapiens as a plant that thrives only in the most perilous and inclement terrain (Nietzsche 1988a: 61; §44). It can also evoke idyllic domestication, ‘the time [ . . . ], in far distant years, when the population of the earth shall be kept as strictly within the bounds of number and suitability of race, as the sheep on a well-ordered moor or the plants in an orchard house’ (Galton 1972: 410). That’s because history, as the ‘natural process’ of human self-cultivation, in any case ‘stands out as a gigantic laboratory in which all possible experiments have been made to obtain a formula of public life most favourable to the plant “man”’ (Ortega y Gasset 1993: 52; cf. Davies 2006a: 37, 43). In the words of George Bernard Shaw’s endorsement of ‘eugenic religion’: in ‘never deliberately calling a human being into existence for the sake of civilization’, but in ‘wiping out millions’, ‘both on the scaffold and on the battlefield’, history has in effect ‘never hesitated to carry out the negative side of eugenics’ (Galton 1905: 74). 3.22. The historicized world as an experimentation-facility The laboratory also encapsulates the historicized world as an experimentation-facility,—as in Volney’s remark that ‘history, taken in its universality, is an immense anthology of moral and social experiments [un cours d’expériences morales et sociales] mankind involuntarily and extravagantly carries out on itself’ (Volney 1989a: 511, 554).10 Partly the historical unconscious manoeuvres human beings into unforeseen situations it would rather avoid (as Jünger, for example, recognized). Clio, the muse of history, is a lab technician assembling a complex apparatus to see what happens, if . . . (What happens if a ‘rogue-state’ acquires nuclear weapons? What happens if China becomes the world’s only superpower? What happens if the Amazon rain-forest is cleared? What happens if 40 million people worldwide live with HIV & AIDS? What happens if meat from diseased cattle enters the human food chain?) Partly too, governance—the practice and technics of world-management—looks like experimentation, once politics becomes ‘zoo-keeping’. Transforming democratic politics into political and economic managerialism, ‘the governmentalising of the corporation and the corporatising of government’, does make the world a testing-facility for social-engineering designs. It substitutes for the public sphere of critical debate a controlled and controlling environment: here the ‘few (corporate


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management; politicians and civil servants) organise the social activity of the many’. This unprecedented ‘politico-economic phenomenon which involves a re-branding of business and democracy as democratic business and businesslike democracy’ is ‘the New Totalitarianism’ (Allott 2002: 162, 172–173, 174). (a) The laboratory defi nes history as a site for experiments in governance once several factors converge. Forms of scientific rationality such as process, calculation and equivalence reproduce socio-economic structures. The relationship between the political leader and the manipulated masses, or the chief-executive and the alienated work-force, replicates the relationship between the experimental scientist and the material being tested. Political strategy solidifies into empirical, positivistic facts underwritten by history’s identitary logic (cf. Horkheimer & Adorno 1973: 10–12, 23, 26ff.; Sohn-Rethel 1978: 205ff.). So once nature is defi ned mechanically, by experimentally verifiable laws of nature, the world itself becomes simply a mechanism to be regulated. Once experimental science vindicates the power of knowledge, those in power use knowledge to set up political or socio-economic “experiments” ideologically to vindicate themselves. History (as public historians in particular insist) offers them ideal, laboratory conditions for testing their egregious designs. As something to experiment with, history, therefore, becomes a bio-political agent. Not least it produces biological and, consequently, behavioural and cognitive changes which impact on itself and its own self-comprehension. Its pathological effects are everywhere apparent: Baalbek trembling with Israeli shells exploding around it; Babylon used as a US army vehiclepark; the Bamiyan Buddhas, 2000 years old, dynamited in an instant. The historicized world, experimentally pre-conditioned as it is, is evidently a toxic environment,—an environment contaminated by historical experiments, by what the self-appointed ‘engineers of world-history’ keep trying out (cf. Horkheimer & Adorno 1973: 37). The laboratory history has become, is maintained by the state as a military-industrial complex managed by corporate governance, its technical apparatus the governance-system, and its bio-political experimental-process synchronous with historical time itself. Toxicity is the endemic, “natural” pre-condition of the historicizations it produces. Toxins—all kinds of popular nationalism, fundamentalism, revanchisme, idealism—are what history’s chemistry concocts (cf. Valéry 1960a: 935). The toxicity is endemic in its rationalizing, identitary order: ‘The whole world has become one great big organism dying of ptomaine poison [i.e. food poisoning]. It got poisoned just when everything was beautifully organized’ (Miller 1982b: 146). (b) The laboratory epitomizes the historicized world because, driven by ‘vulgar curiosity’, history can’t resist trying things out (cf. Nietzsche 1988a: 159; §224). The laboratory figure here connects ‘experiment’ and ‘experience’. But where the scientist experiments to experience what happens, the historian’s history-focussed behaviour, operating on identitary

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logic, wants to know what “what happens” is like: ‘“Experience”, indeed, is the favoured word nowadays of many historical museums and exhibitions which, like TV reconstructions of times past, are designed to give the person of the today a feel for the texture of life in an earlier era’ (Snowman 2007: 9). Historical sites function, therefore, as inquisitive installations, generating experiential simulacra, synthetic ‘like-experiences’, with a socially conditioning and conventionalizing effect (cf. Laing 1968: 80). Typically the emphasis is on ‘experiencing the real thing’, stressing not just visual, but tactile, olfactory, and auditory sensation, e.g.: ‘Encourage your children to have as many different sensory experiences as possible. [ . . . ] at Hampton Court, the mouth-watering aromas of Henry VIII’s state banquets are recreated in the magnificent Tudor kitchens, with game pies and suckling pigs. [ . . . ] At sites where no resources are available, simply get your children to close their eyes and describe what they smell and hear. This is a great way of putting them in touch with their surroundings’ (Borman 2006: 21 (my italics)). The ‘historic attraction’ works like the ‘scent organ’ or the ‘feely’ (cf. movie) redolent of the laboratory society in Huxley’s Brave New World. This shouldn’t be surprising. Where education degenerates into ‘learning experience’, it starts a curiosity-craving. History provides the right curiosity-fi x. The laboratory figure covers (e.g.) both the nuclear fallout shelter and the historic country-house once they become experiment-sites, stimulating the ‘like-experiences’ curiosity craves. The information-leaflet for the ‘Story of Berlin’ exhibition proclaims: ‘The Story of Berlin is the capital city’s top interactive exhibition. Our philosophy in three words: Please touch everything! (my italics)’ And it goes on to explain: ‘Experience 800 years of Berlin history in two hours—displayed in an unprecedented multi-media format. Hear, see, smell and feel the experience of Berlin in twenty-five experiential rooms (my italics).’ Synthetic that experience may be, it culminates in the still fully operational nuclear bunker, the ‘most awe-inspiring’ part of the exhibition, ‘guaranteed to send a chill down your spine’. But when it gets real, it can’t get too real, it becomes a cheap thrill: ‘Experience the anxiety of the Cold War. Lying on a makeshift cot, you can actually hear the terrifying sounds of an airborne attack.’ Clearly, as the learning director at English Heritage remarks, ‘the teaching of history has come a long way since the days of reciting endless dates and facts. Children today learn what it was like to live in the past, as well as about the great events that shaped the modern world’. Of course, she’s referring not to the ‘shapes’ made by nuclear missiles, but to something more banal, or at least romantically remote, but definitely ludic: ‘They can play detective with historical sources and debate questions as wide-ranging as what the Romans had for breakfast to who killed the Princes in the Tower.’ She continues: ‘Yet no matter how good classroom-based learning is, there is no substitute for experiencing the real thing. Everyone [ . . . ] agrees that, when it comes to providing a deep and lasting learning experience, nothing beats a visit to


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a historical site. Peering over the battlements of Dover Castle [ . . . ] brings history to life like nothing else can’ (Borman 2006: 20 (my italics)). In Brave New World, history-teaching was banned so that totalitarian laboratorysociety was affi rmed (Huxley 1966: 38). The heritage industry is more devious: it uses the past to promote the ideological totality of history’s scope. Despite its propaganda, history [rg] doesn’t actually matter. Reducing it to an experimental synthetic eradicates the past as it was for itself, as something different. The synthetic history ‘experience’ might be ‘like nothing else’: identitary thinking ensures that the historical stuff being experienced is all the same. Discriminating between types of sense-data is pointless when the ‘real thing’ and the pastiche ‘historic attraction’ are alike. (c) The laboratory figure, therefore, reveals history as a facility for human beings to experiment on each other. In historical perspective homo sapiens is a species determined to experiment with its own species-nature. To begin with, human life depends on a metabolic relationship between human beings and nature: labour-force is the energy that drives it; production, human self-reproduction, the result. Human beings regulate their relationship with nature: in interacting with it, they themselves impact on it with natural force, as a ‘force of nature’ [Naturmacht] (Marx 2005: 57, 192). Given that ‘all production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual and through a specific form of society’, history, the narrative of successive social, economic, and political forms, is synonymous with production (Marx 1993: 87). It’s the eidetic form of human self-reproduction, of the human appropriation of nature. Production is the natural activity of the mega-machine that is the historicized world, only because history naturalizes it. After all, history is the record of human beings acting on their natural world with their own ‘natural force’. In the historicized world, with capitalist production integral to it, historicized thinking is, therefore, inimical to ecological consciousness. Based on anthropic conceit, it gives the ‘natural force’ of human work ontological priority. So nature, technologically captured, totally historicized, no longer has anything natural about it. It dwindles to being an adjunct to historicized human nature. Historicization, therefore, ruptures the ecological interdependency between human beings and nature. It destroys their umbilical unity (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 10). In experimenting with nature, history (as eugenics already implies) inevitably experiments on human biological material. Historical sense results primarily from ways of encoding alterations to body-tissue, whether these alterations result from adaptive social behaviour (e.g. work-routine, diet), from injuries human beings infl ict on one another (e.g. crime, war) or from the pathological vulnerability of organic existence (e.g. illness, accident) (cf. Davies 2006a: 97–101). But in experimenting on the organic nature in humans, history exploits an ethical loop-hole. According to Kant, the human being [der Mensch] is an end in itself, never the means to an end. The individual’s personal autonomy, his or her inalienable right to self-determination, entails the obligation to respect in the particular,

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embodied person, the quality of being human: humanity [Menschheit] itself (Kant 1967: 102, 151). However, nothing indicates how adequately any individual person represents human qualities. Kant does stress that humanity, the ideal essence as such, must be respected,—as though it may not always be evident and so the moral law acts as a reminder. He does argue that humanity [Menschheit] is a moral and cultural potential the human species must realize in history, hence that it involves a self-historicizing dynamic. However, at any given historical moment (according to the implication of this argument) it would be unclear how adequately realized this potential would be,—how adequately the existing population of human beings would represent the moral potential of the species as a whole. Kant does conclude that, without the quest for the highest good and ‘as long as people’s nature remained as it is’, ‘their behaviour would be transformed into a mere mechanism. Without being geared to a moral end, historicization would be an energy-wasting machine,—like a puppet-play so full of gesticulation but with no life at all in the marionettes [aber in den Figuren doch kein Leben anzutreffen]’ (Kant 1967: 169). Could the Enlightenment here in its ‘existing language’ really be having ‘a dim apprehension’ of post-Holocaust humanism? Does it intimate here, prompted by its own historical unconscious, the stark realization that ‘there is no essence of the human being’ because ‘man is always falling short of or exceeding what is human’ (Agamben 2003: 147)? Testing human beings to the point of destruction, the bio-political experiment that history became in Auschwitz reveals that man, existing on a ‘fault-line between the non-human and the human’, is ‘infi nitely destructible’ (Agamben 2003: 146–147, 161). Like Kant’s ‘mechanical puppet’, the ‘walking corpse’, human being at the point of absolute reduction, has nothing vitally human about it anymore. Without human qualities, without ‘human’ as a qualifier (e.g. human species), species-being is merely biological substrate, so much genetic material,—the automatic obduracy that moral duty and the moral law were meant to transcend. The obligation to respect humanity [Menschheit], therefore, keeps needing to be reasserted. Otherwise, ‘species’ signifies nothing but obdurate substrate and always will need extra qualification in order to dignify it, to make it human. The problem is: this essentially “human” qualification must be essentially indefi nite. (d) The laboratory figure in the end reinforces history[crg]’s self-identical character. If human beings, be it as individuals, be it as a species, have no nature but history, their “natural qualities” will be totally historical (as, e.g., Elias and Ortega y Gasset argue). Their nature will always remain as it is, since it will always remain historical: revealing how history ‘shapes’ us, history’s identitary thinking makes everything self-identical. There will never be any ethical transcendence of human nature by human thinking and acting. Overruling ethics, history will vindicate whatever human beings have done, species-modification or reduction included. The same


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logic makes history so “natural” that it exposes everyone to being treated as biological substrate, to being anaesthetized, sedated, stimulated, engineered, or cleansed. In the historicized world, people are already guinea-pigs, subject to callous treatment: vous êtes des cobayes, chers hommes et des cobayes fort mal utilisés (Valéry 1960a: 1062). So to construct a defence based on innate human dignity, human rights derived from human nature, and political regulation against human self-experimentation by means of biotechnology is misconceived, both as an assessment of the problem and as a remedy (cf. Fukuyama 2002: 148ff., 181ff.). As the walking corpses of Auschwitz show, human nature, reduced to biological substrate, is neither dignified nor right. Political regulation of biotechnological research would, in any case, become a supplementary experimental factor, given that (as already suggested) political governance is ipso facto a form of human self-experimentation. Instead, the danger lies not so much in the long-term social implications for coping with a re-engineered, pharmacologically modified humanity (e.g. the ‘giant nursing home’ society would become if—perhaps like Swift’s Struldbruggs!—people normally lived to be 150 or more (cf. Fukuyama 2002: 67, 69)). It lies in something more immediate, already operational now: the historical capacity to modify biological substrate generating an ethics of its own. ‘Techno-science and modern rationalized capitalism’, as ‘universalized productions of Western bourgeois culture’, produce a ‘regestalting [sic] of truth’, a new ‘biosociality’: ‘nature [ . . . ] remade through technique [ . . . ] will fi nally become artificial, just as culture becomes natural’ (Rabinow 1996: 99, 102, 131, 137). In a historicized world, history’s own self-interest will inevitably reduce political and social problems to treatments for the human biological substrate, because it makes history more like itself, because it reinforces its identitary logic. It creates new genetically based, identitary formations (e.g. associations of those suffering from particular, genetically inherited diseases (cf. Rabinow 1996: 102)). Where history sees itself as the ‘technology of technologies’, technology—biotechnology above all else—enhances history’s technological potential (cf. Davies 2006a: 120ff., 137ff.). Where history sees itself as changing the latest thing into the same old thing, technicians—history biotechnicians in particular—will help accelerate the already accelerating historicization (cf. Davies 2006a: 132–136; Halévy 2001: 145, 168). History may well involve many abortive attempts to correct the deforming, wilful growth of human nature, to straighten out what even Kant reduced to the ‘twisted wood’ of humanity (Kant 1977a: 40, 41; §§5, 6). It might well discern utopia in the far distance, many generations away (if humanity lasts so long). To reach it, human beings may well need to keep their nerve to withstand the ravages of their own ‘unsocial sociability’ [ungesellige Geselligkeit] that should take them there (Kant 1977a: 37; §4). However, the biotechnology revolution—as revolution, as a historicizing phenomenon—is a historical ‘singularity’ with the potential to make

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this history obsolete. Why unending human misery in the meantime, if Prozac or Ritalin (‘an overt instrument of social control’) can deliver good times now (Fukuyama 2002: 46ff.)? Why catastrophic ideological confl ict, if the offending material can be edited out of the “book of life”, the human genome, itself? Why entertain ethical scruples when, in medicalizing human behaviour, history presents itself as a therapeutic technology pushing analgesics for the distress it causes? The laboratory figure reveals history as a facility for human selfexperimentation,—as the bio-technology revolution confi rms.11 It stresses the essentially illusory character [illusio] of historicizing thought, since historical experimentation ultimately threatens the ‘phylogenetic capital of the human species’. Its identitary logic culminates in the ultimate anthropic conceit, the ‘genetic simulation of the living’ [la simulation génétique du vivant] (Baudrillard 1992: 139; my italics). More, then, is historically conceivable than is naturally possible, since species-being no longer limits what is conceivable. Envisaging a ‘posthuman future’, pursuing its eugenic selfenhancement, humanity sleepwalks towards self-induced obsolescence. In driving its historicizing logic to its conclusion, the human species renders itself, as a species, historically redundant.

3.3. Social figures of unconscious historical coercion (iii): the work-place Certainly, ‘capitalism produces the worst prison of all: it locks time up’ (Cohen 1993: xviii). The work-place (i.e. the factory or office) evinces characteristics of both the prison and the laboratory. It’s where history’s identitary logic materializes: it “shapes” the world; it “makes” things the way they are. Historical work, therefore, needs a place to work in,—a History Workshop for working-peoples’ history, ‘history’s workshop’, L’Atelier de l’histoire, for the ‘historian’s craft’, le Métier d’historien, and ready equipped with The Historian’s Toolbox.12 Historians would thus convince themselves their work is artisanal, a pre-capitalist, non-alienating form of social production outside the labour-process and the circulation of capital. In this antiquated (or historicized) self-conception historians encode their alleged, cognitive ‘situational advantage’ [avantage de situation] as the ‘best tooled-up’ [le mieux outillé] to render current events intelligible (Furet 1997: 31). But the artisan-historian’s ‘extremely precious knowledge’ is flawed by its own anachronism (Furet 1997: 30). Being the latest version of the same old thing, history [crg] comes only in a mass-produced, commodity form: in historicized society the work-place is where history (like everyone else) works. There it functions indispensably as the ideal self-image of the economic system, its ideal production process, its ideal commodity. Through the socialization of both work and production, social behaviour becomes a form of labour. But in a historicized world, all social behaviour is ipso facto history-focussed. Consequently, both in thought


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and in action, history identifies with the economic system: the socialization of work (3.31) and production (3.32) presupposes the socialization of history, the characteristic sign of a historicized world. 3.31. The socialization of work Work is socialized when social behaviour becomes productive and can be expressed as a measurable economic value. Work is, by defi nition, a social activity since it supports everyone’s life. But, because necessary work apparently defi nes a margin of leisure, it seems not to be totally socialized. It socializes itself once leisure acquires the productive potential of work. Leisure was, in any case, integral to capitalist production: owners of capital grudgingly allowed workers time outside work for refreshing the labour force they were “selling” in the work-place. However, in the neo-liberal economic system, leisure itself becomes productive. Guaranteed by statute, and with it consumption facilitated by disposable income, leisure generates new needs for the economic system to exploit and new sources of value for it to realize. In producing goods consumers need for their leisure activities, the leisure industry re-functions people’s freedom, exploits it so they consume more leisure commodities still, and so assimilates their own free-time to the production process. Caught up in this production process, people ‘do not notice how unfree they really are when they feel most free because the rule of their unfreedom is abstracted from them’,—is produced unconsciously of their own volition (cf. Adorno 1970: 60). The worker, therefore, needn’t be at work to be working. As demonstrated earlier (Chapter 1), history-focussed behaviour becomes a form of socialized work, harnessed to the socialized production of public value. It belongs to the normal social behaviour of the socialized worker. As an expression of labour-force, the essence of both the physical and mental capacities of the individual, it creates a capital-generating usevalue (Marx 2005: 181; Virno 2004: 81). Whether yoked to free-time leisure activities or harnessed to urban regeneration projects, it’s a significant economic factor. Museums, galleries, and historical sites represent significant capital assets, not just because the cultural sector generates a large amount of public value, but also because they have even more valuepotential as a valuable resource for the postmodern, “creative economy”. They too affi rm the socialization of work through the inescapable presence of the workplace and the coercive force of capital. In one’s free-time, why not visit Beamish Museum, ‘Britain’s favourite open air museum’, ‘a living, working experience of life as it was in the Great North in the early 1800s and 1900s’, to enjoy industrialized life replicated as historical spectacle?13 And stressed out by one’s work-schedule, where else seek narcotic relief than in museums and galleries, especially since ‘there is no doubt that [they] can also be ordered and tranquil places in contrast to many of the more challenging aspects of modern society, contributing to

122 Imprisoned by History the achievement of happiness and other desirable ends’ (Travers 2006: 13 (my italics)). It happens so naturally, so unconsciously. (a) Work is socialized once the worker becomes the social type [Gestalt] and collective labour-power a historicizing force. As a historicizing agent in its own terms, free from the historicizing economic regulation of totalitarian capitalism, the worker represents a vital energy, derived from ‘elemental forces’ [elementaren Mächten]. (That aspect is often overlooked in the rationalized system of totalitarian capitalism, even though it is intimated in the productive capacity of the economies of the Indian sub-continent or the Far East.) The workers’ numinous, elemental dynamic rapidly transforming modern reality is by defi nition inconceivable to a moribund bourgeois society and its essential, rational and moral categories (Jünger 1982: 19, 23). Because it is ‘powerful, new, and intact’, the violence of proletarian energy reinvigorates nations affl icted by bourgeois decadence, by tapping into the ‘energy they once had’ [leur ancienne énergie] (Sorel 1981: 101, 330). Proletarian energy is both visceral and cosmic: the work it delivers is ‘the pace of the fist, of thoughts, of the heart, life in the day and at night, science, love, art, faith, religion, war’; it is ‘the vibration of the atom and the force that moves stars and solar-systems’ (Jünger 1982: 68). The worker Gestalt is, therefore, not the product of the bourgeois economic system, but a ‘declaration of independence from it’, not the renunciation of this system, but its subordination to the workers’ ‘much more comprehensive claim to domination’ [ihre Unterordnung unter einen Herrschaftsanspruch von umfassenderer Art] (Jünger 1982: 31). Being the bearer of the ‘basic, heroic substance’ [heroischen Grundsubstanz], it has the capacity to determine a new way of life, to inaugurate a new historical era, ‘to cause a new history to be written’. After all, a Gestalt is a metaphysical constant ‘not produced by history, but instead making history change’ [Die Geschichte bringt keine Gestalten hervor, sondern sie ändert sich mit der Gestalt] (Jünger 1982: 47, 82). It possesses not just its own autonomy, but also its own crucial power-position. Whatever force exerts itself in the world must accommodate the worker: the ‘existence of a new form of humanity’ the worker Gestalt implies, represents a hitherto unexploited capital. It’s the worker’s own, ‘keenest weapon, his supreme instrument of power’ (Jünger 1982: 67, 73–74). So, in infi ltrating all aspects of social existence, the worker Gestalt imposes the ‘total character of work’ [der totale Arbeitscharakter]. Symptomatic of the socialization of work is the increasing scope and power of technology: technology enables the worker Gestalt to revolutionize the world by totally mobilizing it. It represents not a just prosthetic extension of human potential, but the projection of the particular way of life imposed by work, the instrumentarium of the elemental dynamic that energizes it on nothing less than a global scale. Socialized work, driven by the heroic worker Gestalt, produces an aggressive state, based on a permanent warfooting, an extremely sophisticated machine of social domination. It drives


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ever more rapidly increasing production, so its operating systems, for efficiency’s sake, enforce social conformity by automatically exerting a levelling influence on the population. It orientates itself with production plans and targets, which digitizes social activity. Not least, the unemployed masses represent a ‘reserve army’, a potent capital resource. According to Ernst Jünger’s vision the ‘total mobilization’ [totale Mobilmachung] of state and society invalidates and supplants the shallow, inauthentic reality of liberalbourgeois democracy. Instead, as the current, neo-liberal ‘totalitarian capitalism’ shows, the ruthless, total mobilization of the state work-potential now needs the liberal-bourgeois historicizing ethos, as a camouflage, as an anaesthetic. (b) Conversely, in the historicized, liberal-bourgeois world, what enslaves the worker is a social arrangement, based on the division of labour, that makes work the dominant mode of production, the universal social practice. Work, in this case, does not mean the culturally creative activity of homo faber, but a regression to slavery or bonded labour redolent of the Classical world or of feudalism, the repetitive, routine occupation of the human animal laborans. It refers to that worldless, coercive activity ‘where the human body [ . . . ] is [ . . . ] thrown back on itself, concentrates on nothing but its own being alive, and remains imprisoned in its metabolism with nature without ever transcending or freeing itself from the recurring cycle of its own functioning’ (Arendt 1974: 115 (my italics)). Certainly, as vital energy, labour force has its own natural potential. Because it produces all the necessities, property, capital, and an endless profusion of commodities for consumption, it becomes the most valued of all activities. However, once labour becomes the generic, social activity, it confi nes human existence to a state of necessitousness, to its endless, self-reproduction. It produces a ‘waste economy in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world’, and with it a ‘society, dazzled by the abundance of its growing fertility and caught in the smooth functioning of a never-ending process, [that] would no longer be able to recognize its own futility’ (Arendt 1974: 106, 134–135). It succeeds in ‘leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance’; it deprives individual existence of any self-transcending aim and, instead, enforces its subservience to the self-serving, private satisfaction of ‘making a living’ (Arendt 1974: 126–127). The outcome, ‘laboring society’, is a ‘society of jobholders’,—of the ‘little man’, the ‘mass man’, the ‘man without qualities’, the ‘one-dimensional man’, suffused with what Nietzsche identified as the reactive-passive slave-ethos. It demands of its members ‘a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life process of the species and the only active decision still required of the individual were [ . . . ] to abandon his individuality [ . . . ] and acquiesce in a dazed, “tranquillized,” functional type of behaviour’ (Arendt 1974: 322).

124 Imprisoned by History (c) What enslaves the worker is the reduction of action, predicated on freedom, to functional behaviour, predicated on coercion: ‘The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery [ . . . ] to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself’ (Marx 1993: 693). This technological shift sees social relationships in terms of mechanics, dissolved into the overall, automated production-process. Certainly, human existence always has depended on technology to support it. However, it becomes its adjunct once machinery, vastly extending the labour-force, meets needs and desires more effectively than a reproduction-system reliant mainly on individuals’ energy. This shift invests reality with an ever-accelerating dynamic, lends it its ‘dromomania’ (cf. Virilio 2007: 114f.). It releases a hitherto unconscious potential that configures social practices in terms of naturalistic historical determinism, whereby the laws of physics (where work is defi ned as the force applied to an object to move it) converge with economics (where work is the abstract measure of the movement the force has produced) (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 611). The ‘smooth functioning’ of the human labour-force, enforced and enhanced by machines, discloses a further, unconscious historical potential. Technology is particularly adapted to satisfy private desires, since its complexity as something manageable only by adults lifts the adult prohibition on prohibited infantile aims. Technology ‘prohibits prohibition’ (Virilio 2002: 12). In so doing, it indulges regressive, puerile desires. It makes gratifications of all kinds possible, though only virtually, phantasmically [illusio], since that is the only way of satisfying the desires of the worker, chained as he is to his commonplace work (cf. Horkheimer & Adorno 1973: 34ff.). Technology thus becomes the visible manifestation of unconscious drives that run automatically and appear phantasmically: ‘the unconscious itself is no more structural than personal, it does not symbolize any more than it imagines or figures: it machines, it is machine-like. Neither imaginary nor symbolic, it is the Real in itself, “the impossible real” and its production’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 62, 362–363). The de facto ubiquitous presence of machines becomes a material index of the unconscious, irrational potential of the historicized world,—of its latent event-capacity, of its inherent accident-propensity (cf. Deleuze 2002: 365– 366; Virilio 2005: 19). Machines operate also as the agents of historicization. They perpetually revolutionize the production-process according to their own logic, particularly since industry can never treat ‘the productionprocess in its current form as defi nitive’ (Marx 2005: 468, 510–511). They represent fi xed capital: to keep up-dating his technology to keep maximizing the productive value of his investment in it, is in the capitalist’s interest. Here, too, the latest thing always supersedes the same old thing. (d) Not only is the worker enslaved by being ‘a tiny accessory in contrast to science, the enormous forces of nature, and the social labour-mass


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embodied in the machine-system’, but also, though it may fulfil his or her desires, capitalism blocks every escape-route the worker might discover in order to enlarge its own scope (Marx 2005: 466; Deleuze 2002: 375–6). Bourgeois reality thus ‘establishes an incomparable form of slavery [un esclavage incomparable], a form of subjection without precedent’, since in imposing their burdens on each other ‘the slaves by themselves have command of other slaves’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 302). As working conditions in the developing world reveal, the production process turns factories into virtual prisons. In fact, ‘factories are prisons’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 448). Being put in his common work-place, the worker is enslaved because he or she can never become fully conscious of the implications of being in that place: as a tiny adjunct to it, lacking any sense of the production-system as a whole, he or she is open to being manipulated, compromised, or alienated by it. As the materialization of the historical unconscious, the production-system itself automatically blocks any form of resistant self-awareness in those dependent on, and conditioned by it. It blocks it with history [crg]: the self-historicization of the productionprocess imposes itself retrospectively, anaesthetically, as everyone’s general knowledge, as the self-affi rming knowledge that keeps people unsuspectingly in their place. (e) Lastly, work is socialized when, as the dominant principle of production, it becomes the dominant principle of social order. As Nietzsche observes, those who extol work are actually imposing regimes of personal constraint and public security. Hard labour-activity [harte Arbeitsamkeit], the whole day long proves to be the best way of maintaining civil order [die beste Polizei]. It keeps everyone in check and prevents them from developing their reason, their needs, and their longing for independence. It absorbs so much nervous energy that it withdraws it from thinking, reflecting, dreaming, worrying, loving and hating, leaving only enough over for petty objectives and frequent, but superficial satisfactions (Nietzsche 1988c: 154; §173). The work-place is thus an inescapable, historical commonplace. The white-collar worker [der Angestellte] is someone, literally, ‘put in his or her place’ [an-gestellt], according to the demands of social production and distribution (Kracauer 1971: 19–20). Writing in the 1920s, Siegfried Kracauer recognizes that Germany’s 3.5 million white-collar workers exert a decisive social influence, even if it has yet hardly intruded into public consciousness. He stresses the inner desolation that comes with administrative occupations by dispelling the mystifying compensations popular culture offers, thereby exposing the ideological self-affi rmation of the business leadership responsible for it (Kracauer 1971: 102ff., 110). He wants white-collar workers themselves to recognize the hitherto unconscious ramifications of their coerced existence. As he remarks: white-collar workers ‘are least of all conscious of their situation. [ . . . ] Indeed, powerful forces are at work that would prevent anyone noticing anything here’ (Kracauer 1971: 11).

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3.32. Socialized production Production is socialized once ‘the entire society becomes one enormous factory, or rather, the factory spreads throughout the whole of society’ (Negri 2005: 204). The social extension of industrial plant organizes society as integral to a scientifically ordered production process (Marx 2005: 654). The world in which people work (and live) together, therefore, becomes ‘a huge machine’ [ein großer Automat] (Marx 2005: 401, 441). So where work is the metaphysical principle of the world, the world itself assumes the ‘character of a workshop’ [Werkstättencharakter] (Jünger 1982: 190). Through historicization the world becomes a vast factory, ‘a factory in the literal sense, as a transformation machine [machine à transformations]’, designed to maximize its potential, and with its historical agenda dedicated to the technological realization of a ‘strange programme [un étrange programme]’ of oneiric desires (Valéry 1957a: 1003, 1006, 1014). Socialized production, however, essentially ‘fi nds its exclusive centre in communication, in the process of information and in the spheres of communicative structure’. In controlling communication it ‘influences in a direct way the social relations of production and exploitation’ (Negri 2005: 58). Capitalism must appropriate communication and ‘superimpose itself on the autonomous capability of managing knowledge’, since ‘science, communication, and the communication of knowledge’ sustain ‘the very high level of productivity of the socialized worker’. Capitalism affi rms its totalitarian aspiration in that it ‘insinuates itself everywhere and everywhere attempts to acquire the power to coordinate, commandeer and recuperate value’. Its comprehensive dynamic requires it ‘not only to follow and to be kept informed about, but to anticipate, organize and subsume each of the forms of labouring cooperation which are established in society in order to generate a higher level of productivity’ (Negri 2005: 116). Production is socialized, therefore, once all parts of society become productive, particularly those that traditionally didn’t generate commodities. That makes capitalism totalitarian. Besides its total organization of the labour force, it infiltrates productive networks that are entirely social, such as education and culture, re-encoding their public value as economic value. As the instrument of totalitarian capitalism, socialized production automatically drives historicization. By infi ltrating and managing information and communication systems, by extracting value from purely social networks, capitalism and its institutions inevitably become the central, executive authority for history [crg], itself the authoritative, cognitively privileged, total information and communication system. As the repository of everything humanity knows about itself, as the knowledge resource of all knowledge resources, as symbolic capital, history has real value. And value is a ‘motivating force in its own right for which merchandise and money are just pure forms’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 269). Socialized production and historicization thus reinforce each other.


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History is, therefore, ‘the only science’ [die einzige Wissenschaft] that can uncover a production process, amplified to the scale of world-history, which forces human beings to be subjugated to the totalitarian power of the global market (Marx 1981b: 15, 43). It is the only form in which capitalism can come to know itself, given that the conditions that produce it ‘derive from an economic basis that is the product of a long process of development’, since ‘the available productivity of labour as the foundation from which it operates is not a gift of nature, but of a history that embraces thousands of centuries’ (Marx 2005: 535). Socialized history, the history-function in the historicized world, is just a front for totalitarian capitalism. Running on identitary logic, lacking any different cognitive value, it is blind to the outcome of its current machinations, though it tries to pre-empt it. Even so, things still happen,— unconsciously. As Jünger argues, ‘the planet still reacts, whatever happens. It is ready for anything. But it is uncanny when the old Gaia begins to move of its own accord’. ‘Deep down,’ he continues, ‘beneath the strata on which state and society flourish, beneath the crypts and the cellars, something still stirs’. However, he stresses, ‘events cannot be directed, let alone explained by human beings’. The point is: history itself becomes redundant, since ‘when the historian surrenders his arms, when language fails him, it does not mean that he confronts something meaningless, but that the means at his disposal are inadequate’ (Jünger 1983: 37). Socialized history under conditions of totalitarian capitalism makes society a gigantic machine and the human environment a vast, self-engrossed technological apparatus. As a technology of technologies, history in the already historicized world inspires unconscious desires and needs since, endorsed by totalitarian capitalism, it can call on enormous material wealth to realize them. History here comes into its own, as the screen onto which humanity projects its needs and desires, visions of the future “shaped” by its past, all objectively accredited by historical knowledge. It easily lifts the ‘prohibition on prohibitions’ to sanction the most infantile satisfactions. In this sense too, history’s cognitive value is nil, since it either blocks or pre-empts any sense of their future potential implications: the impact of the technology is beyond the power of the technology to ascertain. Still, as an expression of the unconscious, it operates under its own momentum, indifferent to persons or any prevailing order (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 62). The force that drives production is, for that reason, fatal. The historicized world condemns humanity to sleepwalk towards the future. Living experience in the preterite mode, as déjà-vu, numbs its immediate apprehensions, while history, as a totally socialized practice, simulates the way things are, knowledge already known, nothing different. In this predicament ‘the world appears as a single terrible machine, that never rests, [ . . . ] that runs on laws you cannot grasp, . . . impudent, self-confident laws, engineers’ laws . . . everyone must act in the prescribed manner [ . . . ] the machine is something evil and evil is embodied in the machine. Its order is the nothingness that will surely come [Ihre Ordnung ist das Nichts, das kommen muß]’ (Broch 1978a: 556).

4

History A Self-Centred Science

In a historicized world history happens fi rst. No activity exists that isn’t already historicized, that hasn’t got to be the way it is.1 A historical phase is, therefore, no longer a structure of meaning recognized only after its ‘form of life has grown old’ (cf. Hegel 1967: 17). Rather, any activity not already historicized can’t exist. A historically hyperconscious humanity becomes mesmerized by its own self-historicization: the past always present, the latest thing the same old thing. This situation puts historians and historical knowledge particularly in the spotlight. The historicized world makes history not just central, but self-centred. History can’t but offer “indispensable” knowledge. Consequently, the historian producing it convinces himself that his is a privileged cognitive function with a special social relevance. This conceit represents a crucial, ideological affi rmation of historyfocussed thinking and behaviour. Typically, it’s evinced in the presumption by historians that their social function is ethically exemplary and, for that very reason, bears responsibilities unique to themselves. Because it ideologically affi rms not just history as a dominant form of knowledge but as the knowledge that affi rms socially dominant interests, this self-centredness needs to be taken apart, now. That involves (1.) exploring it further to clarify its ideological significance; (2.) through a close reading of Droysen’s Historik (1857–1882), showing how historicism supplies an indispensable, metaphysical foundation to it, hence to history as the physical trace and intellectual record of humanity’s selfpreoccupation; and, in conclusion, (3.) arguing that it operates as an anthropic bias against the cognizance of ontological and biological interests essential to the human species.

1. HISTORIANS: ‘THE ONLY PEOPLE QUALIFIED’ As an academic persona, the historian apparently officiates as the ‘high priest of modern society’, or as ‘the gate-keeper of society’s psychological health’, or as an expert technical consultant whose past knowledge estimates future outcomes (cf. Snowman 2007: 13–14; Musgrove 2006:

History: A Self-Centred Science 129 7; Halévy 2001: 25). This persona imposes itself as the paradigmatic, ‘responsible citizen’ (Tosh 2008: 120–121). Sustained not just by historical progression, but also by being aware of actually contributing to it, ‘everyone in every civil relationship has to be a practical historian’ [jeder in jedem sittlichen Verhältnis hat [ . . . ] ein praktischer Historiker zu sein] (Droysen 1977: 269). But what does being a ‘practical historian’ mean? What practice does history ideologically enforce? It appears (1.1) that historians assume a duty of surveillance, which legitimizes their social advisory function; (1.2) that what qualifies them for it, is their being, by defi nition, ‘best placed’ to gain the knowledge it requires and guarantee the vigilance it affords; and (1.3) that, in affi rming the correctional value of historical knowledge, derived from its central, dominant place, they affi rm whatever values are socially dominant.

1.1. The historian ‘standing guard’ With its ‘essential dignity’ and ‘moral imperative’, the historian-function is apparently ‘more urgent than ever’: ‘Against the agents of oblivion, the shredders of documents, the assassins of memory [ . . . ]—only the historian, with austere passion for fact, proof, evidence, which are central to his vocation, can effectively stand guard’ (Yerushalmi 1996: 116). Hence, it presents itself as morally exemplary: ‘A historical discipline properly attentive to historical epistemology [ . . . ] can serve as a model of honesty and intelligence in the investigation of the human world’ (Megill 2007: 215). Accordingly, history does claim to operate as an indispensable, yet patronizing corrective: e.g. ‘a knowledge of history helps people to behave as intelligent citizens’ (Marwick 2001: 37). It pretends to an ethics evidently unknown to ethics itself: ‘Historians [ . . . ] are in fact the only people qualified to equip society with a truly historical perspective and to save it from the damaging effects of exposure to historical myth. If professionally trained historians do not carry out these functions, then others who are less well-informed and more prejudiced will produce ill-founded interpretations’ (Tosh 1999: 33). So Tosh endorses unequivocally ‘the fi ndings of History & Policy—and other forays into applied history—[ . . . ] as a serious contribution to debate’ and recommends they be ‘vigorously disseminated’. The competence of the historian-function as policy advisor obviously goes with academic integrity: ‘the best applied history does not depart from the canons of historical thinking, but rather amounts to a logical extension of the core principles of historicism’ (Tosh 2006). Needless to say: for the professional historian, academic practice guarantees civilized society, i.e. a society not clouded by ‘myths that exist in the common mind’ or by ‘the deformations of collective memory’. The antidote to propaganda is the academic insistence on both ‘a coherent and explicative relationship between the sources and referential reality whose indices are the mark’ and ‘a knowledge gained according to a controlled scientific

130 Imprisoned by History method and appropriated to its object by following a logic of intelligibility and communication’ (Bédarida 1994: 2). But historical expertise stresses its correctional capacity not least because history is also appropriated for propaganda and deception: ‘history’s duty is to de-mythify [démythifier], and in that respect historical works [les travaux historiques] make their own contribution to the civic debate and constitute a necessity. Revealing what is hidden, exposing masked traitors, stigmatizing deception: that’s what the historian’s social role involves’ (Dumoulin 2003: 43). These affi rmations sound impressive, even intimidating; but, regrettably, they’re a delusion, projected by history’s self-centredness. Their very impressiveness betrays them: what is this but historians resorting to epideictic rhetoric with ‘its proper function [ . . . ] to amplify and to embellish’,— and on their own behalf, for their own self-interest (cf. Quintilian 2001: II, 104–105; 3.7.6; Cassin 1995: 200)? What does it reveal but a professional conceitedness seizing every opportunity for self-amplification or selfembellishment? After all, this rhetorical mode focuses on achievements as ‘signs of moral habits’, on superiority as an ‘indication of virtue’, on praise of mind as ‘always real praise’ (Aristotle 1994: 101, 105; I. ix. 33–34; I. ix. 40; Quintilian 2001: II, 108–109; 3.7.15)? What do these euphonic affi rmations of cognitive, hence ethical rectitude come down to, but a sophistical, ‘logological’ discursive effect (cf. Cassin 1995: 68–69)? As a device for managing the all-enclosing techno-sphere that supports human life, history exemplifies the technical expertise invested in the social system. However, in these cases the social system dictates history’s investment. Certainly, historians identify themselves as already accredited technical experts. They apply their special, specialized knowledge not just to issues of public policy, but also in legal cases involving, e.g., libel action, race and gender discrimination, corporate social responsibility, and minority territorial rights (Dumoulin 2003: 63ff.). Such cases seem to validate their specialized knowledge; but they undermine its cognitive specialness. In instances involving, e.g., fi nancial or other forms of compensation, description based on impartial truth becomes prescription on behalf of partial interests, such as establishing the group identity of potential beneficiaries. In those involving the interpretation of, e.g., treaties or historical documents the open-endedness of scholastic debate can be foreclosed by the lawyers’ strategic objectives for their clients or by the judicial determination of a definitive reading (Dumoulin 2003: 71, 80, 86). Thus, in applying its (allegedly) transcendent, diagnostic perspective, the historian-function [crg] morphs into just another social agent (history [rg]). Historical knowledge becomes a historical fact for itself, both further historicizing itself and the already historicized world: ‘the historian ceases to be an incidental link in the debate only to become its kingpin, its pivot’ (Dumoulin 2003: 80). Historians’ belief in their own special, social-correctional capacity proves a sophistical self-delusion [illusio]. They may well justify their commitment to public history as an extension of their professional pedagogical activity,

History: A Self-Centred Science 131 a form of outreach to the ‘laity’ (to retain the self-enhancing, clerical figure) (Tosh 2008: x). It seems to confi rm their special, thaumaturgic powers to mediate between academic truth and the “real world” (Dumoulin 2003: 94). But, in fact (as, e.g., the history-based consultancy History Associates Incorporated shows), as specialized advisors to private clients, consultants for ‘information resource management’, providers of support and respectability for a company’s ‘current goals and future objectives’, historians—as a reference class in and for themselves—constitute just another social subcategory of technical experts, just another self-appointed group of mediatized opinion-formers, just another, not very special class of social actors. 2 Historians’ self-defi nition as social de-mythologizers is itself a myth,—a purely verbal configuration of already accepted significations, the perfect alibi for their sophistical compliance with whatever’s going (Barthes 1980: 195; cf. Davies 2008: 470, 472). Historians’ assertions of cognitive privilege—as being ‘best qualified’ or ‘best placed’—cover their instinctive conformism (Tosh 2008: 110, 131). What else sustains the economic totalitarianism behind the production of public value from public cultural interests but the methodological integrity of academic history? What else endorses the use of culture in neo-liberal ideology to mask glaring socio-economic injustices by conjuring up common identities, fabricating social cohesion, and fiddling with the social level, but the professionally validated historical knowledge-resources of the heritage sector? Far from academic training guaranteeing historians’ professional integrity, it automatically leads to their self-incriminating complicity with dominant economic interests: ‘History Associates Incorporated was founded on the conviction that skills honed in the academy could be invaluable to clients in the government, corporate, and non-profit sectors.’3 But this formulation is itself mythic. Politically speaking, the expressly hyperbolic ‘invaluable’, signifying a coercive absolute embodied in ‘academic skills’, allies them with socially dominant interests, i.e. those who create public, political, and economic value. Thus history [crg] (i.e. historical skills) in itself already evinces a thought-style, in fact a whole ‘organon of thought’, elaborated ‘in conformity with a model it derives from the state’, since the state is the central locus of power and the dominant interests it endorses, that endorse it. It becomes ‘an image of thought that would encompass [recouvrirait] all thought’; it would be ‘the special object of its own “noological method”’ (i.e. its own special form of cognition); and so it would be ‘like the form the state takes when it is developed in thought’. It reinforces itself mythically: this political-noological structure is by defi nition founded on ‘an imperium of true thought’ it produces for itself; but also logically: it is incorporated in ‘a republic of independent minds’ (i.e. academics, their disciplines, and their disciplinary associations) that legitimize it (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 464). Thus the historian-function is a crucial social transmitter of prevailing power-relations. History [crg], as a dominant social idea, is an

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eidetic expression of dominant social force; hence, its automatic recourse to the rhetoric of coercion. For this reason its persuasive capacity will be in inverse proportion to its cognitive value. Methodologically speaking, therefore, historical skills don’t guarantee professional or cognitive integrity. What supports history’s varied social functions is nothing other than the ‘immutability of positivism and its connection with power’. A core, ideological premise informs this complicity: the ‘conviction that material facts are accessible, the certainty that practical lessons based on true objectivity can be discerned’,—in a word, ‘the discipline’s most scientistic visions’ (Dumoulin 2003: 102, 104). Ultimately, meaning anything to anyone, history proves untrustworthy. The self-same special, specialized historical knowledge can both collaborate and expose,—as normally happens when historians keep re-working already historicized knowledge. No wonder history’s postmodernist critics stress the factitiousness of historical truth. Through its public functions too history induces its own redundancy.

1.2. Historians place themselves best Why, then, do historians invest themselves with cognitive privilege, with special knowledge? The point is: they must see themselves as central. Within an already ‘self-referential academic culture’, identitary thinking (the identity principle) makes them believe in the centrality of history [crg], as well as in their own, special self-centredness (cf. Black 2005: ix). The discipline of history establishes historians a priori as pivotal. The historian-function makes a basic assumption: that the central position from which it produces historical knowledge ipso facto generates sense. And it can make this assumption: the ‘prevailing institutional distributions’ of the discipline support its partitioning of time and space. Underlying historical discourse is the rationalizing ‘premise of place’ [la raison du lieu]: historians are always ‘best placed’. It legitimizes the historian-function’s pivotal position by comprehending all other sites of production as affi liated, yet external to it (Certeau 1975: 354). It’s both Oedipal, exemplifying the invariable law of the father, of dominant authority, and capitalist, replicating the comprehensive, totally enclosing production process. The historian-function holds an apparently invulnerable, transcendent position. By being central, it enables history [crg] not just to identify everything, but the production of everything,—by accounting for it being how it actually was, and demonstrating the way things are in terms of how they got to be. In thus identifying every thing as essentially historical, history[crg] “naturally” pretends to the status of a universal, ontological principle sustaining both thought and reality. History is thus the ultimate “ground” of all reality: it reveals the grounds, the sufficient reasons, for things having got to be the way they are. It thus establishes the a priori identity of thought and reality (of historicized thought and historicized reality),—by

History: A Self-Centred Science 133 analogy with Aristotle’s Prime Mover for whom ‘thought and the object of thought are the same, because that which is receptive of the object of thought, i.e. essence, is thought’ (Aristotle 1997a: 148–151; 1072 b 20ff.). The historian-function, forsaking the insignificant scale of human life, sees itself managing a global surveillance-system with its vantage-point ‘in the very position of God the Father’ (Braudel 1984: 308–309; 1994: 15). It can assert itself as the ultimate judge of human affairs (cf. Montesquieu 1949:1133, §611; Hegel 1967: 288, §340). But this is actually self-delusion [illusio]. Far from being a universal, ontological principle, history is—in Aristotelian terms—a science of ‘accidents’. Faced with an incessant, even accelerating flux of random, often catastrophic events, it attempts to make sense of them by ordering them chronologically, defi ning them contextually, connecting them causally, categorizing them thematically, classifying them conceptually,—by stabilizing them, by fi nding common places to put them in, by disclosing reasons sufficient to explain them. In applying this, its technological management competence, the historian-function merely exploits the ‘imperialism’ inherent in the discipline, given that in an already historicized world ‘nothing is inaccessible’, nothing can be inaccessible, to history (Cohen 1988: 95). Sustained thus by the ‘narrative authority’ sanctioning its imperialistic dominance, the ‘historian is modeled as metalingual to both readers and past actors’. By defi nition ‘the historian occupies a place of full presence and is the tutelary-narrator’: this is the ‘rigged schema’ by which he or she operates (Cohen 1988: 97–98). In attempting thereby to insulate itself as a form of knowledge against the possibility of a formal critique, the historian-function locates itself ‘in a place that one can do nothing about, but which affords history the power to enact its overall accumulative function’: it is ‘deliriously self-encoded as a cultural operator incapable of being transcended/overthrown by other discursive systems’ (Cohen 1988: 28, 227). Its cultural function to project transcendence enables it to over-arch its own heterogeneity, to rise above its own self-contradictions. That it pretends this self-coercive structure for dealing with random accidents is a universal, is self-delusion. In fact, it has a crucial interest in making history look universal. It thus stresses the absolute authority of the very particular socio-economic conditions that produce it. Its own affi rmative agenda thus monopolizes the ‘best place’, the position of cognitive centrality. In history the identity principle, as an ontological premise, is “accidentally” localized and instrumentalized. As deployed by the historianfunction, it keeps on re-constructing patterns of meaning in the incessant, accidental flux. In particular, it provides the perfect alibi of impartiality whenever cognitively privileged, academic historians identify with social and economic privilege. It indisputably vindicates historical truth whenever historians grapple with postmodernist “subversives”. In these cases it sustains history’s rhetoric of coercion. In this instrumentalized form, then, the identity principle affi rms the centrality of history: it ensures the historian

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cannot identify any-one else who could fulfi l his or her identical function. It sustains its affi rmative political stance: historical thought-styles enforce compliance with dominant social norms, thereby reinforcing prevailing patterns of social identification.

1.3. History’s ‘clear, explicated knowledge-guiding interests’ The apparent basis of analytical history, these knowledge-guiding interests automatically reinforce dominant social interests (cf. Wehler 2007: 47). As a social management technology, the historian-function in practice comes down to affi rming socially affi rmative thought and behaviour,—as the following randomly selected instances confirm: (a) History’s special cognitive aptitude and historians’ self-centredness coincide to produce in history’s “workshop” the optimal potential for work, the fundamental agency of capitalist production (cf. ‘history, etc.’ = ‘best tools’ [A=A]),—as in: ‘Dismissals of history, politics, and narrative as hopelessly modern ideas, now outmoded in the postmodern world, might seem up to date, but history, politics, and narrative are still the best tools available for dealing with the world and preparing for the future’ (Appleby, et al. 1995: 236 (my italics)). (b) The historian’s self-centredness is configured as a privileged, personal opportunity for the unrestricted accumulation of symbolic capital (cf. ‘enrich . . . beyond measure’),—as in: ‘A great deal of the excitement of historical study derives from its pivotal position where the concerns of many other fields converge. Historians make those concerns their own by submitting them to the disciplines of historical context and historical process. They relinquish those intellectual positions which stand above or outside history; the rest they assimilate and in so doing enrich the subject beyond measure’ (Tosh 1999: 212 (my italics)). (c) History’s self-centredness produces compulsive social compliance through the evasive, euphemistic adjective ‘attentive’,—as in: ‘If I had to sum up the vision of public history that emerged from this online conversation, it might be that the participants saw themselves as “historians in the middle”—operating between various constituencies and disciplinary fields, grounded in the methods of the historical discipline, highly attentive to the social processes and political implications of their work, and resistant to too much closure when it comes to defi ning what they do!’ (Stanton 2007 (my italics)). In fact, only history’s evasiveness transcends this text’s internal contradictions. The semantically unnecessary, hyperbolic qualifier ‘highly’ underscores in ‘attentive’ an ambivalence that could as easily embrace as reject ‘political implications’. And how can definition involve ‘resisting closure’ when it is itself a form of closure? These examples illustrate the coercive character of the historicizing mentality (e.g. ‘submitting to discipline’). They reveal the “gravitational pull” of the otherwise undetectable methodological unconscious in historicized

History: A Self-Centred Science 135 thinking. The historicizing principles (emphasized in italics) to which the authors actually defer, articulate an automatic self-centredness (cf. ‘best tools’, ‘pivotal position’, ‘in the middle’). They produce indispensable mental ‘additions’ or metaphysical ‘importations’ (e.g. ‘context’, ‘ground[ed]’, ‘process’). In effect, they viciously bifurcate nature into reductive, causal principles of “objective” knowledge (on the one hand) and secondary, accidental qualities of “subjective” experience (on the other), even though the former can come only from the latter (cf. Whitehead 2004: 30–31). Self-centredness in historical science defi nes its practice of re-inserting its mental structures such as ‘contexts’, ‘grounds’, and ‘processes’ into the selfsame flux of events they originally came from, as a way of “explaining” them. In historical knowledge this bifurcation is particularly deceptive. Despite the claim to being self-conscious (cf. ‘highly attentive’), the historian’s deference to its self-centred, historicizing principles is compulsive and delusional,—delusional because compulsive. Further, its self-centredness makes historicized thinking socially compliant. That this compliance is automatic, betrays its unconscious operation (as Deleuze and Guattari point out). Defi ning itself by reference to ‘the best tools’, by ‘enrichment beyond measure’, by ‘resistance to closure about what they do’, the historian-function ensures its knowledgeguiding interests comply with unrestricted (i.e. capitalist) production and accumulation, here replicated in figures of thought and speech. A purely nominal knowledge category, a formal signifier, a science without a specifi c object, history—for it to substantiate itself—needs to embrace everything, to be comprehensive. For this to happen most effectively, it can’t just identify with the totality of what happened (history [rg]). It must also identify with the system that actually produces the totality of what happens, the system of totalitarian capitalism. Thus it can present itself as identical to (i.e. identify itself as) its unrestricted production potential. At this unconscious level, at the centre of history’s self-centredness, cognitive privilege and compulsive compliance are the same. The constant reproduction of new knowledge about the past driven by historicization (privileged cognition) replicates, and is replicated by, the constant reality-shifts in the present induced by capitalism’s incessant self-modernization (privileged domination). The differential gear synchronizing the two dynamic systems is curiosity [Neugierde].4 The restless, historical quest to discover something new about the past, the same old thing (historicization), mirrors the restless, economic need in the present to project the same old thing as something new (capitalism). In an already old, historicized culture, a culture aware of its own lateness, both are compulsive expressions of a historicizing mentality mesmerized by the ever-latest thing. Superficially, the historian-function’s self-centredness looks like an administrative convenience,—something “natural”, something obvious (albeit autocratic, patronizing). In reality, its alleged impartiality discloses

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a structural bias towards dominant interests. It thereby eradicates immediate contact with the world [aesthesis]. ‘In the immediate fact for awareness’, the world is primarily encountered aesthetically, as a ‘complex of passing events’, ‘a manifold of prehensions’, as a ‘full concrete experience’ (cf. Whitehead 2004: 14, 166; Whitehead 1967c: 71, 81). These immediate, ‘manifold prehensions’ the history discipline automatically clamps into stabilizing, identitary, categorical coordinators, centred on itself, it has fabricated for its own self-substantiation (e.g. origins, precedents, trajectories, traditions, heritages, legacies, beneficiaries, identities, catalysts, causes, contexts, products, etc.). Historicization, apparently signifying the latest cultural progression, effectively makes for social regression (as, e.g., Jean Améry’s case illustrates). In thus affi rming its own, socially coercive force, it also affi rms the totalitarian capitalism it complies with and reflects.

2. ‘WORLD HISTORY IS THE SENSORIUM COMMUNE OF THE UNIVERSE’ It’s axiomatic: ‘the historical world is the essentially human world’; the history of mankind is a ‘great civil community’ [eine große sittliche Gemeinschaft] (Droysen 1977: 14, 369). Certainly these are identitary propositions, but they rest on not just formal logic (A=A), but the ‘physics of history’, the place of humanity in nature and history itself as a ‘product of nature’, as an ‘element of the effectiveness of the force of the universe’ (Humboldt 1980a: 576; Humboldt 1980b: 578). The historical world is the latest, ‘potentialized continuation’ of a process that over aeons has formed the surface of the planet. A kind of oxidation, it builds it up, layer upon layer, from volcanic activity and the formation of mountains through to the evolution of plant, animal, and human life. Each development adds a new stratum to the planetary bio-sphere, produces a new ‘crust’ or ‘patina’ on the planet’s surface. History enhances this aeonic process ‘with an intellectual and civil stratum of its own’. As the stratum of human life, it enables the planet to accommodate free-will and a god-like mind, which in turn generates its own world of thought, which then can transform conceptually the material world around it.5 Finite though this historical stratum might yet be, it’s ‘suffused with a glimmer of eternity’. This is the world human beings have made and are still making: ‘the task of history as a science is to research into, and know about, this human world’ (Droysen 1977: 15, 470). To see what endows the historian-function with cognitive privilege, why the historian is always ‘best placed’, means returning to Historik, Droysen’s lectures on historical method in Berlin between 1857 and 1883.6 They aim to provide ‘scientific justification’ for historical research, to teach what thinking historically involves, and to show the forms in which historical thinking moves (Droysen 1977: 4–5, 44). They set out how the historianfunction acquires its cognitive privilege, how it constructs for itself its ‘best

History: A Self-Centred Science 137 place’. They show, tautologically, that the historian-function is central to what happens in the human world, conceived as the pinnacle of cosmological development, because it uniquely ‘awakens and sustains the sense of its realities’ [den Sinn für die Wirklichkeiten] (Droysen 1977: 5; cf. Humboldt 1980c: 589). Predicated on identitary thinking, Droysen’s key principles of historical method underpin all historical practice because history would be unintelligible without them. The identity principle does vindicate historical truth as the convergence of thinking and being. However, because it applies to any kind of thinking, it doesn’t make historical thinking special (Droysen 1977: 5). To make history [crg] into the indispensable ‘self-knowledge of the civil world and its conscience’, to establish a basis for its cognitive privilege, Droysen must show the moral world itself as privileged, cosmologically and ontologically (Droysen 1977: 41). He, therefore, resorts to this cosmological fable to vindicate a classical, liberal-humanist vision: that the natural formation [Bildung] of the Earth will be “finished” by the progressively civilizing formation [Bildung] of humanity as a species. In fact, the fable presupposes the cognitive privilege it’s meant to establish: history’s transcendent, temporal and spatial viewpoint. Managing the civilizing process as the highest level of the planet’s destiny is history’s proper, exclusive task. There is, of course, no need to take this fable seriously. The same perspective disclosed to Volney a world utterly ruined by fanatical religious conflict; to Nietzsche the planet’s epidermis covered with a skin-disease called mankind (Volney 1989b: 187–189, 204; Nietzsche 1988d: 168). Moreover, it’s now fallacious, scientifically speaking. With its idea of history as the civilizing culmination of the earth’s development, it confuses natural evolution with human progress. Quite simply, evolution does not ipso facto imply progress towards ever more complex forms of culture. In fact, reflective cultural development could actually ‘counteract the “spontaneous” functioning of biological logic and the play of natural selection’. In any case, homo sapiens apparently corresponds to merely 2.2 percent of the genus of hominids, almost all of which enjoyed a far longer life span than the present human species (Schaeffer 2007: 189–190). Lastly, Droysen’s historicist vision ignores the fact that the time-scale of human culture is far shorter than that of natural evolution. By definition, it blocks any acknowledgement of the eventual extinction of the human species as a problem for present or future human action. By definition also, it discounts ‘the extreme youth of the species [l’extrême jeunesse de notre espèce] which makes it extremely difficult to evaluate the significance of culture from the viewpoint of biological evolution’ (Schaeffer 2007: 326). In fact, Droysen’s fable merely shows that history’s cognitive privilege and its correctional function can be established only by recourse to anthropocentric thinking, blind to its ultimately natural and biological precondition. His particular liberal-humanist outlook looks decidedly inhuman. It produces a self-centredness predicated on a smoothrunning apparatus of causes, identities, and sufficient reasons, fixated more

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on the technicalities of its own historicizing procedures than on human life. Designed as a means of forming [Bild-ung] civilized individuals, it actually only ever churns out images [Bild-er] of itself for itself. As Droysen demonstrates, for history to represent a socially and cognitively privileged form of knowledge and for the historian to see him- or herself as ‘best qualified’ and ‘best placed’, history must, narcissistically enough, both establish itself as a historicizing institution of an already historicized society (2.1); and occupy the position that represents its comprehensive managerial functions (2.2). Inevitably, (2.3) the outcome is a totally historicized world, an inhuman system of incarcerating commonplaces.

2.1. History’s Narcissus complex History offers an anthropocentric compensation for monistic, reductive science infl icting narcissistic injuries on mankind’s self-importance, for it confronting a species that claims to be special with much about it that is nonspecial (cf. Freud 1987: 226; §18). Discovering that the universe is heliocentric (Copernicus), that human consciousness is limited by the laws of reason (Kant), that the human creature has evolved from non-human species (Darwin), that the psyche itself is a disorderly house (Freud), leaves human beings managing their existence with ever ‘less truth’, with ‘less truth’ as the pre-condition for them managing it themselves (Blumenberg 1974: 239). Difficult to interpret though the book of nature might be, history enjoys a peculiar advantage: it discloses within nature a more legible world expressed in a more intelligible language because its readers and authors are one and the same (Blumenberg 1986a: 21). The cosmological ramifications of the civil world history unfolds, endow the identity principle with organic necessity. Since ‘this world of nations has certainly been made by men’, so ‘the modifications of our own human mind’ will reveal what it’s like: ‘history cannot be more certain than when he who creates things also narrates them’ (Vico 1984: 104; §349). (a) History, therefore, discloses a natural truth adequate to human comprehension, reasons sufficient for vindicating causality, and actions demanding ethical reflection. More importantly, because the desire for knowledge about our fellow human beings is insatiable, these truths, reasons, and ethical instances can be amplified and ephemeralized endlessly: however little the truth to start with, more can always be made of it (cf. Droysen 1977: 461). The anthropocentric proposition, encapsulated in Pope’s verse, ‘The proper study of mankind is Man’, provides a paradigmatic infra-structure to everything human beings can know (as evinced in d’Alembert’s ‘Preliminary Discourse’ to the Encyclopédie (1751ff.) (Pope 1983: 250; l.2). It also provides in the historicist projections of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (as in the works of G. E. Lessing, Herder, Kant, W. von Humboldt, and Hegel) a constant dynamic to human reality, political, economic, cultural, and ethical reasons sufficient to generate the ‘driving

History: A Self-Centred Science 139 causes’ [die treibenden Ursachen] of world-historical change (e.g. Humboldt 1980b). Thus, history displaces philosophy as the “queen of the sciences” precisely because reductive science (as, e.g., embodied in the Newtonian universe) severely limits the scope of metaphysics, philosophy’s traditional jurisdiction (as Kant maintained). The result of this world-shattering, epistemological revolution: only history remains as an ‘authentic science, as the primary epistemological basis of human knowledge’, incapable though it may be of determining the general laws of thought, or—because they require mathematics—of physics, or nature (Reinhold 1790: 14, 29, 38–39; cf. Davies 1987: 190). Evidently, these texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries construct history’s cognitive privilege. However, to regard them as temporally remote from the latest justifications of history’s ‘best place’ would be a historicizing misconception. The issue is not temporal, but ethical. To assert historical knowledge as conducive to producing ‘intelligent citizens’ or ‘responsible citizens’, as a corrective to the social mind, automatically invokes these self-same liberal-humanist defi nitions of public intelligence or personal self-improvement. It justifies these ideals as worth pursuing. In offering, as a narcissistic compensation, cognitive advantage grounded in cosmological development, history uses the identity principle to guarantee not just the identity of thought and its objects, but to lock into place the identitary link between historical thinking and historical objects (A=A). To secure history’s ethical and cognitive privilege as a human science, Droysen pinpoints its Aristotelian, hermeneutic principle, that ‘knowledge is based on the one who knows being equivalent to [i.e. the same as] that of which they know’ [das Wissen ist ein Gleichsein des Wissenden und dessen, wovon man weiß]. It’s axiomatic that, where human beings are concerned, this condition holds only for the human world they create for themselves through historical action and historical knowledge: ‘Only with regard to mankind and human affairs are we equal and knowledgeable’ [Nur den Menschen und menschlichen Dingen gegenüber sind wir Gleiche und Wissende] (Droysen 1977: 16, 22, 398; cf. Aristotle 1996: 349ff.; 1033 b 26ff.; 1997a: 148–151; 1072 b 20ff.). Further, Droysen reinforces this identitary basis of history’s cognitive privilege not just from various methodological perspectives, usually with analogies with geological or biological phenomena underpinning it, but, crucially, by stressing in Classical Greek an etymological connection between isos, ‘the same’, ‘equal’ and histor, ‘someone who knows’ or ‘learns by enquiry’ (Droysen 1977: 22).7 In systematic terms: if the global purpose of humanity [Weltzweck des Menschen] is to create a civil world, the production of this world is the substance of history (cf. Droysen 1977: 289). History, as a concept, comprehends the human species as a biological entity because history is nothing other than the species’ essential, ‘incessantly increasing motion’ [die rastlos steigende Bewegung] (Droysen 1977: 380, 411). But history is also, therefore, an ethical matter, a matter of personality, the most advanced stage of biological

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development. Personality implies not just the ‘empirical self’ of ordinary life, but a self [Ich], with an absolute sense of its own purpose, with infinite potential, that transcends all the other civilizing agencies such as the state, the church, the nation [Volk], or the family, even as it is constantly immersed in them and sustained by them. The ethical aim of the individual personality is to cultivate this potential, to partake in the ‘general self’ of mankind, identical with the human species as a whole, that informs the philosophers in their thinking, legislators in their verdicts, or historians in their research. Conversely, this ethical and cognitive ideal is already constituted by history itself, since history is nothing other than this general self of mankind. Bound by the ‘infinite drive’ [unendlichen Trieb] of its species-nature to elevate itself in its own consciousness to this universal human level, the personality embraces the whole of historical time, from ‘the most remote pasts’ to the ‘end of days’: it realizes itself as the outcome of world-historical developments (Droysen 1977: 364–366, 385–387, 399, 442). Defi ned as infi nite potential, elevated to a universal value, the individual human personality is the corner-stone of Droysen’s anthropocentric vision. Historically self-enclosed, self-referential as it is, it projects individual consciousness onto the universe. As the basis of everything a human being can know, self-consciousness becomes, therefore, the basis for a human being to know everything. Hence, the self “naturally” amplifies itself. So, in terms of critical idealist philosophy, it ‘demands to comprehend within itself all reality and to fi ll up infi nity’ [Das Ich fordert, daß es alle Realität in sich fasse, und die Unendlichkeit erfülle] (Fichte 1970: 194). Further, particularly if construed as the culmination of cosmological evolution, the anthropocentric vision displaces other fundamental or transcendental structures of meaning such as mythology and religion. So, in terms of critical materialist philosophy, in the Essence of Christianity (1841), a book he calls ‘a necessary consequence of history’, Feuerbach conceptualizes God as the self-projection of an infi nite mind freed from the constraints of the physical world, of a fully self-realized, human intelligence (Feuerbach 2005: 31, 83, 85). Thus, be it conceptually, as an idea (history [crg]), be it materially, as the physical product of human action (history [rg]), the anthropocentric perspective establishes history as the dominant category (cf. Droysen 1977: 263). Accordingly, Historik regards faith as ‘the other side of the national spirit’ [Volksgeist], hence as an agency contributing to historical development. Conversely, it asserts the whole historical time-span, ages and peoples taken together, as ‘only like one expression of absolute totality, of God’, since ‘the fate of mankind in its true totality’ is available only from a transcendent, god-like perspective (Droysen 1977: 254, 330, 398). If, as history’s sole rival in making universal, metaphysical sense, religion cannot be historicized, history can still operate on its behalf with its own cognitive potential. No wonder then that, as an anthropocentric, self-centred science—as ‘historiosophy’, a form of knowledge capable of organizing the ‘higher moments of the mind into the real and important elements

History: A Self-Centred Science 141 of history’—history can be projected as ‘the Sensorium commune of the universe’, as its central locus of sensation and consciousness (Cieszkowski 1981: 68–69). Ultimately the historian is ‘best placed’ to safeguard civil values, because standing in for religion as a dominant social authority, history authorizes itself to constitute a surrogate theology, with the historical sciences as a surrogate clericalism, and with historians as surrogate priests (cf. Snowman 2007: 13–14). But resisting this requires a radically dissenting perspective. Discarding transcendent knowledge as illusory [illusio], urged on by immediate objectives [aesthesis], Stirner saw liberal humanism as an oppressive dogma, and mankind, in personifying world history, closing the cycle of Christian thought [Der Mensch als Ich der Weltgeschichte schließt den Zyklus christlicher Anschauungen] (Stirner 1972: 140ff., 410). But the metaphysical justification of history’s cognitive privilege is anyway a sham. It discounts the anthropic principle (as the argument will subsequently show). History’s apologists, megalomanic in their self-delusion, are infatuated with their own observational selection affects. (b) Theoretically questionable though it may be, the metaphysical basis of history’s categorical dominance must realize itself in actual social practice. In fact, ‘a normative culture’, regulated (e.g.) by categorical coordinators derived from identitary thinking, ‘presupposes the existence of institutional culture’ with its own constitutive procedures (cf. Schaeffer 2007: 277–278). So the historian-function aligns itself with the institutions of civil society: the state, the nation [Volk], the church, and the family. It accepts them in their own right as historical personalities. Conversely, these dominant institutions, in their own self-interest, invest their social and political authority in history, in the historicizing thought-style. Historical understanding thereby acquires the authority to affi rm their power in practice as dominant, transcendent, but, above all, as historical. Here Droysen turns public historian. Pragmatically speaking, history’s socially affi rmative function must identify itself with prevailing social and political practice: it has no option but to go along with whatever’s going. The historian ‘must be the total military man, the total lawyer, or on another occasion the theologian or the banker, in order to conduct research properly.’ History has to perform ‘an important patriotic duty’ by ‘presenting to the nation and to the state an image of itself’, an image [illusio] with a distinctly correctional intention if national self-consciousness is less self-assured than it should be. Thus the present comes into the purview of history, since what happens now is only ‘the latest point of historical development’ [die letzte Spitze der historischen Entwicklung], ‘the matured fulfi lment of a long sequence of preparatory moments’, the historian-function can understand, if not explain. Thus what is happening, framed in terms of what has already happened, is affi rmed as knowledge already known, the same old thing. On this basis, history has a ‘politically propaedeutic’ (i.e. a public policy advisory) function. ‘Equipped’ with ‘comprehensive knowledge’ [mit

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der Gesamtheit dieser Erkenntnisse] and in the habit of thinking historically, already familiar with the relevant perspectives and adept at grasping the historical context, the trained historian [der so Durchgebildete] is capable of illuminating whatever particular issue arises from political practice and of assessing its objective importance (Droysen 1977: 174, 235, 270, 278–279). Both theoretically and practically, however, history goes further still. It does more than identify itself with whatever happens. Rather, the method of thinking historically [das historische Denken], ‘with its jurisdiction extending as far as this method can be applied’, ensures that whatever happens is itself history (Droysen 1977: 5). It identifies itself as the system that produces whatever happens. Particularly with ‘world historical individuals’ being ‘the business directors of the world spirit’ [Geschäftsführer des Weltgeists], it assumes it can take charge of whatever happens (Hegel 1961: 76). Hence, ‘there is hardly any business [Geschäft] in the conduct of public life that doesn’t proceed without the vital knowledge of the historical context it occurs in and carries further’. As a result, business is constantly producing a turn-over for history and history’s value for business is constantly being assessed. Thus, history drives global development: historical consciousness expands rapidly as each day millions upon millions of people around the world communicate with each other. The pace at which money moves as the measure of material goods is outstripped ‘in the consciousness of the civilized world at present’ only by the more surprising production-rate of the ‘profusion’ [Fülle] of ‘knowledge of how things have got to be the way they are’ [Wissen von dem Gewordenen]. So each day the present is ‘being shaped’ into comprehensive historical representations; and there is ‘immeasurably more there’ yet to happen, yet to be witnessed, yet to be interrogated (Droysen 1977: 68, 70). History, as social practice, exerts a regulatory, supervisory control: noone escapes its jurisdiction. Historical continuity is implicit in the work and progress of the forces of civil society [in den sittlichen Mächten]: everyone, each in their own place [jeder an seiner Stelle], participates in them, so indirectly even the socially least important and the poorest live in history. Its authority is also central: Droysen recommends that the state establish, to accompany its statistical bureau for economic affairs, an archive as a historical bureau from which the state administration could seek guidance on matters of domestic and foreign policy (as History and Public Policy does today!). Behind this, ensuring the universal, practical relevance of history, stands the historian, affi rming the civil historian-function. He lives and works for a vision of the world [Weltanschauung], derived from his own inner life, from his own personality, to which he adheres with absolute conviction [in dieser seiner Weltanschauung ist er seiner absolut gewiß]: historical science is for him a powerful tool for justifying it, disseminating it, and bringing it to dominance [zur Herrschaft zu bringen] (Droysen 1977: 36, 79, 263, 433 (my italics)).

History: A Self-Centred Science 143 All the human sciences rely on conviction, on persuasive rhetoric. History, though, must impose itself in practice with coercive force. Only thus can it mask, from itself as much as from the world, its own reality as an anthropocentric fantasy,—the most theoretical theory, the most narcissistic illusion.

2.2. Representing the ‘general self’ of mankind Central to Droysen’s vision is human consciousness, the world of intellection, as the quite special, ultimate phase of cosmological development. Historik defi nes human beings becoming conscious of being human through their civil purpose as the dynamic driving history: ‘The idea of mankind is self-hood [Ichheit], and more precisely, freedom, i.e. the self-referential, selfdetermining mind [das Sich-auf-sich-Beziehen und Sich-in-sich-Bestimmen des Geistes]; and whatever contributes to the unfolding and development of this self-hood, is historical [geschichtlich].’ The ‘general self’ [das generelle Ich] of mankind is thus both the subject and the object of history. It gives history a purpose and is also the means of realizing history in which, and for the sake of which, the human being becomes increasingly conscious of his or her general humanity (Droysen 1977: 369). (a) Crucially, Droysen cannot defi ne consciousness in relation to immediate sensations [aesthesis]: since the human creature shares them with other, non-human creatures, they are nonspecial. Certainly, like the highest forms of animal life, the human creature does experience the world through the senses, is subject to desires and fears. But, unlike animals, being centred on its conscious self, it has the capacity to recollect this sensory experience, to reflect on it, to express it in language, but above all to learn from it. The human creature thereby develops itself, becomes more conscious of itself, progresses in intelligence and civility (Droysen 1977: 16, 23–25). Consequently, Droysen must defi ne consciousness in terms of mental images or projections,—in terms of illusio, since they project mankind’s self-centred, cognitive privilege. Moreover, since every human individual, already potentially a historian, has been produced by history in a world that is itself a historical product, these images and projections constituting human selfconsciousness are already, in their very essence, historical. On this identitary basis, history provides mankind with ‘self-certainty’ [Selbstgewißheit] (Droysen 1977: 9, 424, 444). As the principle of representation as true likeness, identitary thinking is here particularly crucial, absolutely binding. The work of the historian is to produce an image [Bild, Abbild, Gegenbild], to create a projection [Vorstellung] or a representation [Darstellung] of the past. History is ‘the retrospective understanding of existence in terms of it having got to be the way it is, its counter-image that engenders itself as a reconstruction of how it got to be the way it is and in which we encounter its truth, its vital force’ [das rückwärts gewandte Verstehen des Seienden als ein Gewordenes,

144 Imprisoned by History ein Gegenbild desselben, das sich uns aus der Rekonstruktion seines Gewordenseins erzeugt und in dem uns dessen Wahrheit, dessen lebensvolle Kraft entgegentritt] (Droysen 1977: 41 (emphasis in original)). The objective past, as it happened, is ‘cognitively incoherent’ [wirklich objektiv ist nur das Gedankenlose] (cf. a-type sequences (Chapter 1)). The historian’s task is to ‘let the facts speak for themselves’. But, since intellection makes human beings special by producing an ordered, civil world, he can speak for the facts only if he understands them, if he raises them from eidetic incoherence [Gedankenlosigkeit] into the sphere of human thought [Sphäre des menschlichen Gedankens] (i.e. by constructing b-type sequences (Chapter 1)). Thus, in analyzing the available sources existing now, in the present, as the culminating point of historical development so far, the historian ‘draws the mental-image of a past’ [das Gedankenbild einer Vergangenheit zeichnet]. The identitary fact is that, as each moment and each person is, by defi nition, a historical outcome [ein historisches Ergebnis], each person’s conscious thought is fi lled with mental-images [Gedankenbilder, die unser Denken erfüllen]. These images arise as personal recollections of the past, or as projections of personal intentions onto the future: as memories and fears, hopes and ambitions, they cluster around the present. Being conscious of having these already historicized images, of their cognitive value, constitutes not just human self-understanding, but also a vital cognitive force that can affi rm, and be reinvested in, further improvements to the ‘civil community’ of world history, history as a cosmological force already affi rms (Droysen 1977: 8–10, 218). This identitary conclusion makes the images [illusio] produced by historians true by connecting them precisely to two, absolutely binding reference-points. The mental-images they “artificially” fabricate are representations corresponding to ‘things having become the way they are’ [das Gewordene], the methodology of historical research guarantees as veracious (Droysen 1977: 162). But these same historically constructed images also correspond to the “natural” mentalimages occurring in each person’s already historicized consciousness: they are equivalent to, or even indistinguishable from them. In fact, both the technically fabricated and the naturally intentional images converge in the ideal, historical concept of the general self-hood of mankind, the universal level of civility, on which the historian already operates and to which each person, conscious of being a historical outcome, aspires. As an ultimate totality, the historical world proves totally illusory. A vast planetarium of ‘thought-images’, historical knowledge a priori encloses the individual psychologically (as the horizon of his thinking and acting), socially and politically (as the horizon of the present world as a historical product), and metaphysically (as the ultimate horizon of cosmological purpose). Certainly, historical thinking and historical methods will reveal this totality to the individual. They affi rm his self-centred position in it and confi rm his contribution to the civil community world history represents (cf. Droysen 1977: 472). This projection [Vorstellung] is meant to sound

History: A Self-Centred Science 145 awe-inspiring, but its implication is distinctly authoritarian. It locks the historically self-conscious individual into this central position. History may well give him a sense of reality; but, detained in this historical self-centredness, he can’t know any reality other than the historicized projections [Vorstellungen] history substitutes for it. Moreover, since history, represented by these projections, is the only reality and both historicized knowledge and historical reality present themselves to consciousness as mental-images [Gedankenbilder], history transforms reality into reflections of itself,—into a sign of itself, its own simulacrum [illusio]. Thus the mental-images, projections, and representations produced when history transforms cognitively incoherent, immediate experience into historical reality, have an absolutely crucial function. They might be presented as the outcome of historical research, as the ideal product of history’s identitary logic. But their significance emerges only if their intention is reversed. To posit self-centred consciousness as the special privilege of human beings, automatically transforms the mental-images it generates into reality: the world can’t help becoming phenomenal [illusio]. Furthermore, to see consciousness in terms of sequences of mental images, irresistibly enforces identitary thinking: how else could it logically guarantee that these images would be like the object they represent? The mental-image confi rms that the world appears to consciousness as a representation, that objects can be known within this cognitive situation only through being represented, that true knowledge involves making accurate representations, true likenesses, although—on the basis of Kant’s epistemology—only other representations are available for verifying their accuracy. Thus the crucial purpose of the mental image is to offer incontrovertible evidence of the practical application, hence the practical value, of history’s identitary thinking. In Historik Droysen offers a manual for producing historical images of society and its institutions: that is, after all, the ‘practical significance’ of historical studies (Droysen 1977: 449). In all their heterogeneous variety, they constitute tiny stones in the grand, mosaic design of history’s civil totality. Historical understanding offers ‘an intellectually objective image of what happened [ein geistiges Gegenbild des Geschehenen] in terms of its meaning, context and truth’. The ‘forms of thought’ [Gedankenformen], the ‘names and concepts’ that ‘fix and classify’ inchoate source data disclose truth by producing for the mind [Geist] an objective counter-image [Gegenbild] of the outside world. But, in any case, ‘these contexts, causal connections, systems of motives, purposes, and conditions’ (i.e. these categorical coordinators) are inherent in the way human beings conceive the world [in der menschlichen Vorstellungsweise] since they derive from and contribute to a whole ‘world of mental projections’ [Vorstellungswelt], of phenomena, in which as cognitively privileged, self-conscious creatures they constantly live (Droysen 1977: 88, 148, 375, 472). The past is ‘contained ideally in the present’: history’s task is to bring this ‘ideal content’ into consciousness. In doing so, the historical account becomes an idealized copy [Abbild] of the protracted, arduous

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research-work that produced it. Ultimately, though, what guarantees the veracity of all these images, is mankind—itself a copy [Abbild] of (divine) truth (having been made, according to Christian dogma, in the image of God). It’s this being a copy, this living in and through copy-images, that keeps mankind searching for truth, broadening its historical knowledge, that motivates ‘a drive immanent in the human mind to be a self-centred totality in itself’ (Droysen 1977: 225, 283, 325, 459). Even so, this claim induces scepticism: pretending to comprehend all human reality, Droysen’s vision just fobs you off with copies or images of history itself. (b) For history Droysen claims an idealistic, ethical purpose: ‘ethics,’ he says, ‘would be the true philosophy of history’ (Droysen 1977: 55). But history is also a systematic science [Wissenschaft]: ‘the proper historian ought where possible to know everything’ (Droysen 1977: 3). Logically, nothing connects these two propositions. Ethics requires not knowledge of everything, but the far more discriminating knowledge conducive to a moral life governed by prudence, by ‘practical wisdom’ [phronesis]. Certainly, the natural scientific method of testing data, of falsifying hypotheses, of ‘piecemeal tinkering’, might ensure an open society (Popper 1974: 58, 155). But history is not, by these criteria, a science. It discloses retrospectively only the contingent ‘logic of situations’: Droysen conflates prudence and understanding. In any case, the scientist-historian is both its subject and its object. Furthermore, ethics in principle seeks here and now to align knowledge, moral intention, and resulting action. It comes down to immediate choices, judgements, and decisions, enacted in specific situations, but also to taking responsibility for these actions. This immediate, practical application of knowledge differentiates ethical action from just understanding (Aristotle 1983: 218; 1142 b 31–1143 a 16). By contrast, history can hardly claim to possess ethical value. Be it prudent or not, whatever a person does, for whatever reason, in whatever situation, contributes to history (Droysen 1977: 267, 407). Even—in fact, especially—confl ict, cruelty, barbarity (as ‘asocial sociability’, as its dialectical logic) are sanctioned by history because they too belong to its ‘driving causes’ (cf. Kant 1977a: 37; §4; Hegel 1961: 70–71, 108). Droysen acknowledges the ‘deep scars’ infl icted by the history one lives through. However, he is dismissive of those who ‘lament the frequent hard frictions of realities’: they forget that the ‘confl ict and noise of the real world’ are ‘infi nitely more copious and refreshing’ than ‘peaceful conditions’ or ‘the boring shadow-play of ideals’ (Droysen 1977: 131, 339). Adopting the perspective of the general self of humanity, mindful of the historical continuities mediated through him, the individual, his own ‘practical historian’, acts in full consciousness and out of his own volition. Unlike moral maxims that limit his or her freedom of action, history, with its ‘high ethical character’, offers a host of mighty, commanding, and inspiring examples to emulate (Droysen 1977: 251–252, 269). Even so, in a historicized world constructed out of images, copies, and representations this freedom is illusory. The

History: A Self-Centred Science 147 individual is already locked into a self-centred, self-referential perspective on the world, defi ned a priori as historical. His or her actions can’t but follow the symmetrical equivalences of past and future; they can’t but take ‘only a small step’ in conformity with the overall progression towards the fulfilment of a historicized civilization,—a goal that makes sense only as a mental-image or projection [Gedankenbild; Vorstellung] and then only from the individual’s self-referential historical standpoint (Droysen 1977: 269). In Historik ethics operates as the alibi of a totalitarian management system run by a comprehensive information technology. The ethical ideals it promotes derive from procedures and ‘best practices’ already prescribed by the management system and the targets set up for it to achieve, just as in any hierarchical, bureaucratic organization such as a corporate business, a public service provider, a civil-service, a university. History is by defi nition the ultimate knowledge management-system, a technology of technologies, the self-appointed focus of all knowledge. By nature affi liated to politics, jurisprudence, and economics, it also regards the other main knowledge disciplines (e.g. theology, philosophy, natural science) as its ancillaries [Hilfswissenschaften]. In any case, they do have their ‘historical side’, in that they have become the way they are [insofern sie gewordene sind]. On this technological basis, in its own self-interest, history asserts its claim that only the sense of history, backed up by historical method, is ‘capable of fi nding coherence and reciprocity in the incalculably animated and variegated life of human affairs’. Given that bourgeois society [die bürgerliche Gesellschaft] is the ‘objective organism’ of the idea of the well-being of humanity, history assesses how the civil institutions that affi rm it (i.e. its legal framework, manufacturing, the state) pursue their civilizing function from the standpoint of how they got to be the way they are [unter dem Gesichtspunkt des Gewordenseins]. Consequently, however human beings act, be it deliberately or not, be it ethically or not, ‘what they do has its place in the great economy of history’ [es hat seine Stelle in der großen Ökonomie der Geschichte] (Droysen 1977: 56, 275, 340–342, 344). With Historik Droysen conclusively demonstrates how, through the technics of historical science, liberal culture manages the ‘social level’. As applied both by Droysen and by the current managers of public cultural policy, history can offer a progressive raising of the social level in times of material prosperity as well as socially affi rmative, cultural compensations where there is a politically calculated, overall economic benefit in maintaining social deprivation. Certainly (he acknowledges), myriads live and die without making a name for themselves, but even the least trace they leave behind gradually produces, along with countless other atoms, the mountains that carry those who form the contours of their summit (Droysen 1977: 369). Precisely this organizational perspective betrays the administrative mentality historicized thinking enforces,—as Droysen confi rms, by advocating historical method as basic training for bureaucrats [so wird die

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historische Methode die Grundlage der Verwaltungsstudien werden müssen] (Droysen 1977: 273; cf. Adorno 1979: 122). (c) A typical, self-affi rming treatise on historical science, Historik can’t do without catachresis: the combination of essentially incompatible terms, which both accommodates divergent interpretations and pre-empts dissent. On the one hand, Droysen insists on the restless dynamic of history. Given its cosmological context, history is about ‘becoming’ [Werden]. It shows how things are the way they are, by revealing how they got to be that way. Further, discovering how things got be the way they are will disclose what in future they can become, what their contribution to the civil purpose of history could be. “Revealing”, “discovering”, “disclosing” are all mental acts in accordance with historical hermeneutics and source-criticism. History is not just a mechanical succession of events, but a methodologically based, intellectual appreciation of the driving forces and realities in the historical “process” (Droysen 1977: 255). On the other hand, in his specific, empirical position in the present-day (in his own, current reference group) as the self-appointed representative of general humanity, the selfcentred, cognitively privileged historian enjoys an immutable, comprehensive overview of the historical process. With it based on the accumulated, total knowledge available in the present, he or she has the ‘relatively highest’ [den relativ höchsten] standpoint. The idea of the historical process as a totality, as means of illuminating the sense of the past and the direction of history, is supplied by the thought of God as the ultimate, self-centred, self-sufficient cause. Hence, historical science is ‘a constant process of discovery from the standpoint of God’ [die Historie [ . . . ] ist ein stetes Finden aus Gott] (Droysen 1977: 236, 254–255). The illusion Droysen perpetrates is to make these divergent tendencies interdependent. After all, how could history even appear as a total process, if the historian couldn’t occupy a comprehensive, transcendent position that would reveal its totality? Why would the historian even wish to claim that sublime position, if it offered no spectacle worth seeing? Historical comprehension derives from identitary thinking. The very formula A=A, specifically its historicized version Apast=Apresent , graphically symbolizes stability. The constancy it implies, comes only from a comprehensive overview. It facilitates the bureaucratic procedures that transform dynamic process into a space-time pattern: these organize (i.e. understand and explain) historical events, actors, and issues by assigning them their “proper place” in the historical continuum. Historical science thus offers a copy [Abbild] of the civil world as seen by the eye of God: ‘the way it has become’ appears as ‘eternal present’ [ihr Gewordensein als ewige Gegenwart], ‘its disparateness’ manifests itself as ‘an oscillating world of spheres at peace with itself’ [ihr Auseinander als eine ruhig in sich schwingende Welt von Sphären] (Droysen 1977: 61). History’s totally comprehensive supervision is, therefore, constantly emphasized. The question of history, the questions historians address history with, presuppose ‘a totality of

History: A Self-Centred Science 149 acquired information and knowledge’ [eine Totalität erworbener Kenntnis und Erkenntnis]: this is an intuition that arises from the ‘totality of our self’ [aus der Totalität unseres Ich], from the whole ‘intellectual content’ [ein Ergebnis des ganzen geistigen Inhalts] each person has unconsciously assimilated and which subjectively goes into constructing his or her intellectual world. In fact, without being attributable to a ‘superior context’ [die Zurückführung auf den höheren Zusammenhang] such as this to bring it to life, history would be ‘a dead mass of historical erudition’. Ultimately, Droysen envisages the comprehensive historicization of the planet: once everyone enters into ‘the proper and highly esteemed life of history’ [dies rechte und hochberufene Leben der Geschichte], then the sphere of historicized life will begin ‘to flow around the world and so, penetrating into the deeper layers of humanity, animate and elevate them’ (Droysen 1977: 60, 106–107, 375; cf. 264, 424). Historical comprehension can reckon with stability: the cosmological dynamic of history maintains its equilibrium through the constants that govern it. Derived from a self-referential, self-centred vantage point, it itself ensures constancy in principle. So too does history’s progressive evolution [Werden], since this evolutionary progression doesn’t itself evolve. In other words: there can’t be any change in the conditions of change, because (as in the Newtonian world) ‘change is ruled by an unchanging law’ (cf. Popper 1974: 130, 161). But constancy comes not just built in to history’s plan: the dynamic development of historical events and historical knowledge also affi rms it. In this respect, Droysen’s frequent recourse to the adjective “constant” [stet] is significant: e.g. the ethical world produced by the flow of history evinces ‘a constant willing and obliging, a constant becoming’ [ein stetes Wollen und Sollen, ein stetes Werden] (with the verbs’ force frozen by their conversion into nouns) (Droysen 1977: 83). History, though is not just a haphazard sequence of events (a-type sequences), but the intellectual recognition of these events (b-type sequences). So the true ‘contents of history are thoughts’: that’s what makes history a science and makes historical science a moral science. Therefore, to discover how things got to be the way they are, history explores the present for its ‘thought-content’ [Gedankeninhalt], without which it cannot produce the ‘mental-images’ [Gedankenbilder] that will disclose its history. Precisely this production of an ‘intellectual counter-image’ [geistiges Gegenbild] of the world ensures stability: the world makes sense for human beings only in terms of the ‘mental projections’ [Vorstellungen] it generates. This intellectual simulacrum of the world, the world made into a sign of itself, is necessarily linguistic, essentially ‘logological’, a verbal ‘world effect’ [effet monde]: the intellectual world is set out comprehensively in language [die ganze Gedankenwelt legt sich in der Sprache dar] (cf. Cassin 1995: 69). The world, then, may well be in flux, as we are, but that means ‘we can understand it by analogy with what occurs within ourselves’ [ . . . unter der Analogie dessen, was in uns selber vorgeht, begreifen]. And to achieve this historical understanding

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means grasping as its essence ‘what remains the same as things change’ [das im Wechsel Gleiche]. This means resorting to conceptualization, the identitary reconstruction of the world in thought and language: names and concepts are ‘for the mind the counter-image [Gegenbild] of the external world, for us its truth’. Relying thus on the panoply of “categorical coordinators”, on ‘rules, laws, material, volume [Raumerfüllung]’, identifies ‘the forms that keep recurring’ and ‘enables the mind to grasp the constant elements through which movement occurs [ . . . faßt der Geist das Stetige, das, an dem sich die Bewegung vollzieht]’ (Droysen 1977: 148, 316, 220–221, 256, 472, 474–475). Stability, equilibrium, constancy, etc.: they all come with defi ning history as comprehension, as the recognition of how things got to be the way they are. Any present moment is fi xed as ‘what it has become’ [ein Gewordenes], i.e. Apast=Apresent, given that it’s the latest stage of historical development, replete with all the past that produced it. The ‘same thing’ [das Gleiche] by which historical understanding orientates itself and from which it produces its thought-images, is inevitably knowledge already known. There is no human issue, no human situation, that hasn’t already become what it is, that hasn’t already been conceptually fi xed: situations are only conceivable in so far as they have already become what they are,—i.e. in so far as they result from history [denn denkbar sind sie uns nur in dem Maß als sie geworden, als sie historische Ergebnisse sind]. Driving this recurrence of the same old thing, of knowledge already known, is historical continuity: each successive present, as the immanent expression of the past, entails a constantly self-renewing search for historical knowledge. For this reason historical truth is inevitably relative: true only in so far as it has been realized and recognized hitherto [das historisch Wahre ist nur ein Relatives, die Wahrheit, wie sie bisher verwirklicht und erkannt ist] (Droysen 1977: 162, 201, 206, 283, 422, 475). For all its claims to underwrite human freedom, history’s comprehensive representation of the general self of mankind (history [crg]) offers a comprehensive reality-management system, supported by the specialized technology its own critical methods represent. This means that the historicized world manifests itself in kaleidoscopic patterns of stabilizing, symmetrical mental-images [Gedankenbilder]. These form ‘a net in which historians attempt to capture the incalculable combinations of the historical world’. Conversely, for the self-centred, cognitively privileged human mind (that buys into this impersonating of the general self of history), the historical world appears as ever-changing combinations of mental images and projections (Droysen 1977: 207, 366). In other words (as Droysen confi rms), in a totally historicized world the social historian-function keeps organizing and re-organizing the same old thing, the knowledge already known, to ensure that the images to which it, for its own administrative efficiency, has reduced the world are constantly reshuffled and recombined. In passing reality off as objective images of itself, historical culture (as will become

History: A Self-Centred Science 151 clear) promotes a sophistical culture, a culture fi xated on images, particularly on its own self-image, a culture in which truth is defi ned only in terms of what has been realized and recognized hitherto, a culture particularly dependent on historians adept in dealing with the same old thing, ready to go with whatever’s going, for its self-affi rmation.

2.3. Chains, nets, and history’s incarcerating commonplaces According to Wilhelm von Humboldt, described by Droysen as the ‘Francis Bacon of historical science’, ‘the truth of past events, simple though it may seem, is the very height of what the human mind can conceive’ [die Wahrheit des Geschehenen scheint wohl einfach, ist aber das Höchste, was gedacht werden kann]. For, ‘if it could be achieved, it would reveal, as a necessary chain, what determines all reality’ [so läge in ihr enthüllt, was alles wirkliche, als eine nothwendige Kette, bedingt] (Humboldt 1980c: 587 (my emphasis); cf. Droysen 1977: 419). Though historical knowledge may come down to nothing other than ‘thought images’ [Gedankenbilder], ‘counter-images’ [Gegenbilder], copies [Abbilder], or projections [Vorstellungen] of what the past was like, such statements make it clear that exceptionally coercive, intellectual force is required to guarantee the uniquely privileged veracity of these images, to ensure the comprehensiveness, the dominance, and the necessity of history both as the technology—the technology of technologies—that produces them and as the bureaucratic system that manages their production. Here too, typically, catachresis is the coercive instrument. For Droysen it is axiomatic that the present, as the latest phase of the historical development, is in itself historical. To understand the historical ramifications of the present, is the historian’s historicizing task. Just to exist, just to be alive now, is to be already historical. What Droysen sets out to demonstrate, the historicized thinking he wishes to enforce, is already predetermined: Historik is predicated on an inevitable, self-enforcing tautology. The concept of a ‘historical present’, the world as dominated and configured by an epochmaking, historical figure or event and acknowledged as such by contemporary observers, is a particular instance of historicized thought coercion (cf. Droysen 1977: 151–154). However much Droysen insists on history moving, on history as progression in civility [Sittlichkeit], his comprehensive vision can’t help being static in its administrative and organizational self-interest. It blocks any conception of meaningful individual existence external to historical agencies or structures. For a start, historical commonplaces or commonalities [Gemeinsamkeiten] are indispensable for endowing a person’s existence with meaning: commonplaces enable the individual to discover his or her own ethical truth [erst in der Gemeinsamkeit kommt das einzelne Ich zu seiner Wahrheit]. The individual human being is, therefore, no abstraction: he or she is nothing unless ‘rooted’ [wurzelt] in a natural context,

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as in a family, an ethnicity, as well as a nation. Added to this are social and cultural conditions [die Zuständlichkeit] that frame, and are generated by, the restless striving of human activity. In fact, Droysen conceives of the present here and now ‘as a vast network of conditions’ [als großes Netz von Zuständen], ‘as an ideal cross-section of the full-flowing movement of civil forms’ [wie ein ideeller Durchschnitt durch die vollströmende Bewegung von sittlichen Gestaltungen],—in other words, in terms of the segmented, ‘striated spaces’ characteristically generated by bureaucratic regulation (Droysen 1977: 61, 336–337; cf. Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 254, 529ff., 592ff.). Taken as a whole, the historical work of humanity is virtually anonymous: most people live and die leaving virtually nothing behind them. Still, just as the fossilized remains of infusoria produce vast geological formations, so they too contribute to the formation [Bildung] of the overall, civil identity of mankind (Droysen 1977: 15, 19–20, 407, 436). If, by contrast, historical understanding does focus on individuals, it’s not for their own sake: the historian selects them because they have a historical significance, because ‘their life has a decisive place in the vast historical context of things’ [deren Leben eine maßgebende Stelle in dem großen geschichtlichen Zusammenhang der Dinge hat]. The individual human being might well be important in his own particular place, but the idea of history, the design of its comprehensive plan, lies not within him, but passes through him [der Gedanke des Ganzen ist nicht in ihnen, geht nur durch sie hin]: he or she is just a cipher, a mosaic fragment in the total design (Droysen 1977: 194, 196 (emphasis in original)). Thus the world as designed by historical comprehension is a static world (its dynamic ruled by constant laws that ensure its equilibrium), a world predicated on the symmetries of present, past, and future, of human existence and historical progression, of historical understanding and human reality. Inevitably, it must be a world of coercion and constraint. Inevitably too, the historian himself is coerced by his own coercive design: he must be aware that he fi nds himself ‘in the context of an incalculable task’, and ‘that he has his own place, his own position with its own duties, just like everyone else in this long chain of slowly proceeding workers’ [daß er wie jeder in dieser langen Kette langsam vorrückender Arbeiter seine Stelle, seinen pflichtmäßigen Posten hat] (Droysen 1977: 63 (my italics)). The lynch-pin of this entire historical design is this utterly binding ‘idea’ as the ‘authentic subject of history’: the idea, assumed at the outset, that mankind is a cosmological, self-referential project towards civil and ethical self-realization (Droysen 1977: 298, 368–369). This comprehensive design may well claim to recognize human freedom. However, (as Stirner pointed out), it comes over as re-tread Christian theology, or as the self-aggrandizement—on a metaphysical, cosmological scale—of the bourgeois state, or as invoking an unattainable ideal of humanity as a means of promoting the cause of a rationally vindicated, socially repressive authoritarianism (Stirner 1972: 114ff., 150, 158–159, 410ff.). Justified though Stirner’s

History: A Self-Centred Science 153 critique is, Droysen’s historicist contrivance is anyway vulnerable. The slightest malfunction, and it all falls apart . . .

3. ANTHROPIC BIAS: PROBING HISTORY’S METHODOLOGICAL UNCONSCIOUS Its rational coherence, its social convenience,—its very artificiality: that, ironically, does make Droysen’s historicist contrivance vulnerable. Somewhat like Huxley, he has devised a historicized sphere of culture as an ‘artificial thing’, as ‘antithetic to [ . . . ] the cosmic process’. In defi ning this special, human sphere of civility [Sittlichkeit], he too seems to be suggesting that ‘social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process,’ otherwise society will remain in a morally unrefi ned state with only the physically fittest, but not necessarily the most “civilized”, surviving (Huxley 1911a: 12–13, 31; Huxley 1911b: 80). His conception of the historicized world seems to concur with Huxley’s liberal world-view that likens the human sphere to a garden walled off from the rest of nature, cultivated to serve humanity’s special, ethical aspirations, laid out according to a human design to bring on specially selected plant-species and to eradicate any undesirable growths, but always susceptible to being reclaimed by nature, to running wild, should the human commitment falter (Huxley 1911b: 81, 83; Huxley 1911a: 12ff.; cf. Droysen 1977: 23–24). Certainly, the recourse to scientifically vindicated natural processes to legitimize historical or social order (exemplified by Elias and Droysen) is a conventional strategy of historical and sociological theory (cf. Elias 1976b: 38–39; Droysen 1977: 61). But because it operates by hypothetical, trial-and-error procedures, science precludes such holistic constructs; while dealing only with particular events rather than pervasive phenomena, sciences of society can’t replicate sciences of nature (cf. Popper 1974: 80–81, 107ff.). Droysen’s conception of history as integral to cosmology might have been more credible, if it didn’t deny the one crucial fact that might have validated it: the integration of the human species on the basis of its biological species-character into nature. Instead, it admits no sense of the ‘fundamental unity of life’; it blocks entirely the notion that being so integrated ‘binds us to a destiny which was decided in our absence and which, by all indications, will unravel without us’ (Schaeffer 2007: 154–155). In fact, suggesting ethics are ‘socially obligatory’ since they’re inherent in evolution, recent zoological fi ndings invalidate Droysen’s conviction that the historical, self-civilizing vocation of “Man” distinguishes “Him” from all other species. Experiments have shown (e.g.) that a wide diversity of mammals evince confl ict resolution, empathy, reciprocity and a sense of justice, which suggests these forms of behaviour are essential to the survival of the group as a whole, regardless of the “fitness” of any specific individual

154 Imprisoned by History in it (Atlan & de Waal 2007: 62ff., 103). In other words, sociability is not uniquely confi ned to human beings: homo sapiens itself descended from ‘ancestors who for millions, if not dozens of millions of years belonged to social groups and were engaged in social interaction’; furthermore this sociability, probably invented by mammals, phylogenetically predates the separation of the human lineage from that of other primates (Schaeffer 2007: 255). Similarly, consciousness itself, which seems to be such an essential human capacity, can be derived genealogically from more elementary functions of organisms: relatively speaking, it is no more special for human existence, than the capacity to regenerate themselves for micro-organisms, or wings to fly with for birds (cf. Schaeffer 2007: 159–160). That Droysen’s vision of the historical culmination to planetary development excludes human biology, suggests a cosmological fl aw in his argument as well. In fact, Droysen’s preoccupation with history as a civilizing “fi nish” to the Earth, particularly with the ever recurring, unchanging ‘constants’ sustaining history’s driving forces, is symptomatic. Certainly, a world-system in equilibrium seems more humane than a chaotic universe verging on incomprehensibility. It coincides with “our” habitual way of thinking; it seems to be more “about us”. It does make time reversible, thereby sanctioning historical analogies, permitting causes to be inferred from effects. It does apparently make the world manageable, since sufficient reason would justify its operation. However, it would in fact produce nothing more than ‘an immutable affi rmation of its own identity’. With its ideal of totally comprehensive knowledge, it would ensure ‘a tautological repetition of the same thing’ [une repetition tautologique du même], of the same old thing (Prigogine & Stengers 2001: 22, 25–26; Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 351). It would function with all the remorseless, rhythmical regularity of a ‘mega-machine’ that would block any creative deviance (Prigogine 1994: 96). Though it might seem to vindicate human rationality, it actually projects a natural world that excludes mankind [un monde naturel d’où l’homme est exclu]. Totally determined by its past, it allows for no unprecedented differentiation that might produce human life. Just as in historical practice, it establishes its objectivity as ‘the absence of reference, in the description of the object, to the person describing it’. Ultimately, there is nothing human about the world-view of classical physics Droysen adopts. Instead, it offers ‘an indifferent nature for which each state is equivalent to every other, a fl at, homogeneous nature devoid of relief, the very nightmare of universal insignificance’ (Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 130, 135, 299). The same goes for the historicist schemes it supports and the social and cultural norms it justifies,—such as Droysen’s conception of historical scholarship and the public history got up by self-centred public historians huddling in his shadow. Substantive though these methodological objections are, Droysen’s historicism would never have been able to acknowledge them. Quite the

History: A Self-Centred Science 155 contrary: in fact, he assimilates Darwin’s theory to his own designs because it apparently reveals ‘a historical moment in the realm of organic nature’ (Droysen 1977: 470). It wouldn’t have been in his self-interest: it would have deprived him of his self-centred, cognitive privilege and his social-correctional responsibilities,—epistemological practices sanctioned by the history discipline. In other words, since the integration of homo sapiens into nature challenges the epistemological basis of human self-centredness (i.e. teleology, anthropocentrism and essentialism), it exposes the erroneousness of historical knowledge as such (cf. Schaeffer 2007: 185). Yet, in blocking these ontological considerations, the self-centred historicizing mentality creates for itself a methodological unconscious that fatally compromises it. Hence, the imperative now to explore the issues they raise: (3.1) the anthropic principle which deflates the conceit of cognitive privilege; (3.2) the self-induced criticality of natural and social systems which excludes causality based on the principle of sufficient reason; and, in conclusion, (3.3) the demise of the certainties arising from identitary thinking and enforced by managerial regulation. They disclose a human reality liberated from historicization, fi nally open to a creative apprehension of the human predicament precisely because of its aleatoriness.

3.1. The anthropic principle Anthropic bias derives from the anthropic principle. It posits human cognition as pre-conditioned by the special cosmological and biological factors that make human existence possible. (Clearly, if the physical properties of the universe had been only slightly different, they wouldn’t have produced conscious human beings capable of observing it.) Anthropic bias expresses ‘the notion that “although our situation [in the Universe] is not necessarily central it is necessarily privileged to some extent”, in so much as special conditions are necessary for our existence’ (Carter 1983: 347). However, calculating the balance of probabilities, the cosmological perspective suggests that within these special conditions the human situation is not very special. That’s because ‘of all the places for intelligent observers to be, there are by defi nition only a few special places and many nonspecial places, so you are likely to be in a nonspecial place’. Aware of being intelligent observers, human beings see themselves in that special reference class. However, again on the balance of probability, within that class one’s situation is unlikely to be special. Though ‘the location of your birth in space and time in the Universe is privileged (or special) only to the extent implied by the fact that you are an intelligent observer, [ . . . ] your location among intelligent observers is not special but rather picked at random.’ Yet again on the balance of probability, there is only one certain assumption to make about one’s place in one’s reference class, the ‘self-sampling assumption’: ‘Knowing only that you are an intelligent observer, you should consider yourself picked at random from the set of all intelligent observers (past, present and

156 Imprisoned by History future) any one of whom you could have been’ (Gott 1993: 315, 316; cf. Bostrom 2002: 57). The anthropic principle also implies that this cosmological-biological precondition for the human situation cannot but generate its own ‘observational selection effects’. That’s to say: it’s ‘a reminder that [ . . . ] subjective selection conditions [ . . . ] should include not only the usual allowance for the limitations of our (artificial) measuring instruments but also allowance for our own limitations as living organisms’ (Carter 1983: 348). (‘Imagine, for instance, that 99 per cent of all observers had body temperatures below the boiling point of water. You could then find it unsurprising that your own surroundings were below that temperature’ (Leslie 1998: 16).) The anthropic principle thus ‘arises from its almost tautological corollary’: i.e. ‘in making general inferences from what we observe in the Universe, we must allow for the fact that our observations are inevitably biased by selection effects arising from the restriction that our situation should satisfy the conditions that are necessary a priori, for our existence’ (Carter 1983: 347–348). Hence, a civilization can’t help selecting for its objects of knowledge those a priori determined by the kind of intelligent observers it accommodates. The anthropic principle thus raises searching questions about the nature of human cognition (although, as a “psychocentric principle” or “the observer self-selection principle”, it is not necessarily restricted to human beings (cf. Bostrom 2002: 44)).8 In taking a cosmological perspective on human existence, it reveals not metaphysical or conceptual certainties based on identitary logic, but physical, pragmatic uncertainties governed by chance. On the one hand, the anthropic principle could imply that for knowledge about nature to be objective, it must discount the perspective of the human observer. Since this observer would reflect its own cosmological situation, it would either be biased in its own, existential favour or it would constitutionally block facts (even facts crucial to its own self-understanding) it couldn’t apprehend. Paradoxically, there would then be a good probability that the knowledge most necessary for humans could be humanly inaccessible, that the ultimate principles sustaining human cognition would be undecidable (cf. Prigogine & Stengers 2001: 30–31, 40; Kant 1971: 454ff. [A 426ff.; B 454ff.]). With consciousness thus a source of illusion, cognitive capacity would produce nothing but misconceptions,—as in Kafka’s story ‘Investigations of a Dog’, a lucid parable of psychocentrism. In fact, the apprehension that the reality of the natural world and the human sphere is not accessible to, or exhausted by, common sense, is already familiar. ‘That [man’s] senses were not fitted for the universe’ and ‘that his everyday experience, far from being able to constitute the model for the reception of truth and the acquisition of knowledge, was a constant source of error and illusion’: these apprehensive insights drive the whole endeavour of knowledge, be it in the natural or human sciences (Arendt 1993: 55). Apprehension propels this endeavour into discovering means of making reality intelligible,

History: A Self-Centred Science 157 even if the results challenge what is humanly conceivable. Here, crucially, the aesthetic dimension [aesthesis] motivates a scientific concern, which is to ‘provide the most simple, coherent, and comprehensive possible description of appearance’ [illusio] (Carter 1983: 352). On the other hand, the anthropic principle could imply that the world is ‘fi ne-tuned’, which suggests that ‘if cosmological parameters or fundamental physical constants [ . . . ] had [ . . . ] been very slightly different, the universe would have been void of intelligent life’ (Bostrom 2002: 11; cf. Carr & Rees 1979: 612). It implies that consciousness, the capacity to make observations, is structurally implicated in the universe the human mind attempts to understand. Given that there is intelligent life, the universe might well have its origin in ‘purposeful design’, hence evincing sufficient reason for it existing (as, e.g., in Leibniz’s Essays in Theodicy (1710)). More likely, however, is the existence of an ‘ensemble of universes’ so large that humans observe only a small part of it, but variegated enough to contain the fi ne-tuned universe they actually do observe. Observational selection effects would explain why no-one observes other universes in the ensemble: they aren’t observed because they contain no observers. Hence, by virtue of being intelligent observers, ‘a fi ne tuned universe is precisely what the observers should expect to observe given the existence of the ensemble’ (Bostrom 2002: 12–13). Conjectural though this thought-experiment is, it does stress two crucial issues: that the self-sampling assumption the anthropic principle involves does ‘cater to a methodological need in science by providing a way of connecting theory to observation’; that, therefore, ‘we ascribe some mysterious quality to things we call “observers”, some property of an observer’s mind that cannot be reduced to objective observer-independent facts’ (Bostrom 2002: 87, 134). To cut, simplistically, through the dense thicket of logical caveats: between the observer moment, indexical knowledge (i.e. the knowledge one has through one’s own reference class), non-indexical information (i.e. regarding the situation one’s reference class confronts), theoretical hypotheses, and evidence, observational selection based on self sampling effects does appear to establish probabilistic connections that are reliable (i.e. to which credence can be assigned). The point is: ‘Our theory puts the two domains, the indexical and the non-indexical, on an equal footing. In both, there are constraints on what can be reasonably believed, but these constraints may not single out a uniquely correct credence function’ (Bostrom 2002: 182). In this specific respect, the anthropic principle seems to coincide with Whitehead’s arguments for basing knowledge on the passage of nature as experienced in its entirety, rather than on a privileged, “objective”, rational scheme extracted from it that a priori discounts as secondary its immediate, observer-dependent qualities [aesthesis] (cf. Prigogine & Stengers 2001: 41). Evidently, in epistemological terms, the anthropic principle puts historical cognition in perspective. It takes it into its methodological unconscious: not

158 Imprisoned by History this time exposing the unconscious or unintended intentions of historical action (history [rg] (cf. Chapter 3)); but exposing the a priori assumptions and conditions behind the construction of historical knowledge (history [crg]) as knowledge about homo sapiens. That’s to say: (3.11) it exposes as fraudulent the historian’s claim to cognitive privilege; and it shows (3.12) that, being self-centred, history is self-organized to amplify, atomize, and ephemeralize itself. 3.11. History as nothing special The anthropic principle proposes that, though being a historian may be privileged or special, most historians in their own reference class are not special. Historians may well be ‘the only people qualified’ to equip society with a correctional, historical perspective. But that doesn’t mean much, given the ‘enormous’ size of the history profession alone and the absence of any alleged, socially correctional effect (Thomas 2006: 4; cf. Plumb 1973: 87). It certainly doesn’t mean much in a historicized world where the history-function is constitutive and history-focussed behaviour allpervasive (cf. Dawnay 2006: 22; Travers 2006: 8, 35; Droysen 1977: 106, 269, 275). So, far from being in a cognitively privileged position, historians are completely implicated in the way society is. If, as technicians maintaining history as a ‘technology of technologies’, they were included in the reference class of all the resources managers and information engineers maintaining the techno-sphere, their position would be routine,—as it actually is (cf. Davies 2006: 134–136). The way things are now results from historicization. The historians’ role in the social production system is as self-incriminating as everyone else’s—largely because historyfocussed behaviour, be it encouraged or imposed by them, affects not just everyone else, but also them as well since they too belong to the “everyone else” class. Furthermore, the self-sampling assumption completely sabotages the transcendent scope of dispassionate historical comprehensiveness. In the Einsteinian universe there is no unique observer reference-point, no ‘best place’. Rather, ‘it is populated with fraternal observers situated at different reference-points moving in relation to each other, so that objectivity arises only through the common enterprise of exchanging information’. Communication between them is anyway constrained by the speed of light and (because there’s no absolute reference-point) by the impossibility of determining values simultaneously applicable to their variable position and speed (Prigogine & Stengers 2001: 43). So the historian can’t claim self-centred transcendence. To pretend that ‘once the slag of his own tiny existence has melted away’, he stands high above himself, thinking ‘as though from a higher self’, contemplating ‘his state, nation [Volk], and religion from the standpoint of their global destiny’, is cognitively spurious, methodologically fraudulent (Droysen 1977: 238). That reference-point is non-existent,

History: A Self-Centred Science 159 mythic: nothing but the fictive self-affi rmation of the total power of powerful social interests (i.e. state, nation, economy, and religion). That historians do see themselves as cognitively privileged and historical comprehension as transcendent, is itself an observational selection effect. Being specialized, the result of professional accreditation, their knowledgeable behaviour will seem special. Certainly it puts them in a different reference class from the people they study. So, in (e.g.) 2010 historians of (e.g.) eighteenth-century Berlin can’t belong to the reference class that contains only citizens of Berlin in the 1780s. They would expect to have a superior temporal perspective unavailable to the latter about themselves. But their specialized knowledge is not so special. As observers in the “early twentyfirst century” reference class they have no better (or no worse) sense of their own time than historical observers in the Berlin 1780 reference class had of theirs. The observational selection effect reveals that historians can pretend to cognitive privilege only by discounting the conditions that make their own, particular observer reference-point a priori possible: i.e. being in a different reference class and operating with different indexical information from that available to those they study. They presume that the cognitive advantage they enjoy for reference classes they cannot belong to implies a cognitive privilege in the reference class (“historical observers in the early twenty-first century”) they can’t help belonging to. Instead, in a historicized world sustained by allpervasive history-focussed behaviour, their cognitive privilege disappears. 3.12. History self-organized for self-amplification The anthropic principle operates in history’s methodological unconscious to amplify and ephemeralize historical knowledge. The issue is demographic: the probable total size of the homo sapiens population. In proposing that one’s place is random and non-special, the self-sampling assumption implies that this nonspecial place contains most people: containing most people, being a commonplace, makes it nonspecial. It suggests, therefore, that, in all probability, one is living not just when most human beings are alive, but also when most human beings out of all the human beings who have lived or will ever live are alive.9 This, the “Doomsday argument”, involves numerous, complex assessments of how long homo sapiens is likely to survive.10 Roughly speaking (the basic argument goes), the number of human beings who precede those alive now is sixty billion: i.e. one’s rank in the roll call of humanity is around the sixty billion mark. Consequently, ten percent of the people who have ever lived are alive today (Rees 2004: 136). That seems a ‘remarkably high proportion’, but only because ‘for most of human history—the entire preagricultural era before (maybe) 8000 B.C.E.—there were probably fewer than ten million people in the world’ (Rees 2004: 136). It needed all of human history up to 1804 for the global population to pass one billion, but then it took one hundred and twenty-three years to reach two billion in 1927, thirty-three years to

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reach three billion in 1960 and thirty-nine years to double to six billion in 1999 (UNPD 1999: 3). In other words, currently the dead outnumber the living but only by a factor of ten. In this situation anthropic bias suggests two possible scenarios: (i) homo sapiens may well survive for a few thousand years (e.g. according to UN population figures, at stabilization just above the ten billion it will reach after 2200 (UNPD 1999: 3, 4));—or perhaps even increase by trillions and populate the entire galaxy (Leslie 1998: 187–188); (ii) homo sapiens either dies out rapidly, within a couple of centuries, or simply fades away (Rees 2004: 136). This second scenario might seem more credible not so much because of the vicissitudes of the historicized world, but simply because, on the balance of probability, one is unlikely to be alive at an early stage of the species, at a time when, compared to now, comparatively few people were alive. The human species in its entirety may, therefore, never ever number more than a hundred billion (Rees 2004: 136; cf. Brand 2000: 08). With this thought experiment the anthropic principle subverts history [crg]’s projection [illusio] of itself as an orderly regular system. Deriving from the unconscious conditions influencing history as both action and comprehension, these demographic implications produce observational selection effects that further expose the coercive authority of historicized thinking. In a world with an exponentially increasing, unprecedented population size, the history management-system has to constrain two, closely related anthropic tendencies that would destroy it: (a.) the rapid proliferation of existential variables (in terms of the heterogeneity of human work); and (b.) the accelerating dynamic of existential possibles (in terms of the intensified productivity of human work). (a) History [crg] offers a comprehensive system for managing human activity. Clearly, though, there will be more activity, more variable activity, in a world of six billion people (1999) than in a world of four hundred million (1250), or of five hundred million (1500), or even in a world of a billion (1804).11 Certainly, history doesn’t primarily focus on the populous present, despite its dominance within it, but rather on accidents generated in periods with comparatively lower populations (e.g. of a several hundred million). So historical activity in a period of low population growth with, therefore, a relatively restricted number of variable outcomes will seem normative and uniform (as, e.g., Elias shows with the historical “evolution” of manners in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (cf. also Elias 1988: 108–109)). Thus historical inferences drawn from people’s behaviour in comparatively stable demographic circumstances in the past (history [rg]), will, as an unconscious methodological effect, translate into stabilizing but constraining cognitive norms for making a demographically more dynamic present intelligible (history [crg]). Since socially correctional authority depends on its cognitive privilege, history [crg], through the historian-function’s self-interest, must constrain the exponentially proliferating variables produced by a demographic

History: A Self-Centred Science 161 dynamic that could overwhelm it. (As Schopenhauer pointed out in 1851, the innumerable individuals and events in history [crg], that already produced its ‘essential imperfection’ [wesentliche Unvollkommenheit] as a coherent, scientific discipline, would proliferate to infi nity once the history of China and India became available (Schopenhauer 1977b: 526– 527; §233).) So the historian-function’s self-interest can’t but constrain: its cognitive practice normalizes and stabilizes. With its categorical coordinators, historical discourse fabricates identities, generates equivalences, ascertains sufficient reasons that would systematize the heterogeneity endemic in hypermodernity. Conversely, prompted by the same self-interest, the historian-function can’t help recognizing that the unprecedentedly multitudinous population does have an unprecedentedly increased potential for history-focussed behaviour. Why should it even attempt to restrain a dynamic that would only augment its cognitive centrality? Faced with an apparently irresolvable confl ict in self-interest, the historian-function has the perfect solution already at hand: the identity principle. History’s identity-based, coercive thought-style ensures, therefore, that, whatever happens, however much of it happens, it’s always the same old thing, always centred on itself. Actually, though, history can’t even come close to containing the proliferating variables of an already historicized world. Its hold on the world was only ever illusory. In the 1580s in his Essays Montaigne cites a range of Classical authors (Lucian, Plato, Pliny, Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Seneca, Virgil, to name only very few) thereby affi rming his and their common adherence to the same sphere of sense [aesthesis]. In the mid-1700s in his essays Hume fi nds precedents for, and vindications of, his views in Classical and more recent history and culture, their shared realm of sense [aesthesis] only enhanced by its historical scope. The same temporal horizon encloses ethical reference points these authors and their Classical counterparts both recognize. It makes them immediate contemporaries, almost in the sense of Virginia Woolf’s remark that ‘the poet is always our contemporary’ (Woolf 1965: 265). Compared to the present, both the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries had a far lower population size (0.5 billion and 0.7 billion respectively) and a far slower rate of population growth. By contrast, in the 1820s Heine is confronted with temporal horizons and ethical references diverging,—with a ‘momentous age’ [bedeutungsschweren Zeit] in which ‘cathedrals are demolished and imperial thrones consigned to the lumber-room’ (Heine 1983: 40). In a world twice as populous as Montaigne’s and fi fty percent more populous than Hume’s and with a faster rate of population growth—a world, moreover, in which with Volta (1800), Fourier (1811), Œrsted (1820), Seebeck (1822), Faraday (1831), and Peltier (1834), theories of thermodynamics and electrical energy were being demonstrated—much more history is happening, driven by the mass revolutionary demands of capitalism and democracy (cf. Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 166, 173). Because the ethical references have vanished, the world makes

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no sense [aesthesis]: it presents itself ‘now’ [in jetziger Zeit] to immediate experience as ‘wretchedly confl icted’ [jämmerlich zerrissen] (Heine 1983: 343). So, from the Battle of Marathon to the French Revolution, from Plato to Hegel, from the age of Strasbourg Cathedral to that of steamships, the world is but a series of fantasies in the dream of an inebriated, Olympian god. When he comes to, it will dissolve into nothingness, as though it had never existed [unsre Welt ist zerronnen in Nichts, ja, sie hat nie existiert] (Heine 1983: 154). So though the demographic dynamic seems to augment history’s cognitive privilege by amplifying its cognitive value, it in fact atomizes and ephemeralizes its value-system. It makes it as heterogeneous as the historicized world it sustains. However, even as its capacity to make sense of the already historicized world diminishes, its persuasive force remains. In fact, it insists all the more on its social-correctional capacity as its cognitive value diminishes. The more it insists on its self-centred, cognitive privilege, the more it proves itself illusory.12 (b) Increasing exponentially, therefore, the human species acquires a biological momentum with its own historicizing dynamic. It translates into the intensified productivity of human work. Sustained by the ‘accelerating acceleration [ . . . ] discovered by Galileo and [ . . . ] later identified with gravity by Newton’, it produces ‘accelerating social evolution’ (Fuller 1969: 14). It creates a ‘trend of comprehensive ephemeralization’,—‘the doing of ever more with ever less’ (e.g. ‘the one-quarter-ton communications satellite outperforms 150,000 tons of transoceanic cables’). It results from ‘ever-increasing quantities of invisible energy events of universe’ being redirected by human ingenuity ‘from their previously only cosmically flowing patterns to flow through engineered channels and impinge upon intellect-invented levers’. Thus they ‘augment the work accomplishable by mankind’s muscles in rearranging the energetic environment events to more effectively sustain the metabolic regeneration of human life’. Ultimately, the ‘technical and economic augmentations’, produced by ephemeralization, threaten to overwhelm humanity and jeopardize its survival (Fuller 1969: 14–15). Inevitably, accelerating ephemeralization historicizes. It ensures history [crg] too makes ‘ever more with ever less’. As history accelerates, each historical phase contracts, diminishes, recedes, superseded by the ever latest thing. (Writing in the mid 1960s, Buckminster Fuller observes that from 1900 to 1965 the number of people with ‘a personal standard of living and health superior that ever enjoyed by a pre-twentieth-century monarch’ rose from ‘less than one to forty per cent of all living humanity’ (Fuller 1969: 16).) However, beyond a critical point, confronting a proliferating heterogeneity of topics, this increasingly unstable system breaks up, its force dissipating into proliferating academic micro-specialisms with their sub-disciplines, and sub-, sub-disciplines. This proliferating disequilibrium proves indispensable: it does lend history [rg] more

History: A Self-Centred Science 163 presence, more substance, by amplifying it, making more of it; but, now ‘a crowded and heterogeneous field’ due to the ‘crippling accumulation of specialized knowledge’, it diminishes history’s [crg] cognitive value (cf. Thomas 2006: 4). So, made unpredictable by its accelerating momentum, history [rg] induces a vertiginous time-sickness. The demographic dynamic—more and more people engaged in more and more history-focussed behaviour— makes it possible to produce more historical reality, to produce more historical possibles (visions, dreams, fantasies) as realities, to make more reality historically possible. But far from compensating for the reality deficit in a constantly self-historicizing world, this proliferation of historical products, far from affi rming history [crg] as the Ciceronian ‘guide to life’ [magistra vitae], only disorientates. Further, the technological energy generated by the exponentially expanding population far exceeds the human capacity to follow the ensuing reality-shifts. So the more technological rationality advances, the more people are susceptible to the ‘barbaric impulsions’ of their unaffected, essentially recalcitrant unconscious (cf. Halévy 2001: 14–15, 168). The urban mass, identified Le Bon and Ortega y Gasset as immature, violent, regressive, primitive, but, above all, historically illiterate, typifies this unconscious recalcitrance endemic in the social ethos of this technologically energized, self-historicizing world. But the most extreme form of the sickness induced by history’s tempo has a more generic etiology: the ‘escape velocity’ [vitesse de libération] history develops, which takes the world beyond the ‘referential sphere of the real and of history’. The resulting turbulence disrupts the sense of history, dissociates causes from effects (Baudrillard 1992: 12, 156). With constantly shifting temporal horizons blocking the scope of causality, history [rg] cannot but evolve chaotically and unpredictably (cf. Prigogine & Stengers 2001: 76–78). That’s also why a ‘form of life’ has now no chance of growing old, why the history happening in a historicized world never makes sense. Stabilizing categorical coordinators, extrapolated from more demographically stabilized historical periods (such as those in which Thucydides and Lucian lived), fail to address a contemporary world, now, of exponentially developing chaos, however much history emphasizes its self-centredness, however coercive its discourse. The available, authoritative conceptualizations, the categorical coordinators instinctive to historicized thought, don’t synchronize with the random accidents that keep occurring in ever contracting time-phases (cf. Virilio 2005: 51). Instead, transforming unprecedented occurrences into the same old thing, they ensure the cognitive redundancy of history, its immediate uselessness. As a result, history remains as a distracting, pacifying anaesthetic. As concocted by self-centred, ‘best placed’, public historians, exercising their academic, social-correctional authority, it offers the political, economic, and cultural élites a most effective alibi for their lack of ethical selfconfrontation.

164 Imprisoned by History

3.2. Self-organized criticality Self-organized criticality proposes that ‘large interactive systems perpetually organize themselves to a critical state in which a minor event starts a chain-reaction that leads to a catastrophe’. The systems embraced by the theory are historical, since they derive from both natural and social history: ‘systems as large and as complicated as the earth’s crust, the stock market, and the ecosystem can break down not only under the force of a mighty blow but also at the drop of a pin’ (Bak & Chen 1991: 46). Common examples include avalanches (where huge snow-fields collapse as a result of a minor disturbance) or sand-piles (where the addition of a few grains at the top causes a major land-slide),—or wars (where the re-wording of a telegram can bring down a régime and establish an empire, or the assassination of an archduke destroy an entire civilization). The point is: the theory is the ‘only model [ . . . ] that has lead to a holistic theory for dynamic systems’. It suggests that ‘the mechanism that leads to minor events is the same one that leads to major events’ (Bak & Chen 1991: 46). Self-organized criticality sheds light on the unconscious, hence unpredictable, historical dynamic building beyond the ‘horizon of the visible’ in the historicized world. Bak and Chen themselves indicate as much when they conclude: ‘One might think of more exotic examples of self-organized criticality. Throughout history, wars and peaceful interactions might have left the world in a critical state in which confl icts and social unrest spread like avalanches’ (Bak & Chen 1991: 53). It offers a way of understanding dynamic, but chaotic systems. It certainly confi rms that to identify the socalled laws of history with the immutable (i.e. non-chaotic) laws of nature is spurious, if not ideological. In empirical tests, the theory demonstrates that many processes, be they natural (e.g. earthquakes, the evolution of life-forms) or artificial (e.g. traffic flow on a highway, the stock-exchange, a state’s economy), operate ‘on the border of chaos’. It also indicates that the more complex the system, the more it is predisposed to criticality: ‘the complexity of life might be intimately related to the existence of a critical state’ (Bak & Chen 1991: 52–53). The implications are far-reaching. In complex systems (such as history), there can be no ‘strict order’: ‘composite systems never reach equilibrium but instead evolve from one meta-stable state to the next’. Moreover, the past can never be a guide to the future in a ‘fully chaotic system’ such as the historicized world where the initial conditions of the system are indeterminable, given that the theory of self-organized criticality makes history’s lessons irrelevant: ‘Fully chaotic systems are characterized by a time scale beyond which it is impossible to make predictions’. The reason is: ‘in chaotic systems, a small initial uncertainty grows exponentially with time. Furthermore, as one attempts to make predictions further and further into the future, the amount of information one needs to gather about the initial conditions increases exponentially with time. For the most part this

History: A Self-Centred Science 165 exponential growth prevents long-term predictions’ (Bak & Chen 1991: 46, 51–52). Examples of self-organized historical criticality indicative of history’s unconscious potential in a historicized world might include: the revolution in information technology, since IT is not just an adjunct to what exists, but inaugurates a completely new world with completely new parameters of time and space, hence of consciousness itself; the development of genetic engineering with its capacity to destroy the spontaneous, biological logic of human life, thus taking homo sapiens into ontologically and theologically uncharted realms; Auschwitz and 9/11, since, in their quite different ways, they indicate that the existential liabilities latent in technological development inevitably express themselves as historically unprecedented catastrophes; the collapse of the Communist states in Eastern Europe which, far from removing global insecurity, has enhanced it with the threat of global terrorism that has exposed dangerous insecurities within nation states; the current (2008ff.), rapidly deepening world recession triggered by what appeared to be a purely “local” US financial problem with the sub-prime mortgage market. The implications of self-organized historical criticality, therefore, invalidate the basic principles of historical explanation: causality; sufficient reason predicated on identitary stability; and the historicist construction of event-trajectories. (a) By itself, the concept of cause suggests that things as they are function correctly (or they would not be as they are), but that an agency with sufficient reason for doing so takes a course of action that produces a proportionate change, be it as a malfunction or a correction. Conversely, common to critically self-organized events is the disproportion between the attributable cause and the endlessly ramifying effect, given that the same mechanism operates irrespective of scale. The theory thus challenges the assumption that momentous events must have momentous causes. As Maxwell points out, any system has ‘a quantity of potential energy, which is capable of being transformed into motion, but which cannot begin to be so transformed till the system has reached a certain configuration, to attain which requires an expenditure of work, which in certain cases may be infinitesimally small, and in general bears no definite proportion to the energy developed in consequence thereof’. As examples he cites ‘the rock loosed by frost and balanced on a singular point of the mountain-side, the little spark that kindles the great forest, the little word which sets the world a fighting’ (Campbell & Garnett 1882: 443). Certainly, therefore, history’s recourse to causes and sufficient reasons is too ponderous, too rigid, to accommodate the mercurial mutability of things. In particular, to assume that sufficiently momentous events must have sufficiently momentous causes leads to the redundancy of historical explanation: there’s no way of gauging how sufficient any sufficiency would be. In any case, the disproportion between the expenditure of work and the energy it develops may differ so much as to undermine causal explanation. After all, causes as identitary devices with their own sense and fi nality by

166 Imprisoned by History defi nition cannot produce unforeseen catastrophes. If they could,—if they could be not only discerned in retrospect, but (e.g. as the lessons of history) applied in prospect, their effects couldn’t help generating severe apprehension. In its most devastating forms, catastrophe comes across as a sequence of phenomena, ‘the delirium of forms and appearances’ (Baudrillard 1983: 223). However, if historical reasons could sufficiently explain genocide or terrorism, historical reason itself would be an irremediable agitator of mayhem incriminating everyone, atrocity itself would be applied as a normal political strategy (—as it, in fact, is). Belief in a world governed by chance, by fatality, or by accidents would, by contrast, be more tolerable, because it would at least be disinterested, independent from human intention (cf. Baudrillard 1983: 229–230). (b) By extension, therefore, self-organized criticality invalidates the principles of both identity and sufficient reason. The totally historicized present can never conceptualize its own immediate present, now, as it conceptualizes everything else,—historically, as the product of historical causation, as an already sufficiently justified historical reality. Through critically self-organized events the historical unconscious (i.e. what the present can never know of itself because it knows itself only historically) ensures that ‘things happen before they happen, since the causes always come afterwards’ (cf. Baudrillard 1983: 231). In other words, accidents happen in advance of the revelation of their cause, since that is discerned only after the event. Thus, disrupting the temporal succession of cause and effect, hence exposing the chronic disequilibrium of the history-system (history [rg]), self-organized criticality reveals the artificiality of a world shaped by historical processes and regulated by the cognitive priorities of ‘best placed’ historians. The criticality it induces, ensures that the historicized world, the illusory product of historical knowledge [crg], itself the stuff of illusory forms, of images, copies, and representations, and projections, remains illusory. (c) Critically self-organized systems, being inherently unstable, make their history irrelevant. Their ‘diverging exponentially’ from their initial conditions both dissipates their causal equivalence with any subsequent phase, and disrupts any trajectory-formation: ‘the temporal horizon of chaotic systems makes the difference between what we can “see” from where we are and the beyond—the evolution we can no longer describe in terms of individual behaviour but only in terms of the erratic behaviour common to all systems characterized by the chaotic attractor’ (Prigogine & Stengers 2001: 77, 94).13 At any moment, beyond a certain event horizon, they become unpredictable. Events seems to arise unconsciously: ‘we discover an intrinsic limit to foresight: what is today hidden in the background noise of our observations will tomorrow turn out to play a crucial rôle’ (Prigogine & Stengers 2001: 102–103). These chaotic systems, therefore, block any sense of prediction or anticipation. So, in highly unstable fields such as science and technology where innovation is held to be crucial, ‘extrapolation can be misleading. [ . . . ] straightforward projections of present trends will miss the most

History: A Self-Centred Science 167 revolutionary innovations: the qualitatively new things that change the world’ (Rees 2004: 12). Rees points out that, as Bacon remarked, ‘chance and occasion’, rather than ‘the arts of reason’ produce new advances in knowledge; that ‘big discoveries (e.g. X ray, nuclear energy, computers) have continued to take us unawares’; and that ‘scientists are often blind to the ramifications of their own discoveries’. Furthermore, if rational, methodical, systematic science cannot predict itself, because, as Arthur C. Clarke observed, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’, there is even less chance of predicting far less calculable social and political, hence historical, transformations (Rees 2004: 13–14). Under these circumstances, any self-centred historian, even the ‘best placed’, who feels impelled to advise on public policy equipped with nothing more than an arbitrary assortment of analogies is severely deluded. Crucially, therefore, self-organized criticality negates historicism: the more energy the system generates, the more diverse its accelerating ramifications, and the less it offers a linear “process” (e.g. a ‘civilizing process’) (Baudrillard 1992: 156). It junks the usual apparatus of historical explanation, its recourse to constants and regularities (i.e. states, nations, regions, peoples; or ideal-types, colligatory patterns, narrative substances, value ideas, expository devices) or to categorical coordinators (i.e. origins, precedents, contexts, trajectories, traditions, heritages, legacies, identities, catalysts, causes, processes, products, etc.) (cf. Davies 2006a: 87–88, 145–146). It suggests instead that human intelligence generates a self-compromising dynamic, an inherent propensity for its fabrications to crash, that (as Valéry remarked) the mind automatically avenges itself for the world human beings have created by instrumentalizing it, that it is essentially recalcitrant to selfprediction, to self-anticipation, to its projected future self-knowledge (cf. Valéry 1960a: 1062, 1068; Popper 1974: v–vi). Hence, as the product of intellectualization, technology—particularly the history technology—can massively augment compulsive, fundamentalist reflexes and the chaos they generate far beyond the mind’s capacity to grasp them, to identify with them, to fi nd a reason sufficient to explain their occurrence, let alone to cope with their after-shock. This self-compromising potential haunts the historicized world. In the discrepancy between immediate experience [aesthesis] and its historicized conceptualization [illusio] it becomes palpable.

3.3. The demise of certainty ‘If all movement is always interconnected, the new arising from the old in a determinate order—if the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth? What [ . . . ] is the source of that will-power snatched from the fates?’ (Lucretius 1968: 67; II, ll.251ff.). The theory of self-organized criticality may well provoke apprehension, but it acknowledges an

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ancient truth: chaos drives the cosmic dynamic. Were there not an inherent deviance in things ‘no collision would take place and no impact of atom on atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything’ (Lucretius 1968: 66; II, ll.223–224ff.). Lucretius asserts randomness as a metaphysical principle. His conception of the plurality of worlds, like the multiple universes proposed by the theory of anthropic bias, is not regulated by self-centred, sufficient reason (akin to the role of God as ‘cause of Himself’ in Leibniz’s metaphysics). Rather, randomness sustains all life forms, including human life, which removes the exceptional status of human cognition: ‘our world has been made by nature through the spontaneous and casual collision and the multifarious, accidental, random and purposeless congregation and coalescence of atoms whose suddenly formed combinations could serve on each occasion as the starting-point of substantial fabrics—earth and sea and sky and the races of living creatures’ (Lucretius 1968: 91; II, ll.1058ff.; cf. Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 377–379.) Lucretius’s world-conception thus concurs with developments in physics and cosmology that reveal the universe to be ‘a highly heterogeneous thermodynamic system, far from a state of equilibrium’ (Prigogine 2001: 187). These developments (which include thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory) stress the instability of cosmic processes, their indeterminacy, their unpredictability, but also their irreversibility. They exclude the human species as a self-centred, biological exception. Hence, they spell the end of certainty,—certainty as confi rmed by, and as confi rming the cognitive privilege of human consciousness (cf. Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 387). In creating a rationalized, anthropocentric realm for itself, in its own self-image, history [crg] resists the self-organized potential for creativity within nature, within the chaotic, thermodynamic system that is the universe (cf. Prigogine 2001: 85). Historicized thinking, so confident in explaining historical change in the same old identitary terms, thus proves constitutionally incapable of confronting its own, “historical” demise. In repeatedly justifying itself, amplifying itself, it keeps reasserting its coercive, incarcerating effects: imposing on the irreducible complexity of reality for the sake of its own managerial norms ‘the monotonous simplicity of a unique temporal structure whether it converts into invariance or traces the paths of progress or decline’ (Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 366); inducing through anomie and repression a symptomatic time-sickness. In a closed system, such as the universe, entropy tends towards its maximum as the system irreversibly evolves, becomes increasingly chaotic, until inevitably it attains its final, exhausted, inert state,—by which time its initial conditions, long since invisible, have been forgotten (Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 189, 192; Prigogine 2001: 27). In socio-historical terms, in the intensity of its affliction, anomie calibrates the entropy that increases with the ravages of historical progress (Volney), with dysfunctional social organization (Durkeim), and with what goes with them: the incessant modernization

History: A Self-Centred Science 169 of life, the ephemeralization of production and the atomization of spheres of fact and value, all symptoms of a culture simultaneously accelerating and ageing faster than any previously (Prigogine 1994: 83). In particular, energy consumed by history-focussed behaviour both increases entropy and reinforces anomie, thereby cultivating a passive nihilism. Warning artists not to neglect the ephemeral present and the unique insights it afforded, Baudelaire dismissed their automatic recourse to academic historicism as ‘the sign of enormous laziness’ [le signe d’une grande paresse], as a symptom of decadence (Baudelaire 1976: 694–695). In empathizing with the past, in going so far as to attempt to resurrect it, Nietzsche argues, human vanity indulges itself. Hence, ‘historical studies pose a not inconsiderable threat’, since, ‘in bringing the dead back to life, they squander too much energy’ (Nietzsche 1988c: 145; §159). Faced with the recurrence of events and conjunctures in the same terms, the same wars breaking out between the same people, Baudrillard sees the contemporary world, the historicized world, ‘in vainly attempting not to persevere with the ongoing destruction, as condemned to a retrospective melancholy, reliving everything in order to correct it or to elucidate it all’ (Baudrillard 1992: 25). That history accumulates, that it bulks ever larger, that it is deemed to “matter”, indicates, therefore, not a dynamically evolving history-system, but rather its dissipative, nihilistic potential. Additionally, identity, stability, order, equilibrium, process are repressive principles of political control. Their sedative effects are indispensable since totalitarian capitalism and its neo-liberal political managers have an interest in the constant historicization of the already historicized world: after all, ‘historical events appear as a process only as long as the class which views these events still expects something from it’ (Mannheim 1979: 129; cf. 1995: 127). These principles are ultimately justifiable by reference to the stabilizing world-view offered by Classical mechanics and epistemology (Newton; Leibniz): their perpetuation in a relativistic, aleatory, entropic universe indicates the coercive force required to maintain the socially affi rmative, cognitive stability historical scholarship relies on. Thus historical studies negate time as a chaotic operator in its own right and use it as an instrument for organizing and coercing human actions (cf. Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 342–343; Elias 1988: 100, 116–117). Historically sanctioned as they are, both the ‘recurrent, eternally identical natural processes’ [die wiederkehrenden, ewig gleichen Naturprozesse] and the monotonous ‘rhythms of labour’ brutally instilled into the subservient, exploited multitudes are directly connected. Similarly, domination as it appears in a generalized way to the individual replicates reality backed up by sufficient reason (cf. Horkheimer & Adorno 1973: 22, 23). So, far from guaranteeing constructive impartiality, the professional credentials legitimizing his or her correctional stance predispose the public historian to side with the dominant structure of power relations. Unfortunately for history [crg], the stability of nature it presupposes doesn’t exist. It proved untenable, because of perturbations and random

170 Imprisoned by History phenomena only the development of relativity and chaos theory could explain (cf. Lighthill 1986: 38, 47; cf. Prigogine 1994: 41–42). Hence, ‘if our world were to be understood according to the model of stable dynamic systems, it would have nothing in common with the world around us’ (Prigogine 2001: 64). The principle of sufficient reason (and all that goes with it) is invalidated ‘because it conflicts with the notion of knowledge the ideal of which it is supposed to defi ne’ (cf. Prigogine & Stengers 2001: 107, 176). Certainly, history’s claim to offer comprehensive knowledge based on identitary thinking, to track the trajectories of historical agents (ideas, peoples, organizations, cultures), to elaborate historical contexts, to locate everything and everyone in their proper place in time projects a stable, regulated reality (Prigogine & Stengers 2001: 356). However, in a universe that responds to thermodynamic and quantum mechanics, the very notions of locations, identities, and trajectories are inoperative. These theories run counter to history culminating in human beings as the highest expression natural life, biologically exceptional and cognitively privileged (cf. Prigogine 2001: 154, 156, 190–192). Lucretius sees the human species as aleatory: the ineluctable arrow of time and the irreversibility of events in the unstable universe also govern individual life (Prigogine 1994: 94). But precisely this cosmological perspective offers a new conception of human existence. It clears away the distinction between “subjective” and “objective”, the dualism of mind and body, and the theory of knowledge that defi nes reality in terms of corrected images and accurate representations. In particular, it dispenses with causality and its presumption of sufficient reason. Instead, it tracks in systems the instabilities, fluctuations, and bifurcations inherent in them as self-organized propensities (Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 228–229, 231, 251–254). This may seem a drastic, existential impoverishment. But, then, in fact, there’s nothing in one’s own immediate experience [aesthesis] that would prima facie indicate the necessity of one’s own existence (even if, once one exists, one’s existence becomes necessary to oneself!). As the anthropic principle suggests, being in the place where most observers are likely to be, one turns out randomly to be the observer one actually is. But random existence is no impediment to self-knowledge or knowledge of others. There is no incompatibility between being known and being random: ‘that we know a lot about x, however, does not entail that x cannot be treated as a random sample’ (Bostrom 2002: 121). So, whether through a cosmic fluke or through matter organizing itself into ever more complex forms, homo sapiens exists in the universe. The human species is, therefore, completely implicated in it and commensurate with it: the human perspective can renounce any presumptive, cognitive privilege (Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 264, 379). As the anthropic principle suggests, cosmological theory anyway factors the human observer into the nature he or she is observing, e.g.: ‘the irreversibility that the act of observation introduces in an apparently arbitrary manner into quantum mechanics

History: A Self-Centred Science 171 is a necessary condition of knowledge’ (Prigogine & Stengers 2001: 124, 133, 144). Moreover, with chaos there is still order, though not of a technicalmanagerial sort. Turbulence produces ever ramifying, provisional orders: the chaotic weather conditions that produce the blizzard create the unique symmetries that structure each particular, but transient flake of snow (Prigogine & Stengers 2001: 51). Similarly, operating in terms of possibilities in both a positive and negative sense, the dynamics of chaos is more productive of ‘unforeseeable novelty’ than any single, dominant order could be (Prigogine 2001: 69, 86; cf. Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 215–216). Finally, consciousness has its own propensity for creative unpredictability. Whereas the Newtonian universe proposed self-sufficient, objective laws appreciable only from a transcendental perspective, the Einsteinian universe presupposes mortal observers watching from specific places, at specific times. Hence, humanity’s dialogue with nature is conducted from within it and only makes sense because human beings are integral to it. Because, according to the anthropic principle, there is no superior ‘best place’ to observe it from [l’impossibilité de découvrir un point de vue de survol], human beings are confronted with the problem of which language to use when addressing nature, fully aware that the scope of reality far exceeds any language that attempts to describe it (Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 299, 313). Thus, cognitive privilege gives way to ontological responsibility. Engrossed in its true likenesses underwritten by the principles of identity and sufficient reason, the self-centred mind could disregard objective nature (unknowable anyway in itself). Once an allowance is made for anthropic bias, however, it does become clear that how the world is described, does change its nature and implicate human existence as well,— as its historical description, to the world’s cost, demonstrates. Hence, the ontological responsibility: to choose one’s language, ‘to choose one’s words carefully’ (cf. Heidegger 1978: 360).

5

History Deception as Cultural Practice

Socrates encounters Hippias whom, he remarks, he hasn’t seen for some time. The celebrated sophist, famous for his ‘extraordinary powers of memory’ and for his discourses on such varied topics as ‘geometry, astronomy, music, and rhythms’ as well as on painting and the art of sculpture, says he’s been preoccupied with state diplomacy. Self-importantly Hippias explains: ‘whenever Elis needs to have any business transacted with any of the states, she always comes to me fi rst of her citizens and chooses me as an envoy, thinking that I am the ablest judge and messenger of the words that are spoken by the several states.’ Socrates plays up to him. He calls him ‘a truly wise and perfect man’, a ‘man to be held in high repute among the many’, since in his private capacity he is ‘able to earn much money from the young and [ . . . ] confer upon them still greater benefits’ than he receives, and in public affairs he benefits his state. However, he then asks him why ‘those men of old’, e.g. Thales or Anaxagoras, refrained from applying their knowledge politically. Hippias retorts that their wisdom was probably too restricted to encompass both public and private matters. He agrees with Socrates’ mischievous suggestion that the art of speaking has so much progressed that now the ancients’ wisdom would be comparatively worthless and they themselves, if they came back to life, a laughing-stock. Continuing his theme of modern-day sophists highly respected for their competence in both public and private matters, Socrates mentions Gorgias, Prodicus, and Protagoras and the fact that they earned ‘a great deal of money’, ‘a marvellous sum of money’, certainly more money from their wisdom ‘than any artisan from his art’. Ironically he suggests that the sophist’s art must truly have progressed, ‘since none of those ancients ever thought fit to exact money as payment for his wisdom or to give exhibitions among people of various places; so simple-minded were they, and so unconscious of the fact that money is of the greatest value’. Oblivious to Socrates’ deception, convinced that he knows ‘nothing of the beauties’ of his art, Hippias boasts about his earnings: ‘if you were to know how much money I have made, you would be amazed.’ He cites an occasion in Sicily when his earnings even outperformed those of the older and better known Protagoras. Recollecting his father’s and other citizens’ amazement, he proudly claims:


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‘I pretty well think I have made more money than any other two sophists together.’ Admitting that the ancients seemed careless with the money they did have, Socrates apparently concedes the argument to Hippias: ‘So this seems to me fi ne testimony you adduce for the wisdom of men of today as compared with the earlier men, and many people agree with me that the wise man must be wise for himself specially; and the test of this is, who makes the most money’ (Plato 2002a: 336–343, 281A–283B; cf. Philostratus 1998: 34–37). Socrates only appears to concede: he’s just changing tack. Since Hippias frequently visits Lacedaemon (Sparta), Socrates presumes the Lacedaemonians must be rewarding him well. Hippias replies, however, that there he ‘made nothing at all’. Socrates then leads Hippias to the conclusion that, in withholding from their youth the “obvious benefits” of Hippias’s teaching because of their laws banning foreign teachers, the ‘Lacedaemonians [ . . . ] act contrary to law’, because they fail to legislate for the ultimate good of the state. With this inference Hippias can’t help concurring: ‘I agree to that;’ he says, ‘for you seem to be making your argument in my favour, and there is no need of my opposing it.’ At that point, through his own self-centredness, Socrates traps him. Socrates reiterates the formal, logical inference: ‘we find that the Lacedaemonians are law breakers, and that too in the most important affairs—they who are regarded as the most law-abiding of men.’ So what kind of knowledge do these “law breakers”, obviously lacking all civic virtue, require from Hippias? ‘What sort of discourses,’ asks Socrates, ‘are those for which they applaud you and which they enjoy hearing?’ Under further questioning Hippias admits the Lacedaemonians reject his teachings on astronomy, geometry, the ‘processes of thought’, or rhetoric. Instead, says Hippias, ‘they are very fond of hearing about the genealogies of heroes and men, [ . . . ] and the foundations of cities in ancient times and, in short, about antiquity in general, so that for their sake I have been obliged to learn all that sort of thing by heart and practise it thoroughly.’ In fact, he tells Socrates, not only has his formidable memory, as evinced in his ability to remember fifty names, come in useful, but also he has gained a reputation there for ‘a beautiful discourse’ about what the ‘noble and beautiful pursuits [ . . . ] of a young man should be’, based on a conversation between Nestor and Neoptolemus after the fall of Troy.1 Moreover, he is to deliver it ‘the day after tomorrow in Pheidostratus’ schoolroom with many other things worth hearing’: he invites Socrates to come and hear it. At this point the trap shuts: ‘I did not understand that you possess the science of memory;’ says Socrates, ‘and so I understand that the Lacedaemonians naturally enjoy you as one who knows many things, and they make use of you as children make use of old women, to tell stories agreeably’ (Plato 2002a: 344–355, 283B–286B). The self-centred Hippias misses the inferences Socrates draws from his relationship with the Lacedaemonians. If they really are ‘law breakers’ in not acting morally and in their state’s best interest, they will disregard knowledge, given that knowledge is a precondition of virtue. So they will

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accept stories drawn from memory, ‘agreeably told’, about ancient times. From the celebrated sophist they won’t require anything else. But Sparta is the epitome of a ruthlessly well-regulated state. Hippias’s knowledge is, therefore, superfluous: he’s left with ‘telling stories agreeably’ from memory about the past. In this respect, Philostratus summarizes the situation quite bluntly: ‘in Sparta he described the different types of states and colonies and their activities, because the Spartans, owing to their desire for empire, took pleasure in this kind of discourse’ (Philostratus 1998: 34–37). The conceited Hippias fails to see what Socrates is ironically implying: the Lacedaemonians have manoeuvred him into functioning as either a harmless entertainer or an obsequious ideologue, or both. The sophist not least deceives himself. Subsequently, Socrates will demonstrate that the bewildered, frustrated Hippias, this purveyor of beautiful discourses, is incapable even of defi ning beauty, the principle on which his reputation rests. This incident, opening The Greater Hippias, exemplifies the thinking and behaviour behind history’s coercive force and carceral intention. 2 It evinces an underlying, defi ning trope of the academic function: the celebrity sophist of Classical times, like the latest, contemporary academic “star”, touring the world’s capitals, moving from one international conference to another, presenting TV documentaries, demonstrating the knowledge he (or she) is already known for and his (or her) audience already knows (cf. Cassin 1995: 195–196; Steiner 2003: 13; Heidegger 1972: 78; Huizinga 2004: 161ff.). There’s the alleged centrality of historical enquiry: with Socrates’ prompting, Hippias flaunts his self-centredness, along with the professional technical expertise it derives from. There’s the public value of commodifi ed knowledge: like some major research-grant holding academic, Hippias basks in his self-importance, confi rmed by the lucrative rewards his erudition and rhetorical skills bring him. There’s the reiteration of the same old thing: with his reputation Hippias plays to his public’s expectations, deploying knowledge it already knows and is ‘fond of hearing’. There’s the affirmative character of academic knowledge: Hippias unquestioningly supports his state and its power, representing its interests abroad and, through educating its youth, sustaining its interests at home. There’s also the ideological character of academic knowledge: that Lacedaemon refuses Hippias’ teachings signifies not rejection, but a variant of the relationship between the sophist and state power. Being run on military discipline, Lacedaemon requires for its ethos nothing but ideological endorsement. Hippias readily obliges with his discourses ‘about antiquity in general’. That this effort goes unpaid is inconsequential: Hippias can’t lose. His reputation is only enhanced by his ideological function; but, more importantly, his historical narratives represent both an addition to his sophistic repertoire and, from his fee-paying audiences elsewhere (e.g., now, in Athens), a new incomestream. There’s also, therefore, the politics of knowledge itself: Hippias’ public function demands heterogeneous (or multi-disciplinary) erudition based on memorization. Inevitably, he regards the ancient philosophers not


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applying their knowledge to public policy as professional failures. But this verdict, based on the public value of knowledge, comes from an academic oblivious to the value of knowledge for its own sake, incapable either of validating theoretical truth, or, as he subsequently demonstrates, defi ning the associated (Platonic) idea of beauty. There is, fi nally, the implied philosophical critique of the sophistical, academic function: as Socrates intimates, Lacedaemon, in its own selfinterest, recognizes the deceptiveness [illusio] of Hippias’s artistic practice, even if it is powerless to confront him with his own self-deception. In barring him from teaching, it assesses his historical discourses as, at best, ideological, affi rming heroic values, or, at worst, harmless, entertainment for those unconcerned with political business: heterogeneous historical knowledge amounts to merely agreeable stories for children and old women. This verdict coincides with Volney’s conclusion that, deriving inter alia from vulgar traditions of story-telling, the reminiscences of the elderly, or the conversations of those who don’t think at all, history offers merely a ‘magic lantern spectacle’, entrancing children and reasonable adults alike.3 Both suggest an underlying cultural-behaviouristic trope which, when triggered by the apprehension of deceptive cultural practices, induces scepticism (Volney 1989a: 543). Conversely, the dialogue suggests that knowledge derived from memorization, by implication produced by enquiry and deployed in narrative [i.e. historia], lends itself to sophistical culture. It suggests that sophistry is cognitively a social constant, the form knowledge takes in its social application, when commodified or instrumentalized (as in the political and economic exploitation of culture). (By contrast, immersed in deceptive culture, the Platonic dialogue as a genre exposes the deceptiveness of cultural practices. Socrates deceives a sophist adept at public deception. Where the sophist mesmerizes his audience with illusion, Socrates practices deception ironically to expose as illusory the illusions his interlocutor takes for truth.) That historicization legitimizes deception [illusio] as a cultural practice emerges from (1.) the sophistical character of historicized culture, particularly with (2.) its pre-emptive occlusion of the future, and in contrast to (3.) the now that it can’t represent or colonize.

1. HISTORICIZED CULTURE AS SOPHISTICAL CULTURE The defi nition of history as ‘a succession of illusions as they change’ [Die Geschichte ist der Gang des Wechsels der Illusionen] Jaspers rejects as ‘nihilistic’, still characterizes historicized life in a historicized world. By contrast, he affi rms history as a succession of struggles against its many illusions, as ‘humanity’s progression towards freedom by means of the discipline of faith’ [der Gang des Menschen zur Freiheit durch die Zucht des Glaubens] (Jaspers 1983: 271, 275 (my italics)). Certainly his philosophy

176 Imprisoned by History presupposes, as a precondition of human existence, faith in the world’s capacity to accommodate the structure of human reality (cf. Jaspers 1948: 19–24). Nevertheless, he resorts to the familiar discourse of coercion (cf. ‘discipline’). For him (as for Droysen) history is inescapable: the sense of “our” own life is determined by “us” eliciting a foundation and a goal for “ourselves” from historical comprehension; past and present inform each other since ‘history as a universal image and actually situated consciousness are mutually supportive’; ‘we are always in the midst of it’; ‘there’s no way of by-passing history, only a way through it’ (Jaspers 1983: 328, 333–334, 335, 339). Although not a pre-emptive occlusion of the future, what Jaspers proposes as the ‘infi nite task’ of realizing the idea of human global solidarity as a principle motivating historical action is still a vision, something illusory,—albeit a necessary, therapeutic illusion after the catastrophic deception that was totalitarianism (Jaspers 1983: 326). His existentialist humanism needs to be as persuasive as possible: hence his visionary appeal [illusio]. ‘The image of history’ produced in a culture of competing illusions (as in the sophistical, historicized world) does indeed ‘have a bearing on how we intend to act’ [Das Geschichtsbild wird ein Faktor unseres Wollens] (Jaspers 1983: 287). Historicism is utterly dependent on history-images, as Droysen’s historical hermeneutics suggests (cf. Chapter 4); Jaspers defi nes the individual’s cognitive situation where these images are reality. This being the case, what follows makes explicit what the argument already implies: (1.1) that the historical image as the product of historical truth and the guarantee of historical accuracy derives from a flawed epistemology. It also, therefore, (1.2) exposes in history’s knowledge position the capacity for illusion that negates its socially correctional functions. Finally, it suggests (1.3) that, in the business of producing true likenesses, history operates as an information-management technology. Dealing exclusively in images, relying on ‘logological’ discourse-effects, resorting to rhetorical deceptions, history forms the cornerstone of sophistical culture.

1.1. The historicized world as the era of the ‘world-image’ Describing life in an ‘age of equalization [Ausgleich]’ with its evened out social values and relations, Scheler alleges that no-one has hitherto asked ‘whether our entire Western process of civilization, this so one-sided and hyperactive process directed outwards, might not in the end be an experiment with unsuitable methods, when seen in respect of the historical process as a whole’. This civilizing process, he says, must be ‘accompanied by the countervailing art of gaining power inwardly over our entire subintellectual, psycho-physical “life” that otherwise automatically runs its course’. It needs to be accompanied by ‘an art of meditation, self-reflection, patience, of contemplating what exists’, if it’s not to lapse into intellectual passivity. Consequently, the human being who is ‘intent only on external


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power over people and things, nature and body, without the [ . . . ] counterweights regulating his power over himself, ultimately ends up at the opposite goal for which he strove’. That’s to say, ‘he fi nds himself succumbing to an ever-increasing enslavement to the mechanism he himself had read and woven into nature as the ideal plan of his own active intervention’ (Scheler 1968: 107). As this passage shows, both historicization as an intellectual strategy and the desolation of life resulting from it induce a peculiar apprehension: that ‘we are governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong’ (Bateson 2000: 493). The conventional, academic model of historical cognition is based ostensibly on one such epistemology. (a) The historicizing strategy that sees the world in terms of images, makes it look as though the world can be grasped only as an image [illusio]. However, our own immediate situation suggests that the world we ordinarily live in [Lebenswelt] confronts us with the ‘whole occurrence of nature’. Reflecting on our own sense awareness, we infer that science, here particularly historical science, abstracts from experience as its object some entity it has already pre-defi ned by its ideal coherence, permanence, but above all, identity. We realize that this immediately given entity in its ‘transition into thought’ is cleansed of its particular, now apparently secondary, affective qualities (cf. Whitehead 2004: 13–14, 158). In becoming a mental-image, it disengages itself from its habitual meaning, what it meant to us. Conversely, being a historical image, a true likeness, it claims comprehensively to represent reality, the life actually lived. But can a conceptualized true likeness, be taken for the immediate reality it was derived from when we know that this immediate reality is characterized by an ineradicable, aesthetic “nowness” that defies historicization? Why does a historical object-image impose itself persuasively as a substitute for actually lived reality, when actual reality, now, is not obliged by past precedents? The outcome is a paradox, if not a sophistical trick: the historical image looks deceptive. Nevertheless, as an image-producing form of knowledge, as a means of understanding the world in its own image, history historicizes the world. Hence the totally historicized world defi nes itself as the era of the ‘world-image’ [die Zeit des Weltbildes], as the era in which historicization operates as the technology for reproducing and disseminating the images it assembles [Zeitalter der technischen Reproduzierbarkeit] (cf. Heidegger 1972: 69ff.; Benjamin 1977b: 136ff.). (b) Underpinning the production of ‘world images’, are self-centred theories of knowledge, those associated with—inter alia—Descartes, Locke, or Kant. They understand the world as an image: they metaphysically validate image-production. Presupposing the dualism of mind and matter, consciousness and external world, they imply that perception and cognition are—literally—aesthetic activities producing images, copies, imprints, illusions, spectacles (Heidegger 1972: 80–83). So, for Descartes, thought, the activity of personal consciousness and cognitive certainty, produces ideas that are ‘like paintings or images’, their validity as likenesses of the external

178 Imprisoned by History world guaranteed ultimately by the rational postulates of geometry they can demonstrate and by the idea of God as absolute perfection, the sufficient reason for the existence of all things (Descartes 1970: 64, 67, 108; III; §17ff.; V; §15ff.). So, for Locke, the mind is a ‘white paper’ that acquires a ‘vast store’ of ideas ‘which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it’ (my italics): consequently, ‘he has not any idea in his mind but what one of these two [i.e. the senses and reflection] have imprinted’ (Locke 1967: I, 77, 79; Bk. II, Chap. I, §§2, 5). So too, for Kant, ideation relies on schemata of pure understanding operating by means of ‘an art concealed within the depths of the human soul’: it produces an ‘image’ [Bild] in which the ‘empirical capacity of the productive imagination’ and a formal ‘scheme of purely sensory concepts, a product as much as a monogram of pure imagination a priori,’ converge (Kant 1971: 200, B 180ff.). These epistemologies produce a subject that regards itself as ontologically eccentric to its surroundings: the world confronts it as a thing-like, estranging presence. They exclude the more plausible idea that mind and consciousness are anthropic attributes produced within the evolution of nature, thereby forming in it an indispensable nexus. They deny that ‘the living organism of experience’ could be ‘the living body as a whole’, which implies that ‘the brain is continuous with the body and the body is continuous with the world’, so that ‘human experience is an act of self-organization including the whole of nature’ (cf. Whitehead 1967b: 225; cf. MerleauPonty 1990: 185ff., 204ff.). They need above all to maintain the Kantian distinction between phenomena that the human mind can know and their substrate, things-in-themselves, it can’t. Consequently, whether supported by the metaphysical principles of sufficient reason (as in Descartes or Leibniz ), dedicated to the maintenance of civil society (Locke), or motivated by nature’s providential plan for its ultimate self-realization (Kant), the subject’s self-centred eccentricity becomes naturalized. What particularly naturalizes it is history. This cognitive model makes the historian central, transcendent to him- or herself and the world, legitimizes his or her comprehensive, correctional stance, and so massively reinforces the epistemology of the world image. It makes history an absolutely normative cultural practice, with its core structure still much as Hume describes it: ‘In reality, what more agreeable entertainment to the mind, than to be transported into the remotest ages of the world, and to observe human society [ . . . ] making the fi rst faint essays towards the arts and the sciences; [ . . . ]. To remark the rise, progress, and declension of the most flourishing empires. [ . . . ] to see all the human race, from the beginning of time, pass [ . . . ] in review before us [ . . . ]. What spectacle can be imagined so magnificent, so various, so interesting? (Hume 1971: 560 (my italics)). These imaging epistemologies construct the knowing subject as the ‘image-projecting subject’ [das vorstellende Subjekt] (Heidegger 1972: 98). They make it the privileged spectator of not only its own mind and its own life, but also of the world and time beyond it. Hence, most importantly,


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they construct truth, the ultimate criterion, in terms of the identitary certainty of the subject’s mental image-making capacity [die Wahrheit [hat sich] zur Gewißheit des Vorstellens [ . . . ] gewandelt] (cf. Heidegger 1972: 80, 99–101). (c) The age of the world-image is also an age of technology: it must be capable of technically amplifying the images it fabricates, since (as Droysen argues) it has no other way of making its reality-images persuasive, of presenting the world with its own self-image (cf. Droysen 1977: 449). Technology delivers identitary certainty. It aims to compensate generally for the self-centred individual’s “privileged” estrangement from the world. As a life-sustaining apparatus [Ge-stell], it offers a self-sufficient, self-reflecting human reality (Heidegger 1967: 23ff.). The academic disciplines constitute technologies [Betriebe] driving, regulating, and maintaining this mega-machine (Heidegger 1972: 77–79, 90). The ‘unparalleled objectivism’ [unvergleichbarer Objektivismus] generated by the metaphysics of self-centred knowledge is made manageable, ascertainable,—open to anticipation, calculation, quantification, evaluation, qualification [cf. Sicherstellen; Berechnen],—through the images produced by academics in their essentially technical and administrative functions (Heidegger 1972: 78, 81, 100). The history technology in particular invests the ever urgent perpetuation of this mega-apparatus with sense and meaning (Heidegger 1972: 80). Not least, it must negotiate accommodations with the self-estranging environment created (e.g.) by the unintended consequences of human behaviour, by the outages the mega-machine is susceptible to, by the recurrent self-indulgence in moral catastrophe the historical unconscious concedes. These imaging epistemologies clearly have momentous implications. They commit culture to the serialized production of image-objects, be it in the media and in the entertainment industries, be it in the mass-production of commodities, as the means of its own self-reproduction. But this principle invites sophistical exploitation: ironically, it installs illusion [illusio] as its reality principle. (d) The age of the world-image is an age of technology, therefore, also because producing the image (the mental act of placing it in front of oneself [vor-stellen]) inevitably means manufacturing it (assembling it for oneself [herstellen]). Both the world as image-object and the identitary terms for understanding it, are produced through human beings whose essential behaviour and cultural practice have come down to merely assembling and projecting [durch den vorstellenden-herstellenden Menschen] (Heidegger 1972a: 82). Technology is, therefore, indispensable: it enhances both the spectating mind’s perceptual reach and its productive potential. The recourse to imaging technologies, e.g. magnifying-glasses, microscopes, telescopes, thermal imaging, monitor screens, x-rays, scans, radar, cameras, etc., both atomizes and amplifies human reality but also produces more objects to be assembled, projected, “image-ined”. In the age of the

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world-image, the world can’t help producing images of itself. It needs to in order to ascertain the truth about itself, to know what it’s like. Conversely, if the projection [Vorstellung] of true likenesses involves producing [herstellen] (i.e. manufacturing, assembling) objects, producing objects will involve assembling images for projection. Hence, as the production system of the historicized world, sustained by the manufacturing and assembling behaviour of self-centred consciousness, totalitarian capitalism will project human reality in its own image. Money, Marx asserted, is the ‘means and capacity to transform representation into reality and reality into a mere representation’ (Marx 1981a: 635). The production of the latest thing, incessantly the latest version of the same old thing, requires its ever-renewed re-presentation, hence constantly simulates temporal succession (cf. Lyotard 1988: 122–123). This constantly self-historicizing world, the world capitalism keeps ruining, reveals its ephemeral deceptiveness. In this ever-renewed re-presentation of things (as in the multifarious forms of publicity, commercial display, and conspicuous consumption) capitalism reveals its own, true self-image: the ‘society of the spectacle’ reinforcing the glorious self-satisfaction of self-centred consciousness. As a social phenomenon corresponding to the ‘concrete fabrication of alienation’, the spectacle indicates ‘social life totally preoccupied with commodities’, with the capitalist production of image-objects. So, in making the spectacle the ‘principle production of contemporary society’, totalitarian capitalism endorses the historicized world as its true likeness (Debord 1996: 22, 32, 39; §§15, 32, 34, 42). (e) The ‘age of the world image’ is the historicized world dominated by history and capitalism not just as totalitarian forms of production, but also as technologies for social self-reproduction. Hence, it’s the era of ‘the dictatorship of illusion in society’. In promoting the production and consumption of images through history-focussed behaviour as productive work in its totally socialized form, capitalism and history are deceptive practices at the heart of the ‘irrealism of real society’ [l’irréalisme de la société réelle] (Debord 1996: 17, 204; §§6, 213). In the historical era of technical reproducibility, the public availability of images might well dispel the art-work’s aura of originality, so as to subvert authenticity as an immediate signifier of bourgeois “traditions” of social and cultural privilege. At the same time, the politicization of art effected through the social dissemination of images was meant to oppose the aestheticization of politics under totalitarianism, as evinced (e.g.) in its glorification of war or in the masses totally mobilized to perform highly coordinated, public displays (cf. Benjamin 1977a: 139– 145, 167–169). However, an illusion produced by the historicizing effect of capitalism, the spectacle neutralizes this opposition through its ‘enforcement of hypnotic behaviour’ (Debord 1996: 23; §18).4 As illustrated currently by history’s ‘huge fan base’, the ‘millions of souls’ who ‘watch history programmes on television or buy books about art or the past’ (cf. Dawnay 2006: 22) and as confi rmed by neo-liberal cultural policy, the production


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and consumption of historical images through history-focussed behaviour, as a form of commercially productive, totally socialized work, testifies to coordinated mass-mobilization,—an aestheticization of politics, as comprehensive as, but far more sophisticated than, any evinced under totalitarian regimes.

1.2. History’s illegitimate certainties History (crg) is nothing without the pictures it generates. It’s important to remember, though: history is not a natural object. Rather, as a fabricated structure of meaning, it represents itself in comprehensive world-images, in narratives, interpretations, analyses, and re-assessments. It operates as a technological device for projecting “the past” as an image that represents a natural object (i.e. history [rg]: the past as “extra-textual” substrate or referent) as a true likeness, hence for creating a scheme of identitary cognitive categories that puts objects, events, and people ‘in their place’, that confines them to the ‘same universe of thought’, to their respective ‘common places’. After all, ‘to create images is to achieve the highest sensory expression of the thoughts and feelings through which chains of causality manifest themselves’ (Rancière 2003: 49). History, therefore, can’t help seeing itself as image. Comprehensive academic history affi rms itself by asserting: ‘As fast as time and history are rejected from the analysis, however, they immediately smuggle themselves back into the picture. Everything within the cosmos occurs within the temporal-spatial process that frames it. Thus, explicitly or implicitly, we seek ways of accommodating ourselves in time and of understanding the trajectory of history’. It produces itself as self-image production, thus: ‘Putting an age into a grander sequence of historical change invests the identification with a greater authority. Each epoch becomes but a stage in a larger picture’ (Corfield 2007: 122, 158 (my italics)). Nothing substantial, but instead both ephemeralized (cf. ‘epoch’ → ‘stage’) and amplified (cf. ‘grander sequence’), the historicizing image imposes itself with authority through the coercion inherent in identitary thinking, in likeness. Academic history, problem-solving by means of situational logic, is thus the same as explicit historicism intent on transforming the ‘the whole sequence of images’ [die Bilderreihe als Ganzes] successive centuries represent, into a historicized totality expressed in a ‘more “closed” (i.e. totally comprehensive) image [einem geschlossenerem Bild]’,—as in Elias’ case (Elias 1976a:144; Elias 1976b: 434). (a) History’s penitentiary seems, therefore, an imposing edifice, but its foundations are flawed. Its authority isn’t what it seems. The epistemology of the image confi rms that ‘the Certainties of Science are a delusion’ (Whitehead 1976b: 154). Immediately, it poses a question it can’t answer: is any given image-object a true likeness or true likeness? Is it true because it’s a likeness, or is it a likeness because it’s true? How “alike” [gleich]

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must likenesses [Gleichnisse] be? The historian will still maintain that his account (likeness) of (e.g.) a battle is true because it’s based on verifiable facts. It’s undoubtedly an “extra-textual event” in the past, not just a creation of the poetics of historical discourse. The point is: it’s still an account (a likeness). Moreover, truth and likeness are interdependent: if the “likeness” aspect is denied, the truth it represents vanishes too (Nietzsche 1988a: 53; §34). The whole procedure of accounting for the occurrence of an object or an event involves applying to it identitary categories that create a picture of it; though it’s unclear why producing not just a picture of it, but—through anthropic bias—a picture in one’s own likeness, should explain anything at all [wie soll Erklärung auch nur möglich sein, wenn wir Alles erst zum Bilde machen, zu unserem Bilde!] (Nietzsche 1988e: 473; §112). The historical account might, therefore, be true because it‘s a likeness; however, it’s the a priori procedure of assembling [herstellen] and producing [vorstellen] likeness, of framing the picture, that structures it as the categorical form of truth. History, therefore, is not just a means to gaining knowledge (like a microscope or a telescope), but also a ‘knowledge position’, a particular stance, within the epistemology of the image that automatically preconceives reality in terms of what it was like. (b) This issue of likeness, of how “like” a likeness is, is crucial: sophistry exploits the unreliable, malleable aspect of the identity principle. A form of knowledge, history especially, may well offer ‘a “given” world, with isolable, identifiable objects such as people, physical environment, and actions’,—a world already known. It may well provide ‘a world-home and an identity’, thereby leaving you with your ‘feet fi rmly on the ground’, and with a ‘conception of [your] own feet and of the ground’. However, laudable though this position may be for its ‘lucidity or [ . . . ] complacency’, ‘in the theory of knowledge [it] has altogether missed the point’ (Gellner 1979: 41). It suppresses the ‘ideological shift’ epistemologies of the mental image enact. Presupposing truth to be the ‘pre-eminent consideration’, they require ‘that we look not to things, not to the world, but instead to the validity of what we know about things or the world’. Hence, ‘the foundation stone of [ . . . ] our world and identity, becomes not some reliable and reverence-inspiring object or being out there’. Instead, ‘it is shifted inwards to our cognitive equipment, to our criteria of sound knowledge, of the recognition of truth’. As a result (as Kant demonstrates), ‘the central features of the world which it is necessary to substantiate for the sake of our peace of mind (such as the regularity of nature) were to be established, no longer by an appeal to the nature of things, but [ . . . ] by an appeal to the inner necessities of our cognitive apparatus’. This ‘transfer of the ultimate locus of legitimacy inwards, [ . . . ] to human cognitive powers, characterises [ . . . ] the whole of the epistemological tradition from Descartes to our own day’. This ideological shift is momentous. Henceforth, ‘the world is seen within knowledge’: knowledge is no longer just ‘one thing or process amongst others within a wider world’. So, as a form of knowledge, history


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would be not just a set of procedures accounting for what goes on in the world. Instead, what happens in the world ‘must owe whatever aura of authority it possesses to that sole independent and truly final source of it, which is located in the criteria of truth and knowledge’. Knowledge does thus become self-centred: ‘the world passes through the lens of our cognition; whatever is necessary and hence foundation-worthy in it, owes its status to the lens, not to itself.’ Ultimately, ‘real intellectual sovereignty lies in the norms of cognition’ (Gellner 1979: 27–29). The world is, therefore, always already historicized: historicizing operates normatively as a reflex of the cognitive apparatus imposing a pre-fabricated cognitive structure on human reality to make it comprehensive. With its impersonal ‘explanatory schemata’, its categorical coordinators, clamping down on the world of routine existence [Lebenswelt], allocating its constituents to multifarious commonplaces in its pan-optical organization, it affi rms its carceral intention (cf. Gellner 1979: 101). There is, therefore, no “natural” cognitive situation: it depends instead on what cognitive norms prevail. Far from being value-neutral, norms of knowledge ‘provide a court of appeal for normative issues in other spheres. What ethical, political, economic and other norms are found to be acceptable, depends in the end on what kinds of knowledge are possible, which cognitive norms are held to be compelling’ (Gellner 1979: 30). In other words, ‘a real historical situation has imposed a certain task on thought. We do not know just which world we inhabit’. Historicized culture is, therefore, inevitably deceptive. ‘Diverse faiths and visions claim to tell us’ in which world we live, but ‘their confidence, motives and logic are suspect’; others reassure us so that ‘we can continue to feel at home in our ideas’ but ‘we have good reasons for distrusting these various prophets too’ (Gellner 1979: 44). A totally historicized culture cannot but evince epistemological relativism. It will entertain various theories of knowledge with varying scope and validity. At best it offers a consensus of cognitive norms salvaged from the wreck of epistemology caused, ironically enough, by the Cartesian quest for self-centred certainty. It comprises: (i) ‘the empiricist insistence that faiths must not fi ll out the world, but must stand ready to be judged by evidence which is not under their control’; (ii) ‘the “mechanistic” insistence on impersonal, structural explanations’, since, if it is not to succumb to powerless idiosyncracy, for ‘there to be effective knowledge or explanation at all, it must have this form’; (iii) the acceptance of relativistic, everyday, personal ‘forms of life’, ‘an acceptance which no longer endows anything with the aura of the absolute, but is ironic, tentative, optional, and above all, discontinuous with serious knowledge and real conviction’; and (iv) concern, based on sociology, ‘with the specific development of the industrial civilisation to which we are ineluctably wedded’, illuminated by ‘our understanding of the preconditions, alternatives, implications and limitations inherent in this kind of civilisation’ (Gellner 1979: 206–208).

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This conclusion implicitly acknowledges history as the dominant idea, the ‘single thought’, governing contemporary culture. Each of these principles presupposes an already historicized world that pre-empts the immediate cognitive and existential predicament. The world as structured by epistemological analysis is not the same as the world of ordinary life [Lebenswelt]. Ordinary life, therefore, needs to fi nd from somewhere its comprehensive sense: where else could it come from but religion or its surrogate, history, which pre-eminently ‘claims to know the secret of the global process’ (cf. Gellner 1979: 206). (c) Ultimately, historicized culture cannot but practice deception. History may well function as a faith-surrogate, but it masquerades as a construct of empirical knowledge based on evidence. It might claim credibility as the repository of comprehensive truth, but it fails to substantiate it, because the only evidence it can quote is historical evidence, evidence already historicized, evidence never not under its control. In a historicized culture, history can’t, therefore, offer solutions such as reassuring continuities, illuminating analogies, or lessons to be learned. Instead the ‘culture is the problem’. It’s deceptive because we can never ever look at it ‘without doing so on its own terms’ (cf. Gellner 1979: 205). There is no external world history’s lessons could apply to, because the world can be seen only ‘within knowledge’,— hence, as already historicized within the historical knowledge-system. The analogies from the past can never be applied. They’ll never move the world into a new phase of history, a historically improved, more historically informed world “beyond” the past, simply because they would produce only a world more historicized than it is already, comprehending knowledge even more amplified than the amplified knowledge already available. Thus the “lessons of the past” automatically keep re-affi rming the past in terms of knowledge already known that originally formulated the past in terms of lessons to learn from. They merely reflect history itself and further reinforce historicization as the dominant cognitive norm. So, heterogeneous though its subject-matter is, history presents itself as the dominant cognitive norm, since its dominance derives from its affirming the going political and economic norms, themselves established by the commanding political and economic agencies (i.e. the state and capitalism) in whose name the reassuring traditions, the illuminating analogies, or the corrective lessons are invoked. (d) History’s constitutional deceptiveness invites sophistical, hence commercial exploitation. History is the dominant ‘single thought’ since historical knowledge is already available in image-form [illusio]. Synonymous with the human sciences and their disciplinary organization within the corporate university as an agency in both the ‘creative economy’ and the service industry, historical knowledge is the major resource of sophistical cultural practice. With their tendency to amplify and atomize through the proliferation of sub-disciplines and sub-, sub-disciplines, the human sciences literally substantiate the object-ness of the world. Surely, therefore, in terms


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of the sheer quantity of systematic knowledge available, historical studies guarantee the existence of a world out there that can be known? However, their phantasmagoria of images just conceals the fact that, epistemologically speaking, they really have missed the point. Knowledge only becomes atomized, because its foundations have failed. This is the predicament of the totally historicized world: ‘Our condition arises from the simultaneous collapse and the unprecedented growth of knowledge. The collapse meant that we ceased to know just which world we lived in.’ Certainly, ‘many faiths, both formally organised ones and informally diffused ones, claim to tell us’—as evinced in particular by history. However, ‘their reasoning is circular, self-interested and suspect’,—as history in particular demonstrates. Hence, ‘more impartial touchstones of truth’ are required (Gellner 1979: 203 (my italics)). Furthermore, in a historicized culture these ‘impartial touchstones’ will be scarce. In this condition of world-loss, nothing prevents the sophistical playing around with the personal and collective ‘lens of cognition’ to make things look different, to let them be seen differently, particularly when encouraged by dominant state and economic interests. The dominating true likenesses these deceptions generate as true likenesses of domination both affi rm the identitary norms these interests impose and signify the cognitive destitution represented by sophistically amplified, disciplinary knowledge. As universalism of meaning, there remains only the heterogeneity of constant historical re-interpretation, of academic ‘true opinion’, suggestible, ‘alterable by persuasion’ (cf. Plato 1966: 120–123; 51D); as universalism of value, there remains only capital to gauge cognitive viability. Therefore, as Plato argued in (e.g.) The Sophist, Gorgias, and The Statesman, a historicized culture will promote those whose common practice is sophistical, whose expertise is guaranteed by its fi nancial return: the salesman, the publicity image-maker, the lawyer, the politician,—along with the technician, the administrator, the resources-manager, the cleric, the historian’s natural associates.

1.3. ‘Gaining command over the world as image is the basic procedure of modernity’ [Der Grundvorgang der Neuzeit ist die Eroberung der Welt als Bild] (Heidegger 1972: 87) The world becomes totally historicized once it cannot be told apart from the historical images that comprehend it. As historians themselves recognize, total historicization is endorsed by mediatized reality predicated on ‘the power of imagery as a vehicle for understanding’ (Hunt 2004: 91). Reality is, therefore, the totality of what can be projected; conversely, the totality of what can be projected (i.e. “image-ined”) makes up reality. The real and the virtual come down to the same thing: the hallucination of hyperreality. Historicized culture, the affi rmation of the world in its true likeness, therefore, proves deceptive. It produces ‘the human scene’ as ‘a scene of mirages, demonic pseudo-realities, because everyone believes everyone else

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believes them’ (Laing 1968: 66). It cannot but lend itself to sophistry. It’s nothing other than a technique [techne] for taking command of the world as image by producing commanding likenesses [eikones; phantasmata] and, ‘through narratives that will appeal to the many millions of intelligent viewers’, influencing public opinion [doxa] (cf. Plato 2002b: 328–333; 234B–235A; Downing 2004: 17). (a) Understanding the world in terms of images, as history [crg] does, maximizes its dominance: their persuasive force exceeds their cognitive value anyway. Images are more easily re-organized than reality: they make it look different; they let it be seen differently. “Primary source material” may well make the likeness true; but the truth of the likeness derives from various kinds of logological practice. The sophist discovers that, though the extra-textual world substantiates discourse, discourse is required in order to reveal the extra-textual world,—that discourse is not just demonstrative or epideictic [Vorstellung], but also performative, bringing things about [herstellen] (Cassin 1995: 73). Thus the world is what it is said to be like. The technics of sophistry exploit this inherent ambivalence of discursive representation. To ensure its likenesses are true, to minimize discursive ambivalence, historical discourse resorts, therefore, to a variety of logological, (sophistical) tricks [apate]. The identity principle, including analogy and equivalence, ensures its basic, logical stability, which it then performs [herstellen] by evincing regularity, causality, and sufficient reason. Further, recognizing that ‘language is a system of commands rather than a means of information’, it imposes mental coercion through figures of speech drawn inter alia from penology, mechanics, manufacturing, technology, biology, astronomy, and chemistry (Deleuze 2003: 60; cf. Chapter 2). Moreover, given that language conventionally works with common places [topoi koinoi] and identical cases, it produces ‘a true body of words’ by means of categorical coordinators (e.g. origins, precedents, contexts, trajectories, traditions, heritages, legacies, identities, catalysts, causes, processes, products, etc.) (Virno 2004: 35ff.; Aristotle 1994: 30–33; 1358 a 21; Benveniste 2004: 37; Rancière 1992: 180). Thus the illusion of truth is complete. As Whitehead remarks, ‘the influence of language [ . . . ] foists on us exact concepts as though they represented the immediate deliverances of experience’. ‘The result is,’ he adds, ‘we imagine that we have immediate experience of a world of perfectly defi ned objects implicated in perfectly defi ned events which [ . . . ] happen at exact instants in time, in a space formed by exact points’ (Whitehead 1967a: 105–106 (my italics)). (b) But what drives history’s vast correctional machine? It comes down essentially to the identitary practice of the social historian-function, based on the rhetorical strategy of prosopopoeia. By defi nition the historian speaks for others: he explains their motives and goals, he advocates on their behalf: in so doing, as in necromancy, he must ‘raise the dead’ (cf. Quintilian 2001: II, 141; 3.8.51–52; IV, 51; 9.2.30–32). This sophistical strategy


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demonstrates the socially affi rmative stance of the historian-function. It enacts its authority to arbitrate on the truth of the likenesses the historicized world disseminates in its own image,—as exemplified by the concept of historical myth. Eradicating myth apparently vindicates the socially correctional function of history’s true likenesses and the specialized cognitive privilege of the historian-function itself. In fact, though, it’s a deceptive play of illusions. Who else, then, could be the contemporary epitome of the sophist but the “myth-busting” public historian? Essentially historical myth is nothing other than an anathema the historian-function creates: something within history that’s not meant to be the same as history. History comprehends everything, assimilates the most different, heterogeneous material, and makes it all historical, all self-identical as history. But, since it automatically complies with whatever’s going, history still needs something different, but not too different, for its own self-justification. It would otherwise be indistinguishable from whatever happens (—and it is actually indistinguishable from whatever happens!). By defi nition history [crg] must exclude what is absolutely, inherently different from itself (i.e. the a-historical), e.g. the nowness of the now. So what remains can only be a difference within history’s “sameness”, a difference that’s not so different,—but all the more treacherous for simulating something already illusory, hence, all the more wanting correction for resembling history. The historian-function creates this “self-same difference” from its own self-centredness. Historical myth may well be anything—from popular prejudices or public ignorance to ingrained academic misconception, entrenched scholastic dogma, deliberate falsification, or simply untested assumptions—but always self-perpetuating bodies of words. Essentially, though, it’s just “bad” history, history to which credence can’t be assigned. Still, it’s anathematized because, as history’s simulacrum, it could be mistaken for it, simply because history already commands public and professional credence. However, in historicized society historical myth will flourish. In a society in which history-focussed behaviour is pervasive, historical information will keep surging epidemically through the collective, public mind. As it flows, some of it may well be transformed, but some earlier deposits may be untouched and remain endemically regressive, “mythical”. So historians as resources-managers may well need to regulate the circulation of a society’s historical capital, to monitor how the public uses history. They may well claim this responsibility signifies cognitive privilege. But that claim is just a sophistical conceit: history is just one of several scholastic categories (including also, e.g., memory, ethnicity, gender, identity) that, having public recognition, make academic commentary “socially relevant”, hence project academic cognitive privilege as such (cf. Davies 2008: 477). So, though historians may repudiate historical myth, they need it for their self-centred rectitude. In any case, it won’t disappear: historicized society induces historical credulity. 5

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(c) In constantly reasserting their cognitive privilege, historians automatically raise the question of how “good” their good history is that supposedly exorcises the mythic, bad history. Public history, it seems, operates not primarily by identitary logic (in the strict sense), but by analogy (cf. Tosh 2008: 61–77). The identity principle is exceedingly powerful, fundamentally linking thinking and being. For the accidents of history it produces stabilizing categorical coordinators that, essential to its discourse of coercion, literally bind them together. No wonder ‘reasoning by sequence or process [ . . . ] carries the full weight of academic respectability’ (Tosh 2006). By contrast, analogy seems dubious. For a start, ‘it leapfrogs through time in order to confi rm or challenge the conventions of the present’ and is, therefore, ‘condemned by the more cautious and conservative members of the profession’; next, ‘it negates the gulf which separates our age from all previous ages’; further, it ‘contradicts the central principle of historicism, namely the unique character of every succeeding age’; fi nally, the choice of analogical terms could be ‘determined by the prejudices of the writer’ (ibid.). Yet its use is affi rmed, partly because ‘the comparison of things that are not exactly comparable [ . . . ] enables us to draw creatively on the diversity of the past’; partly too because ‘the contributors to History & Policy deal not with single events but usually with an entire tradition—a mode of thought or practice with a proven track record over time’, which ‘makes the selection much less arbitrary and less susceptible to politicallycharged selectivity’. But its use is particularly affi rmed because it’s what’s already going,—and historians inevitably go with it, because academics always go with whatever’s going: ‘one good reason for historians to engage with analogical reasoning is that it is so prevalent in the media and among politicians’ (ibid.). Analogy thus integrates the historian-function into the waking-dream of sophistical, mediatized reality. But both these failings and these affi rmations are also sophistical deceptions. How, if ages do succeed each other, can a gulf intervene without breaking the succession? How can an argument based on ‘tradition’ as a ‘practice [ . . . ] over time’ not be redundant (i.e. tautological)? How can one determine that issues are not ‘exactly comparable’ without comparing them, which means they’ve been compared, which makes them comparable? Far from describing “good history”, such arguments don’t even make good sense. Rather, analogy seems less reliable than identitary logic because it works differently. The identity principle makes things the same [dasselbe]: it classifies them conceptually as ‘belonging together’ [Zusammengehören]. By contrast, analogy leaves differences between terms intact, but establishes their equivalence [Gleichheit] through a form of identitary ‘calculation’ [analogismos] (e.g. ‘the British in Iraq after 1918’ = ‘the coalition forces [in Iraq] from 2003 onwards’ [ibid.]).6 It thus a priori equates the past with the present, the present with the past. Thus ensuring the present is always past and the past always present, it’s the dominant historicizing thought-style of the already historicized world. Further, as the


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logical formula of exchange-value, analogy is merely commodified thinking. After all, it’s replicated daily in commercial transactions. It has currency because it replicates currency exchange. As employed by “public historians”, it expresses historicized thinking at its socially most compliant. It confi rms once more that ‘bourgeois society is dominated by equivalence’ (Horkheimer & Adorno 1973: 11; cf. Virno 2004: 64). Far from enjoying a self-centred cognitive privilege, history here too is just another social agent acting in its own self-interest.

2. PRE-EMPTIVE OCCLUSIONS An endless source of images, historicization is the chief exponent of illusionism in sophistical culture. Its image-based epistemology turns consciousness into a screen onto which it projects the images it assembles from historical data. Itself acting as a screening technology, history [crg] polices what can be projected: essentially the normalized, sufficiently rationalized reality filtering through its categorical coordinators. This self-centred preoccupation comes out most clearly when, besides producing true likenesses of its objects, it screens images of historical time itself. Thus, as the time of the world [Weltzeit], history produces for itself time-images [Zeitbilder] to reinforce its domination of reality through world-images [Weltbilder]. In a historicized world, therefore, history [crg] compulsively (2.1) historicizes the present as a means of (2.2) amplifying its own presence. Inevitably it (2.3) stakes a pre-emptive, occlusive claim on the future.

2.1. Historicizing the present Here it’s worth recalling what the argument has elsewhere demonstrated: the historian’s intimation of a ‘higher self’, along with the cognitive privilege it affords, derives from a temporally transcendent vantage-point that discloses the spectacle of the historical world unfolding before it. This applies whether the historian takes a “long view” of the past or focuses on a localized problem. Conventionally, the transcendent stand-point is produced by the historical-temporal distance between the historian and his or her object in the past. In terms of the anthropic principle, this transcendence apparently places the historian in a reference-group different from the reference group being studied. However, whenever the historian as a historian pronounces on the present, thereby historicizing it, this alleged cognitive privilege is unmasked as a sophistical trick. The historical transcendence conventionally afforded by temporal distance collapses, so the historian needs to produce its true likeness for himself. This means narcissistically endowing the present object with the self-same time-depth he or she wishes to derive as historical value from it. It means reaching a verdict on the present that simulates the

190 Imprisoned by History cognitive privilege of transcendent retrospection only because it derives from an implied viewpoint projected into a hypothetical future,—as in the following examples: ‘In the early 2000s, America’s role in the Cold War remained contentious [ . . . ];’ ‘The perception of the USA in the early 2000s as an imperial state also controversially affected accounts of earlier American history’; ‘education in citizenship, a theme pushed hard in the 2000s, [ . . . ] is in part a response to the belief that the public sense of history and identity is obscure’ (Black 2005: 177, 182 (my italics)). Thus to determine historical time is the ultimate, commanding speech-act. The entitlement to locate ephemeral phenomena in amplifying continuities such as centuries or, grander still, millennia, is an expression of coercive political authority, and of those who identify with it—historians. Here, though, in a book elaborated between 1994 and 2004, published in 2005, the centennial perspective betrays the historian’s time-transcendent viewpoint as nothing but deception. (a) As a management technology working through images, history [crg] needs to extend its jurisdiction to the present, hence inevitably project itself onto a hypothetical future. The true likenesses it uses to keep the past organized already keep re-positioning the present: nothing prevents it from re-positioning the past in terms of the images that organize the present. However, historicization operates arbitrarily. Defi ning the present as the past of a hypothetical future directly subverts public history (such as the History and Policy initiative) that would defi ne a present issue in terms of its past “equivalent”. Encoding the present as already past a priori erases the present, thereby making present comparisons with the past redundant: nothing exists any longer but the past. At the same time, the projection of a privileged vantage-point in the not-too-distant future, pre-requisite for historicizing the present, pre-empts any corrective intention in public history’s analogies. Here too history [crg] confi rms that its persuasiveness is unrelated to its cognitive value, to the sense it makes, given its arbitrariness in making sense,—as in the following examples: ‘By the end of the twentieth century the centrality of the Holocaust in Western European identity seemed secure’; ‘By the opening years of the twenty-fi rst century, plaques, memorials and museums to the victims of Nazism had surfaced all across western Europe [ . . . ]’ (Judt 2007: 820; 826 (my italics)). Here, encoded as already past, the self-same present features simultaneously as both an end and a beginning of a historical period, as the equivalent of such an end or beginning, as an interchangeable link in an impersonal, homogeneous, temporal sequence. Additionally, defi ning the past that is anterior to the present being represented as past, the pluperfect tense removes it from immediate awareness. Also fi rst published in 2005, Postwar thus evinces the deception historicized thinking perpetrates. What can the present matter now, when it belongs to an entropic age ‘fi nally coming to a close’ (Judt 2007: 10)?


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(b) The historian’s entitlement to historicize the present may well signify the social authority of technical expertise and its affirmative, cognitive norms. In reality it’s a strategy of deception. This sophistry is deftly exposed by Whitehead. He observes that certainly ‘the future is there in the present, as a general fact belonging to the nature of things’ and ‘it lies in the nature of the particular present to impose on the particular future which must succeed it’. But he stresses too that ‘there are no actual occasions in the future, already constituted’ and that, consequently, ‘there are no actual occasions in the future to exercise sufficient causation in the present’ (Whitehead 1967b: 194–195). So this historicizing strategy merely enforces the historian’s alleged cognitive privilege. The historicizing rhetoric abstracts the historian from his own contingent circumstances to ensconce him in the invulnerable centre of the history management system, as the “imaging” epistemology behind it requires. Both the compulsion to historicize the present and the historicizing discourse it relies on function as denial,—denial on the historian’s part that, in terms of the anthropic principle, he could ever occupy a nonspecial place in an extremely nonspecial reference class (e.g. “present contemporaries” or “the present broader public”). In fact, history-focussed behaviour is a predominant characteristic of “the present broader public”. It is, as it were, its nonspecial, default setting in the totally historicized world, be it derived from liberal cultural philosophy (e.g. Droysen) or from neo-liberal social policy (cf. Chapter 1). It erases the clerical distinction between lay public and professional academic. Simply by doing history, particularly when historicizing the present, historians occupy public commonplaces. So history’s comprehensive, retrospection is an illusion, its origination in a cognitively privileged ‘higher self’ a conceit. These banalities (cited above), reconfiguring knowledge already known, could come from any contemporary observer of current affairs, the reference group to which the historian in any case belongs. (c) In historicizing the present, the historian can pretend to have abstracted himself from his own, contingent circumstances, simply because his personal apprehensions [aesthesis] cannot provide sufficient reason, let alone sufficient information, sufficiently amplified information, for constructing a comprehensive history, for producing the illusion of historical comprehension [illusio]. So ‘to write a fully comprehensive or definitive history of contemporary Europe’ is beyond anyone’s aspiration. The historian’s sense of personal inadequacy comes from being ‘a contemporary to most of the events’ he relates, from having witnessed ‘much of this history as it unfolded’. These contingencies, therefore, make ‘the dispassionate disengagement of the historian quite difficult to fi nd’ (Judt 2007: xiii (my italics)). But here, too, the historicizing rhetoric is deceptive: as with all sophistical argument, deceptiveness is the pre-condition of persuasiveness. Here, too, history’s coercive force comes unrelated to its cognitive value: not least, history coerces the historian himself. His experience is already historicized (cf. ‘history unfolded’); however, his historicized experience [aesthesis] can’t match the knowledge originating in the cognitive privilege of the historian’s

192 Imprisoned by History (‘dispassionate’) ‘higher self’, underpinned by its self-centred, transcendent perspective. Historicization, particularly the historicization of the present, ipso facto discounts particularly the historian’s existentially specific situatedness. Otherwise why not recode the above examples as anyone else might have ordinarily experienced them, e.g.: “The fairly recent perception of the USA as an imperial state also [ . . . ] affected accounts [ . . . ];” “In the last few years memorials to the victims of Nazism [ . . . ] have spread across Europe”? The resulting tension between history’s coercive occlusion of the ordinary world and (what phenomenology calls) one’s natural attitude produces catachresis, meaninglessness posing as portentousness,—as when Judt remarks: ‘Without, I hope, abandoning objectivity and fairness, Postwar offers an avowedly personal interpretation of the recent European past.’ Here only the sophistical strategies of historicizing discourse can project mutually exclusive ideas (cf. ‘personal’ and ‘objectivity’) as equivalents. Vindicated by socially recognized, cognitive privilege, they alone amplify the nonspecial observations of a nonspecial contemporary (cf. ‘I hope’) into something ‘durable’ (Judt 2007: xiii (my italics)).

2.2. History’s amplified presence Historicizing the present actually creates more past in the present, for the present. Thus more history derives from much less past, the recent European past,—in fact, by comparison with the total past, virtually no past at all! Historical time might well be stable and reversible, equating a priori past with present, present with past, ensuring the present is always past and the past always present. Historicizing the present, however, negates stable equivalences by contraction. It makes present and past synchronous: no longer discrete but analogical phases of a homogeneous temporal continuum. It claims to discover for the present a past it never knew it had, precisely because it was being lived as an ‘immediate prehension’ of sense awareness [aesthesis] (cf. Whitehead 1967b: 176, 180). Only by negating this immediacy can historicizing discourse generate more past. So, to project its true likeness, to amplify it ad libitum, it must extricate the historical object from these subjective qualities [aesthesis] and contingent circumstances. As in the above examples, this thought-coercion operates both within and through the historian-function. The historicizing reflex conflates past and present. Simultaneously it asserts the historian’s indomitable social authority its self-centred “image-ing” strategies enforce. That the resulting amplified past consists merely of nonspecial observations from an ultimately nonspecial historical observer makes it redundant. However, such ‘redundancies of the obvious’, produced by the discourse historicizing the present, still, crucially, ‘shore up’ existing institutions and powers (Cohen 1999: 53). With its significance still minimal, history’s coercive force remains maximal: here, particularly, how things have got to be affi rms the way they are.


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(a) History needs to amplify its presence. It’s in the business of producing and assembling true likenesses. But in a sophistical culture, driven not least by the technological necessity to keep historicizing itself, to keep itself historicized, it must still compete with other image-producers. Its observations, particularly its nonspecial observations on the historicized present, inevitably merge with other images the society of the spectacle projects. In other words, history finds itself confronting a de-realized cultural environment that consists of nothing but likenesses [eikones; phantasmata], nothing but ever-fluctuating opinion [doxa]. Thus the historicized world confronts itself in a world of likenesses (e.g. fabricated in the media, commodity production, fashion), symptomatic of deceptive, sophistical culture. Here, a world of seductive ephemerality unfolds as though in a ‘waking dream’ [rêve éveillé] (Lipovetsky 2004: 58). Moreover, as the dominant image-producer, history unconsciously, therefore, compulsively, precipitates this social parapraxis. With its constantly self-modernizing, technological self-reproduction, the historicized world projects the hypermodernity that ‘has multiplied divergent temporalities’ [l’hypermodernité a multiplié les temporalités divergentes]: the concomitant commodity consumption, individualization of life-styles, de-regulation of services, all have a de-synchronizing effect (Lipovetsky 2004: 55–56, 76). The resulting hyper-reality offers exponential change but devoid of both a historical vision and a future to project it onto,—historically pre-empted as it has already been (Lipovetsky 2004: 55, 64–65). Directionless, the present absorbs itself in its own time, in how things got to be the way they are. It thus produces a historical vision surrogate. It amplifies the presence of history by constantly exhuming the past: it keeps recycling it as a category of consumption and marketing or as heritage and tradition; it incessantly re-validates it through commemorative exhibitions; and, not least, it is re-affi rmed by individuals’ hyper-individualized life-patterns that seek reassurance no longer in abstract universals, but in commonplace identities (Lipovetsky 2004: 33, 58, 73, 82ff., 94). (b) Under these circumstances, historians have little option but to amplify history. The sophistical culture they help sustain culminates in ‘total illusion’. The history [crg] that historicizes the present is embroiled in other forms of immediate historicization. The 24/7 TV news channels, let alone internet sites, inflate events as they happen through constant narration and re-narration, analysis, and speculation. The resulting, virtual information about an incessant flux of events in real time mutates them into signs and effects of themselves, true likenesses, even as they happen.7 However, the very wealth of information does not prevent them from succumbing to amnesia as media-attention switches to the latest, latest thing: instantaneous information, always on tap, de-realizes not just “real time”, but historical time too. At the same time, from the longer term, historical standpoint, events ‘go on strike’ [cette grève des événements]: their accelerating succession forfeits any sufficiently rationalized articulation of what

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they might mean. Rather they keep rehearsing situations that both prompt the apprehension [aesthesis] endemic in historicized life, and, through the smoke of expert commentary and analysis [illusio], administer momentary, anaesthetizing reassurance (cf. Baudrillard 1992: 39–40, 94, 130, 169). (c) Moreover, in this climate historians, let alone public historians, operate: their interventions affirm mediatized reality, as the History and Policy or Public History web-sites in particular confirm. Purveyors of illusions, they inevitably go along with media-culture. But then, as academics, they go along with whatever’s going, as when David Cannadine observes that ‘when it comes to “doing” history, university academics and media people [ . . . ] are engaged in [ . . . ] complementary enterprises if not always [ . . . ] identical tasks’. Reliant on history’s cognitive priority, this viewpoint is as deluded as any self-centred perspective can be. The assertion that ‘the media has [sic] become so all-pervasive a part of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life that the history of the last hundred and more years [ . . . ] is [ . . . ] incomprehensible [ . . . ] without it’, misreads the situation fundamentally (Cannadine 2004: 3, 5). Substantive, fact-heavy though history may be, there’s nothing substantial in cyber-space: history, the most amplified, heterogeneous, information-rich discipline, itself an information management-system, dissolves into this infinitely amplifiable, heterogeneous information-technology medium. In these constantly self-historicizing circumstances, history is an alibi for foisting onto the present nothing other than what confuses it already, ‘the illusions of this epoch’ (cf. Marx 1981b: 48).

2.3. History’s pre-emptive claim on the future Historicizing the present might well disclose more future for the present. It certainly makes a pre-emptive, occlusive claim on it. Temporally encoding the present in terms of centuries and millennia, the historicizing rhetoric establishes a conjectural vantage-point later in time. It thus creates the illusion of a distanciated, future perspective on the present [illusio]. Here too the reversibility of historical time exerts a stabilizing influence: producing more past produces more future,—in fact, the maximum possible future (i.e. eternity), since Judt concludes: ‘The new Europe bound together by signs and symbols of its terrible past [ . . . ] remains forever mortgaged to that past.’ Nothing remains but to shuffle away, bound and shackled, bereft of reprieve, into the solitary confi nement of history’s penitentiary: ‘If Europeans are to maintain this vital link—if Europe’s past is to furnish Europe’s present with admonitory meaning and moral purpose—then it will have to be taught afresh with each passing generation’ (Judt 2007: 831 (my italics)). History is everything and always the same for generations to come: the history [rg] that produced Auschwitz produces the history [crg] that will produce Europe’s redemption. The historical rhetoric of coercive correction (cf. ‘admonitory meaning’) enforces knowledge of the past as a binding obligation (cf. ‘will have to be’) closing in on an unsuspecting future.


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(a) In terms of the anthropic principle, encoding the present as past does enable the nonspecial reference class of “the present broader public” to make their self-centred interests special,—by claiming a future for themselves and their descendants. Since history [crg] organizes time up to the present, that organization surely wouldn’t collapse overnight? As time passes, however much it might need revising, historicizing discourse supported by identitary structures and categorical coordinators would pre-emptively keep it all the same. So, as the anthropic bias [illusio] here implies, the pre-empted future will have at its disposal the time it needs: through its identitary procedures history [crg] will still determine the future choices that will determine the human future. Here too, with the historicized future posturing as redemption, the historian once more masquerades as something between a high-priest and a moral-gate-keeper. Like high-priests, he’s into obscurantism. Certainly, this determinism attracts the same censure as religious dogma. Since the sense of a future open for the self-improvement of the human species is pre-requisite for its survival, pre-emptive historical or religious injunctions against freedom of action and autonomous reflection are truly ‘a crime against human nature’ (Kant 1977b: 57–58). These occlusive projections are all the more criminal for being arbitrary. Because it is dominant, the historicizing mentality, invoking millennia, if not ‘forever’, is naturally biased towards vastly overestimating the available extent of future time,— seeing it as future historical time, rather than as future planetary time. This bias would be exposed (e.g.) by environmentalists who might infer from the latest effects of global warming that the threat to the human habitat, hence to the survival of the species, hence to the alleged competence of history as the system for managing human self-development, could be more urgent than hitherto estimated.8 The pre-emptive historicization of the future is actually disorientating, since its arbitrariness disqualifies history as an existential guide [magistra vitae]. So, in contrast to Judt, Hobsbawm concludes his survey of twentieth-century history by acknowledging the breakdown of temporal equivalences in the present historical reality (history [rg]): ‘We do not know where we are going. We only know that history has brought us to this point and [ . . . ] why. However, one thing is plain. If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present.’ At the same time, projecting a perspective from a distanciated future, he restores the missing equivalence by encoding it as a behavioural corrective on the cognitive level (history [crg]): ‘If we try to build the future on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness’ (Hobsbawm 1995: 585). Here, too, from its self-centred ‘best place’, the historian-function arbitrarily disposes of the life of the multitudes yet unborn. (b) These examples show that the historicized world juggles with a plethora of historical time-images that mutually expose their illusory make-up.

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The pre-emptive occlusion of the future is nothing if not arbitrary: the very idea of history as a ‘process of change and development through time’ means anything the historian chooses. With only a little practice at historicist prestidigitation (i.e. relying on these processes as ‘trajectories which not only help explain the present but may also disclose what lies ahead’), “past” and “present” can be swapped around on a whim (Tosh 2008: 33, 57). At the same time, it can still be justifiably maintained that ‘“the past is never dead, it’s not even past”’, because ‘the world we live in at any moment is the world of the past’. Released by the misdeeds of former generations, all their chickens have now ‘come home to roost’. So ‘to live in the world as it really is’ means dealing with the ‘relics of what has been done by men for better or worse’, being haunted by the past, confronting now the past’s reality,— which is also why the world historicizes itself (Arendt 2003: 270–271). At the same time as well, it’s undeniable that everyday life evinces not (as ‘trajectory’ implies) a weak form of theodicy, but a ‘techno-odicy [ . . . ] carrying us off in spite of ourselves on a fatal “techno-odyssey” into the space of time to come without any future [l’espace d’un futur sans avenir], deprived of both sense and reason’. The acceleration of experience and reality generates a ‘dromospheric pressure’ [pression dromosphérique] that shatters one’s innate ‘optical positivism’, the stable continuities and comprehensive structures that underlie personal identity and objective knowledge. It splits the historical passage of events into now a cinematic hallucination, an ‘intensive time of instantaneity without history’, now a ‘chronoscopy of the relativistic eternal present’, a technological version of the divine perspective in which everything does become the same old thing (‘totum simil’), a ‘unique, megaloscopic perception’ that synchronously rearranges successive temporal moments into a static ‘landscape of events’ (Virilio 2007: 44, 91, 132, 142–143; Virilio 1996: 94–95, 123). Immobility is symptomatic of a historicized world where the analogies and equivalences produced by identitary thinking ensure that the latest thing is ever the same old thing. In a historicized world, history is ever present, precisely because it encompasses all the divergent time-schemes that result from the compression of time and space characteristic of hypermodern reality (Harvey 1989: 284ff.; cf. Lipovetsky 2004: 55, 64–65, 76). Accordingly, the “processes” and trajectories” that trace historical “evolutions” and pre-empt the future inevitably appear to the historian as frozen in ‘a single field of vision’ (Tosh 2008: 43–44). In a historicized world these conflicting temporal schemes collapse into each other: the ‘preferred’ (comprehensive) ‘historical perspective’ discloses not a ‘process of becoming’, nor ‘a richer sense of possibilities’, but at the same time the narrowing, confi ning prospect of an ‘extended present’ [erstreckten Gegenwart] (Tosh 2008: 127; Novotny 1995: 54). (c) Particularly the historian’s fantastical claim to speak for generations to come [prosopopoeia], must suppress, make redundant, generational factors that would undermine it. Historians don’t want history, even future


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history, to elude their grasp. But let’s take the concept of an extended present seriously. Based on a temporal span of only a few centuries, if not a few decades, quick-fi x “processes” and “trajectories” probably won’t register crucial issues affecting future generations discernible only over ‘the long now’, the periodicity of cultural or natural environments as they mutate over millennia (Brand 2000: 34–38). Anthropic bias with its self-selection effects warns against permitting existing historical concerns alone to identify current or future knowledge deficits.9 The multi-generational future evoked by Judt and Hobsbawm clashes immediately with the prospective world of our grandchildren that will, for a start, have to cope with nearly double the present population (cf. Brand 2000: 08). The ideal lessons from our grandparents’ traumas will hardly concern our immediate descendents,—particularly if the effects, unconscious to us, of our present obsessions, bequeathing them a different set of problems, sinks their survival chances. If ‘ten thousand years is the size of civilization thus far’, if that represents ‘only four hundred generations—counting a new generation every twenty-five years’, then the relevance of (e.g. post-war) history for even ten generations to come would apply merely to the equivalent of 2.5 percent of all the generations that have so far existed (cf. Brand 2000: 30). Inevitably, ‘fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power’: the historian-function, convinced of being ‘best placed’, so ignoring self-selection effects, largely discounts ‘culture’s vast slow-motion dance [that] keeps century and millennium time’ (Brand 2000: 34, 38). Nevertheless, ‘the slow stuff is the serious stuff, but [ . . . ] is invisible to us quick learners’; further, ‘our senses and our thinking habits are tuned to what is sudden, and oblivious to anything gradual’: consequently, ‘what happens fast is illusion, what happens slow is reality’. On this reckoning, historical representations just heighten the illusoriness fostered by sophistical culture. Hence, the imperative need to expose the unconscious methodological bias inherent in the historian’s ‘best place’: ‘the job of the long now is to penetrate illusion’ (Brand 2000: 146).

3. WHICH NOW? Historical time makes the deceptive practices of sophistical culture seem natural, effectively unnoticeable. Its unique property is to have no properties: it can be however historicized thinking would have it. Historians might well claim to know ‘that [ . . . ] the periods into which they divide up history, are expository devices, not intrinsic features of the past’ (Thomas 2006: 4). Still, historical conceptualizations (‘Postwar’ or ‘Age of Extremes’ (e.g.)) attribute essential values to them. History would be pointless if it couldn’t enforce such values, commonplace though they are. But a sophistical culture deceives because its historicizing reflexes, evinced in professional expertise or ‘responsible citizenship’, generate a

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bewildering, but ever-expanding phantasmagoria of amplified, atomized ‘reality-values’. Can anyone really defi ne the age they live in? Can they reach a defi nition without acknowledging dominant reality-values? And even if, after a century of mega-death, they were persuaded that historical sense had disintegrated, could this historical era be understood as the era in which history made no sense? There’s no thinking beyond this paradox in historicized thinking that makes history binding. Similarly, as likenesses of historical continuity, both the ‘extended present’ and the ‘long now’ are ancillary to history’s management-technology,—and just as much a deceptive effect of anthropic bias as regarding history as a ‘process of change and development through time’. Real change for the human species would require biosphere change. Ultimately, human beings are dependent on the biological conditions that make their existence possible: the fate of human thinking depends on the fate of the planet (cf. Lyotard 1988: 19). To believe, therefore, that, at this ontological level, nothing much has changed, that the historicized world is merely a technical refi nement of the Neolithic revolution some 10,000 years ago, is more plausible (cf. LéviStrauss 1987: 55–56). That, at least, might explain history’s sameness, the entropic time-sickness, the carceral anomie it induces. To conclude, therefore, it is worth (3.1) emphasizing the deceptiveness of historical time; then, by contrast, (3.2) stressing the existential decisiveness of what happens now; and, finally, (3.3) reflecting on the ontological desolation of the historically self-incriminating, human species.

3.1. The deceptiveness of historical time Glubbdubdrib is truly a province of history, where temporarily, really, “the past does come to life”, populated as it is by ephemeral ghosts. As appropriate for a historical domain promoting a sophistical, story-telling culture, Glubbdubdrib ‘signifies the Island of Sorcerers or Magicians’. As the head of a magician tribe, the Governor, therefore, proves to be a historian in the most literal, mimetic sense. What likenesses could be truer, when the past can return as it really was? Gulliver is informed that ‘by his skill in necromancy, he [i.e. the Governor] hath power of calling whom he pleaseth from the dead, and commanding their service for twenty-four hours’ (Swift 1984: 238–239). Once accustomed to the eeriness of this haunted world,—once he no longer has ‘any apprehensions left’—, Gulliver accedes to the Governor’s sophistical order ‘to call up whatever persons I should choose to name [ . . . ] among all the dead from the beginning of the world to the present time, and command them to answer any questions I should think fit to ask’. This really is empirical, source-based history. Gulliver must respect historical context, since his ‘questions must be confined within the compass of the times they lived in’. Moreover, he can expect to witness the past’s literal truth ‘for lying was a talent of no use in the lower world’. Inclined at first ‘to be entertained


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with scenes of pomp and magnificence’, he conjures up ancient Greece and Rome, thereby gratifying (as he says) ‘that insatiable desire I had to see the world in every period of antiquity placed before me’.10 ‘I chiefly fed my eyes,’ he reports, ‘with beholding the destroyers of tyrants and usurpers, and the restorers of liberty to oppressed nations’ (Swift 1984: 240–241). Then, with his time in Glubbdubdrib running short, Gulliver turns his attention to the ‘modern dead’. At this point, the sophistical arts of a mortified culture expose history’s deceptiveness. When, like any historian, the Governor calls up ‘a dozen or two of kings with their ancestors in order for eight or nine generations’, Gulliver’s disappointment at their failure to live up to their illustrious reputation is ‘grievous and unexpected’. Consequently (he realizes), ‘I was chiefly disgusted with modern history’. ‘Having strictly examined all the persons of greatest name in the courts of princes for an hundred years past,’ he sees through historicizing images: he ‘found the world had been misled by prostitute writers [sophists?], to ascribe the greatest exploits in war to cowards, the wisest counsels to fools, [ . . . ] truth to informers’. Once ‘truly informed’, from the past itself, ‘of the springs and motives of great enterprises and revolutions in the world, and of the contemptible accidents to which they owed their success’, Gulliver can’t help having ‘a low opinion [ . . . ] of human wisdom and integrity’ (Swift 1984: 243–244). His disappointment over history’s deceptions, his having observed ‘how much the race of human kind was degenerate among us, within these hundred years past’, leaves him with ‘melancholy reflections’ (Swift 1984: 247). Thus Swift argues that the correctional intention of historical enquiry is as much implicated in, as compromised by, sophistical culture; but he also contends that the limited human life-span restricts and distorts knowledge of what actually happened in similarly limited, human life-spans in the past. Arriving subsequently in Luggnagg, an island ‘south-eastwards of Japan’, Gulliver undergoes a related, but converse historical experience when he learns about the ‘Struldbruggs or Immortals’, human mutants that can never die. Gulliver initially views them as privileged beings, ‘their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehension of death’ (Swift 1984: 252–253). He gladly, therefore, expatiates on how he would live, if he were to be born a Struldbrugg. It would present a unique opportunity to become a consummate historian by living to a truly historical time-scale. In the first two hundred years of his life, while accumulating wealth, he would ‘arrive in time to excel all others in learning’ in the arts and sciences. Then, engrossing himself in historical enquiry,—‘carefully [recording] every action and event of consequence that happened in the public, impartially [drawing] the characters of several successions of princes, and great ministers of state,’ fi nally ‘exactly [setting] down the several changes in customs, language, fashions of dress, diet, and diversions,’ he would become ‘a living treasury of knowledge and wisdom, [ . . . ] the oracle of the nation’ (Swift 1984: 254). In current parlance, he conjectures that, as a Struldbrugg, he would make an exemplary

200 Imprisoned by History public historian. He imagines establishing his own ‘immortal brotherhood’ of Struldbrugg historians. It would have the pleasure of a comprehensive geo-political spectacle, involving inter alia ‘the various revolutions of states and empires,’ ‘barbarity overrunning the politest nations, and the most barbarous becoming civilized,’ and, not least, ‘great inventions brought to the utmost perfection’ and ‘wonderful discoveries [ . . . ] in astronomy’. But this historical perspective also implies an inhuman disregard for those ‘most valuable’ mortals admitted to this brotherhood. Their successive generations, Gulliver admits, ‘length of time would harden [him] to lose with little or no reluctance [ . . . ], just as a man diverts himself with the annual succession of pinks and tulips in his garden, without regretting the loss of those which withered the preceding year’ (Swift 1984: 254–255).11 However, Gulliver’s conjectures just provoke ridicule: ‘through the imbecility of human nature’, he has missed the point. He had been asked to envisage not what he might achieve, were he to enjoy ‘a perpetuity of youth, health, and vigour’, but ‘how he would pass a perpetual life under all the usual disadvantages which old age brings along with it’ (Swift 1984: 256). Gulliver learns that for the Struldbruggs life is ever-extending senility that condemns them to a pariah-status, ‘despised and hated by all sorts of people’. Further, ‘the dreadful prospect of never dying’ generates its own, unique psychopathology that makes them ‘uncapable of friendship’, ‘dead to all natural affection’, and susceptible to ‘envy and impotent desires’ when they compare themselves with mortals. As they succumb to the diseases of old age, they find themselves increasingly excluded from civic rights and responsibilities; as their memory fades, they can neither read through lack of concentration nor communicate as, after some two hundred years, the language around them evolves beyond their understanding of it. Significantly, the only way to discover how old they are at any time, given that ‘they have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle age’, is by recourse to historical chronology,—‘by asking them what kings or great persons they can remember, and then by consulting history, for infallibly the last Prince in their mind did not begin his reign after they were fourscore years old’ (Swift 1984: 257–259). In these two episodes in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) Swift, like Volney, demonstrates that human existence and historical time are incommensurate. He argues against the identitary presupposition of a natural synergy between history and human life. He would thus scotch the conventional wisdom that sees ‘the succession of human beings, over the course of all the centuries, [ . . . ] as one and the same human being who lives forever and learns continually’ [comme un même homme qui subsiste toujours et qui apprend continuellement] (Pascal 1963b: 232). Swift realizes, as in the Struldbruggs’ case, that, if one could live on an unending, historical scale, the world would still change around one’s subjective, existential self in its own cognitive situation, as it aged, thereby consigning it to obsolescence. Historical truth would, therefore, produce only deception: as practical


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guidance, it would be useless. The idea that, lived on the historical plane, life would be enhanced by comprehensive historical knowledge, would be refuted by the human physiological incapacity to keep pace with historical developments. Swift stresses thus an essential disjunction between the time of one’s own life [Lebenszeit] and historical time-scales [Weltzeit].12 He exposes the deceitfulness implied in the sentimental contention ‘that a better understanding of the dimensions of history, past and present, provides a better understanding of the scope for people to live their lives’ (Corfield 2007: xiv). In terms of the anthropic principle: the biological and cosmological conditions of the human life-form automatically block its historical comprehension. (a) The point is: ‘time must be regarded cosmologically’. After all, it is ‘a fundamental property of the relationship between the universe and the observer which cannot be reduced to anything else’. As such, it is a ‘fundamental dimension’ of human existence (Whitrow 1975: 132; Prigogine 1994: 18). Implicit in this ‘fundamental property’ is the transcendent, cosmological ‘arrow of time’, the irreversible dynamic of the expanding, but ultimately entropic universe, immediately evident in everyday experience, in, e.g., the time in which a sugar-cube dissolves, a mundane instant that ‘fractures the symmetry between past and future’, because the process can’t be reversed and the sugar-cube retrieved (Prigogine & Stengers 2001: 190, 192). Further, the cognitive situation [aesthesis] confi rms this premise. Time is the irreversible succession of states of consciousness, sequences of moments, of nows. According to Whitehead, ‘our sense-awareness posits for immediate discernment a certain whole, here called a duration’: a duration is thus ‘a defi nite natural entity’, ‘a concrete slab of nature limited by simultaneity’. That each ‘duration happens and passes’ confi rms the ‘passage of nature’: thus, a duration reaches ‘a connexion of nature with the ultimate metaphysical reality’. A duration can, therefore, be ‘all nature present as the immediate fact posited by sense-awareness’: whatever one knows, one knows now, in the immediate present (Whitehead 2004: 53, 54–55, 56). The immediately experienced ‘duration’ has a crucial, dual function. It produces the general concept of time, since time’s ‘measurableness’, its ‘serial character’ derive from it. (Whitehead 2004: 55). Instrumental in measuring time is the moment, defi ned as ‘the class of all abstractive sets of durations with the same convergence’. It is not naturally given, but mentally constructed in terms of a particular conjunction of selected passages of nature or ‘families of duration’ being delivered to sense awareness. Each moment has an ‘intrinsic property’ that demarcates it from, and defi nes its relationship to, other moments. On this basis, ‘the passage of nature [ . . . ] distributes the moments of the family into a serial order’, which divides it into past and future. Serial time is, therefore, ‘not the very passage of nature itself’ (the successively immediate contents of sense awareness). Rather, it retains the “feel” of the passage ‘as an extrinsic relation of entities and not as the

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outcome of the essential being of the terms of the series’ (Whitehead 2004: 62, 64, 65). For Whitehead (and in contrast to Kant) time is not a synthetic a priori of experience. Instead, he insists: ‘there is time because there are happenings, and apart from happenings there is nothing.’ Hence, his crucial conclusion: ‘the attempt to set up time as an independent terminus for knowledge is like the effort to fi nd substance in a shadow’ (Whitehead 2004: 66). It thus exposes as a sophistical deception history’s requirement for time to be some material entity in its own right, that manifests itself in ‘swathes’, can be ‘braided’ or used to ‘tether’ the present, or even ‘give people a clear place in the world’ (Corfield 2007: 81, 138, 185, 212). Duration also reveals that cognition has its own time dimension since ‘mind is not in time or in space in the same sense in which events in nature are in time’. Rather, it is ‘in time and space in a sense peculiar to itself’, derived from ‘the peculiar alliance of its passage with the passage of nature’. Here it’s axiomatic that ‘the character of experience does not accord with the ideal of thought’. So, with sense awareness being ‘a procedure of mind’, a ‘fundamental distinction’ exists between cognitive immediacy and the ‘instantaneousness of nature’. The moment the senses and the mind construct from the passage of nature disclosed in durations ‘conciliates the observed fact with this ideal [i.e. of thought]’ (Whitehead 2004: 68, 69–70). Similarly, as confi rmation that ‘what has passed for nature has not passed for mind’, memory evinces ‘a disengagement of the mind from the mere passage of nature’. So, though ‘vivid remembrance and the present fact are posited in awareness as in their temporal serial order’, they can be equally vivid for the mind. There is no ‘sharp distinction either between memory and present immediacy or between the present immediacy and anticipation’, because of the mind’s ‘cogredience’ with durations, because of its continuing ‘being here’, independent of the passing of abstract, serial time (Whitehead 2004: 67, 68, 106–108, 110). Thus the concept of time advanced by Whitehead subverts in history [crg] the axiomatic convergence between lived experience and its own, sufficient reasons (e.g. as evinced in the serialization of events in b-type sequences (cf. Chapter 1)). In particular, it refutes entirely the cognitive justification of history as a management technology. As a comprehensive mode of knowledge with ‘a complete answer to everything’, historical time has ‘a trimness about it, with its instantaneous present, its vanished past, its non-existent future’,—a ‘medieval’ trimness that ‘ill accords with brute fact’ (Whitehead 2004: 73). By implication, therefore, it reveals history, once historical time is stripped of intrinsic cognitive value, to be nothing but a sophistical device, a powerful instrument of persuasion and coercion. (b) Disengaged from any cognitive obligation, free to be a law unto itself, historical time, as the ‘time of the world’ [Weltzeit], becomes a flexible, highly effective management instrument. It offers the capacity for largescale organization. Historicist thinking does see in history the gradual realization of an ‘autochtonous’ human project that fulfils a transcendent,


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cosmological plan (cf. Ortega y Gasset 1962: 231). It ultimately endorses historians’ invocations of millennia or of ‘forever’. Invoking thus temporal phases far shorter than the cosmological time physicists and astronomers confront, it envelopes with coercive effect and incarcerating intention one’s own, much shorter life-span. Further, it offers central coordination of the symbolic, temporal arrangements that with ‘compelling force’ govern the ‘chains of interdependence’ that in advanced societies endorse the social constraints binding social actors together (Elias 1988: 99–100, 129). Like historicism, these arrangements also assimilate personal apprehensions to history’s comprehensive, temporal scheme. But besides supporting history [crg] in managing the world, historical time must legitimize history’s entitlement to incontrovertible managerial authority. The historian-manager who fi nds in the work-place, in his ‘working life’, a ‘deep and continuing use of history’ needs to believe that ‘time is not a random agglomeration of moments’, but instead ‘a connected and orderly sequence of moments, and human actions exist in that sequence and can often be best understood within it’ (Tusa 2004: 131, 141). Of course, each historical account ensures its own coherence by means of a temporal and logical armature it fabricates for itself from identitary categorical coordinators, such as periods or traditions. Certainly too, the sense of history can be tautologically enforced by encoding events as ‘processes of change’ or by tracing ‘trajectories’ (e.g. b-type sequences (cf. Chapter 1)) as phases of temporal significance within the cosmological ‘arrow of time’ or abstracted from the experiential ‘passage of nature’.13 Needless to say, the managerial conviction of ‘orderly sequence’ is a delusion. It flatly ignores the constantly accelerating, ‘dromospheric’ conditions of a constantly selfhistoricizing world that shatter any qualitatively or quantitatively stabilizing ‘unfolding’ of events (history [rg]). It’s also deceitful: it upholds the idea of a self-perpetuating order, devoid of chance and chaos (as, e.g., in the Newtonian universe), that prevents anything new arising. Even so, through analogical recurrences, the perpetuation of the same old thing,’ orderly sequence’ does affi rm history’s managerial order; with its machine-like, inhuman indifference, it re-asserts its coercive force (cf. Prigogine 1994: 96; Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 130, 299, 351). (c) But these devices still do not ensure history’s totalitarian command. For that to be guaranteed, history must be the totally comprehensive form: it must be the comprehensive form for all time. For historians, the assumption is axiomatic: without the totally comprehensive order of time, there can be no comprehensive order in history. However, as Swift demonstrates, no human being has either the physiological or the mental capacity to comprehend the comprehensive order of time. Historians must, therefore, produce for themselves a conceivable image of a totally comprehensive order of time as the conceivably true likeness of a comprehensive order in history. Ultimately, they themselves must fabricate time ‘formats’ that ‘allow for a variety of interpretations within the clarity of a numbered framework’,

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thereby ‘keeping history’s progression within manageable bounds’ (Corfield 2007: 159 (my italics)). Ensuring this likeness of total comprehensiveness requires a sophistical trick, a technological device, much like the digital video that created Russian Ark (2003). (In this fi lm, the single, ninety-minute steadicam shot it facilitated (the very latest in magic-lantern effects), represents some two hundred years of Russian history, the decline of Czarist Russia, centred on a museum, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, as a continuous, mesmerizing historical “flow” of time.) Unsurprisingly, this device is analogy: it conveys a coercive figure of thought that erases difference through wishful similarity (cf. Bouveresse 1999: 22ff.). Historical time is “image-ined” as ‘braided’ time: it is fashioned from ‘collective intersections’, a ‘mesh [ . . . ] ever-interlocking’ of ‘continuity (or persistence), micro-change (or momentum) and macro-change (or turbulence)’ (Corfield 2007: 212 (my italics)). The analogy (cf. ‘braided’) insinuates into these vague, relativistic elements the structure they lack. It effectively amplifies historical time to its maximum comprehensiveness, identical to cosmological time: ‘Multiplying many historical dimensions makes one historical process, whose contours match those of the cosmos’ (Corfield 2007: 252). It would demonstrate a (by defi nition) historical continuity ‘with different rates and sorts of change [ . . . ] detectable everywhere: both close at home and stretching far beyond our immediate horizons’ (Corfield 2007: 251). But this is just sophistical word-play. It deliberately confuses the cosmological arrow of time (i.e. the inherent irreversibility of all events), the individual’s internal consciousness of duration, and serialized time as an instrument for locating events. Further, the ‘multiplying’ of historical dimensions, like the ‘mixture’ of continuity and change, is pure poetics, a ‘logological’ artefact—an expression of the scholastic standpoint. The identity of the person who does the ‘multiplying’, who would be interested in the ‘multiplying’, remains—curiously enough—unstated: but it can be only the historian, in her own, academic self-interest. Here, though, ‘braided’ and its cognates evoke once more the coercive prospect, depicted by Elias, of collective humanity bound together in a constraining, social ligature (Elias 1976b: 38–39; cf. Elias 2000: 209–210). It’s the same old thing: apparently ‘belonging to a “line” that stretches far back into the past gives people a clear place in the world’; apparently ‘the present is tethered into a much longer span of time and is framed within space/geography too’ (Corfield 2007: 80–81, 185 (my italics)). The cosmic amplification of historical time still requires the rhetoric of incarceration, even if the thought fails in the courage of its perverse conviction. It partially retracts itself at the prospect of its consequences: ‘If the trialectical linkages are imagined like a plait or a braid, then it is a very tangled one, with many loops, bypasses, loose strands, knots, and feedbacks, yet still operating within a general power of equilibrium’ (Corfield 2007: 212 (my italics)). If this structure really is “image-ined”, then just assemble a different image


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without the tangle. Instead, one caprice suggests another,—a further identitary conviction, ‘equilibrium’, which, like its related concept, “equivalence”, comes in handy as a cognitive stabilizer. Ultimately, the argument for the managerial potential of historical time betrays its sophistical character: the comprehensive image the historian would construct keeps breaking up. It’s nothing certain, it depends on how it is viewed: it could, therefore, be viewed differently. It should show that ‘history unfolds within a consecutive time-space that is ultimately coherent’, so that ‘these features are potentially knowable by time-based humans’. That is because ‘underlying all historical explanations is the assumption that history is not so fragmented as to be beyond explanation’ (Corfield 2007: 220 (my italics)). Quite apart from Swift’s refutation of this anthropic conceit, its argument is circular. Formally, explanation must start with the assumption of explicability, hence of coherence. It does so, in response not to the nature of history, but to the principle of sufficient reason that it a priori invests in it. But this image does not hold anyway, even reinforced by further wishful analogies flatly ignoring Popper’s distinction between trends in society and regular structures in nature: e.g. the double-helix structure of the human genome which, apparently, ‘can be viewed as a prototype of ordered diversity’ in history (Corfield 2007: 220 (my italics); cf. Popper 1974: 105ff., 113–114). Evidently ‘expressing visually [ . . . ] the [ . . . ] disorderly “braid” of history, within which causation works, is a hard task’. So, rather than accepting it as the product of specific epistemic conventions such as identitary thinking and the principle of sufficient reason, expressed in terms of categorical coordinators, the historian needs historical time to mimic an independent, metaphysical dimension. Consequently, the temporal image must be maintained at all costs,—even to the point of self-contradiction: ‘The untidy elements of turbulence / friction / dynamics have to mesh into the interlocking elements of patterning / structures / persistence, in a way that is simultaneously coherent and disorderly’ (Corfield 2007: 220 (my italics)). It goes without saying (as Prigogine has shown with chaotic systems): once an ‘element’ of disorder is introduced into a coherent system, the whole system becomes disordered. Blind to the absurd lengths sophistry takes her, the historian insists—ideologically—on the integrity of historical time in order to eradicate any ‘viewpoint antithetical to sustained knowledge’, since ‘the theorists who deny the possibility of cause and effect, logically reject not only historical sequentiality but also consecutive time’ (Corfield 2007: 220). But this too is sophistry: the concept of self-organized criticality excludes any proportional reciprocity between cause and effect, any uniform time-scale in which erratic, critically self-organized phenomena develop. Thus, even a cursory glance at the structure of historical time as a synthetic world-time [Weltzeit], hence as a crucial management instrument, reveals that the coercive force of historical discourse has minimal cognitive veracity. Here, principally, history’s persuasive effect exceeds by far its cognitive value, since that value relies on its sophistical predisposition. Rather

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history [crg] ensures its cognitive intention substantiates its ideological claim to social domination through a social and temporal “world order” it generates for itself and manages in its own self-interest. With the world constantly historicizing itself, both history’s self-centred veracity and its totally dominating presence produce for human life the same old carceral constraints,—a ‘hermetically sealed enclosure’, an ‘elastic prison which stretches on without ever setting us free’ (cf. Ortega y Gasset 1993: 33).

3.2. The ineradicable now The contemporary historian has only to start extracting historical data from the present for contemporary experience to reveal only ‘this ever contracting NOW of our daily lives’ (Wells 2006: 46). Manifested in The Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), this contraction is no coincidence. It defi nes the sudden insight ‘that the cosmic movement of events is increasingly adverse to the mental make-up of our daily life’, the instant when existential meaning and historical process split. Hitherto, ‘Man’s mind accepted the secular process as rational and it could not do otherwise, because he was evolved as part and parcel of it’; reassuringly ‘in the present vast confusion of our world, there was always the assumption of an ultimate restoration of rationality, and adaptation and a resumption’ (Wells 2006: 44, 45). Now this self-centred identification proves illusory. History, the story of humanity, was only ever a blip in the history of nature, the ‘three thousand million years of Organic Evolution’ (Wells 2006: 48). The identity of humanity and history dissolves. As it collapses back into natural history, ‘the secular process’ reveals itself as ‘entirely at one with such non-mental rhythms as the accumulation of crystalline matter in a mineral vein or with the flight of a shower of meteors’. Consequently, ‘that congruence with mind, which man has attributed to the secular process, is not really there at all’ (Wells 2006: 44). The result is disorientation: not just the loss of the past, but also the forfeit of historicist projections, ‘the Pattern of Things to Come’ (Wells 2006: 46). Here the urgent now has vital cognitive value. Wells is describing the existential consequences of a cultural paradigm-shift from the unquestioned predominance of the smooth mechanics of the Newtonian world-order to the unpredictability of thermodynamic chaos: ‘Hitherto events had been held together by a certain logical consistency, as the heavenly bodies [ . . . ] have been held together by the pull, the golden cord, of gravity. Now it is as if that cord had vanished and anything was driving anyhow to anywhere at a steadily increasing velocity’ (Wells 2006: 45). As a result, historical structures, predicated on identitary coordination, are in melt-down: ‘Events now follow one another in an entirely untrustworthy sequence;’ ‘A harsh queerness is coming over things and rushes past what we have hitherto been wont to consider the definite limits of hard fact. Hard fact runs away from analysis and does not return;’ ‘The limit of size and space shrinks and continues to


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shrink inexorably’ (Wells 2006: 46–47). The mind is at the end of its tether, because history, which (as historians assert) does ‘bind’ and ‘tether’ people, does keep them chained together, tied to its ‘leading-strings’, undermines its competence to cope with its immediate situation. The tethered mind of the long incarcerated history-inmate is at its wit’s end. Discovering its historical tether was self-imposed, it faces liberation with apprehension, with incomprehension: ‘we pass into the harsh glare of hitherto incredible novelty. It beats the searching imagination. The more it strives the less it grasps. The more strenuous the analysis, the more inescapable the sense of mental defeat’. At this ‘impasse’, this ‘end’, history in ruins is survived only by the illusoriness, the sophistry it always generated: ‘The cinema sheet stares us in the face. That sheet is the actual fabric of Being. Our loves, our hates, our wars and battles, are no more than a phantasmagoria dancing on that fabric, themselves as unsubstantial as a dream’ (Wells 2006: 45, 47). (a) Always keen on ‘tethering’, ‘braiding’, ‘cementing’, ‘grounding’, ‘rooting’, historians must eradicate the cognitive urgency of now. Wells’s apprehensiveness they would certainly quarantine in a more comprehensive, post-war trend or historicist “process”. ‘Presentism’ or ‘present-mindedness’ is for them taboo, for an obvious reason: the least concession of cognitive privilege to the present, now, negates history, wrecks its categorical coordinators. It would dispel the illusion of continuity: ‘the insistent nowness of the here and now, influenced particularly by the battering pressures of instant communication, can seem overwhelming’, because it threatens ‘a failure in social or collective memory’. Hence, the danger posed by ‘time-saturated societies’ is that ‘people [ . . . ] may become too minute-by-minute time-harried and insufficiently aware of the long term’ (Corfield 2007: 193). It would also disable historical context, history’s key management-device, since ‘presentism’ ‘remove[s] events and personalities from their real time and place, forcing them into a conceptual framework which would have meant nothing to the age in question’ (Tosh 1999: 132 (my italics)). It would, most crucially, thwart the historian’s ability to fabricate a true likeness, given that ‘present-mindedness confl icts with the historian’s aspiration to be true to the past’, this confl ict being ‘clearest in the case of those writers who ransack the past for material to fuel a particular ideology’ (Tosh 1999: 119). It would thus sabotage history’s persuasive force, its alleged ‘credibility as a serious contribution of knowledge’. Making historical interpretation ‘true only in relation to the needs of the age in which it was written’ would erase the ‘distinction [ . . . ] between sound and unsound history’ (Tosh 1999: 121). (b) But in making the present taboo, history [crg] is not just prejudiced against immediate experience. There’s something more: the politics of experiential depreciation,—a decidedly deceptive, inhuman strategy masquerading as a human science in humanity’s self-interest. Certainly, as Wells’s apprehension demonstrates, historical events do exceed in magnitude anything the human mind can conceive. Their immediate impact reveals that

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more is possible than can be experienced; it releases a traumatic potential that shatters experiential norms. Through their dynamic intensity, the ‘present becomes inaccessible to experience’ [die unerfahrbar gewordene Gegenwart] (cf. Koselleck 1985: 34). The dromospheric conditions Wells describes result from the resources of capital, scientific research, energy, and work stored up in the weaponry of World War II (and are today implicit in the reality dominated by the state-endorsed, military-industrial complex). The chaotic dynamic their concentrated expenditure unleashes, can be stabilized only by subsequent historicizing reconstructions (as offered, e.g., by Hobsbaum or Judt). But history is duplicitous: where history [rg] traumatizes, history [crg] rationalizes. Still, producing reassuring continuities and instructive analogies, constructing the contexts and commonplaces to confi ne people and events in, this rationalization drives the politics of experiential depreciation the historicizing mentality imposes. As Droysen remarks, in redeeming the past, thereby demonstrating the overall context of a person’s life and its moral purpose, history (allegedly) enlarges the here and now of human existence, making up for its immediate impoverishment with the profusion of the past that preceded it (cf. Droysen 1977: 41). But what justifies the assumption that existence in its immediacy is ipso facto impoverished? Nothing,—if not the cynical bias of the historicizing mentality that a priori disposes human beings and their interests to be little more than ‘transit points for incessant developments in history’ [nur die Durchgangspunkte für das unablässige Werden], nothing but ‘the end product of a process of becoming that only history can lay bare’ (Droysen 1977: 193, 221; Tosh 2008: 43). In these circumstances, it’s difficult to see how the past could compensate the present. If historical developments treat people as mere ciphers, they effectively withdraw the incentive to learn from the past. If history produces merely reified human beings in identitary circumstances, it automatically prevents them from learning to re-function the production process itself. History as historicist development thus negates the professed interventions of public history. (c) With its rationalization predicated on identitary categorical coordinators, history here exemplifies sophistical culture. It represents a deceptive positivism that produces alienation,—that ‘achieves its “reliability” by a successful masking of what is and is not, by a serialization of the world of the observer by turning the truly given into capta which are taken as given, by the denuding of the world of being and relegating the ghost of being to the shadow land of subjective “values”’ (Laing 1968: 52). Precisely these subjective values, these secondary qualities given in the immediate ‘prehension’ of an object, which involves both subjectivity and objectivity, invest the present, now, with vital interest and cognitive value (cf. Whitehead 1967b: 176, 228, 234). However, the historical discourse of objective neutrality, of ‘dispassionate disengagement’, dismisses subjective values as personal bias, or as ideological tendentiousness. In fact, ideological prejudice exists in the


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historicist rationalization that by its very nature dismisses them. That the historian then imposes his or her objective, sufficiently rationalized, historical analysis as the comprehensive, binding construction of how things got to be the way they are, is a positivistic practice that ‘can only perpetuate the alienation which it cannot itself describe’. Hence, it ‘succeeds only in further deepening it, because it disguises and masks it the more’ (Laing 1968: 52). Here too, history emerges as a flexible, social management instrument: the very knowledge that operates a politics of experiential depreciation, cynically asserts itself as the only reliable, indispensable guide to living, as the indispensable resource of the ‘responsible citizen’ (cf. Tosh 2008: 120ff). With this sophistical sleight of hand, history offers itself as a means of socialization, of personal adjustment, of conformity with the way things are. It presents itself as an effective means of influencing the social level, of inducing compliance ‘by inner consent with external restraints’. It gets away with it because history sets itself up as the real reality so as to predispose us to ‘trick ourselves out of our minds, [ . . . ], out of our own personal world of experience, out of that unique meaning with which potentially we may endow the external world’ (Laing 1968: 61). Hence history dominates through sophistical persuasion rather than through its (virtually negligible) cognitive value. ‘The scientific objective world is not the world of real life’: hence, the impossibility of living on the plane of objective historical analysis (as Judt’s disclaimers confi rm) (cf. Laing 1983: 15). So how can history profess any meaning, any cognitive value for the experience of everyday life, for the practices enabling human beings to create meaning for themselves? ‘There is no experience or meaning in the objective order because the objective order is the way the world appears, subtracted of meaningful experience’ (Laing 1983: 33). (d) Certainly, the present seems hardly conducive to making experience meaningful. In a historicized world, immediate prehensions automatically prioritize the past; they instinctively defer to past precedents. In its own terms, the historicized world is the product of a “historical process” that, in the historically hyperconscious production of ever latest things, has imposed the present as ‘hegemonic’, as an ‘oppressive fait accompli’, as thereby rupturing the hitherto orderly, historical continuities (cf. Augé 2008: 32, 117). Thus the history technology works with the other global technologies that, in managing the consumer society, enclose individual existence in a straightjacket [enferme l’existence individuelle dans un carcan] and produce reality as deceptive contradictions [mensonges]. Why, therefore, advocate ‘reintroducing into history the finalities that would deliver us from the tyranny of the present’ [qui nous délivrent de la tyrannie du présent] (Augé 2008: 38, 57, 114, 138)? That would only reinforce the carceral effect of the historicized world. In any case, the production of the latest thing, which only makes sense in the context of the ‘recurrence of the same old thing’ [le retour du même] in the immanent present, is the ultimate, constantly deferred finality of history (cf. Augé 2008: 95).

210 Imprisoned by History Nevertheless, though it may contract, the now is not eradicable: its ambivalence, temporal and experiential, sees to that. In any case, as Einstein remarked, it seems to be ‘something special for human beings’, but nothing any science can assimilate, hence a source of apprehension [inquiétude] (Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 395). In fact, because the ‘immediately given instantaneous present’ is not to be found in nature, Whitehead dismisses it as a ‘nonentity’. However, as will be suggested below, his defi nition of the present within the duration of immediate experience, is still close to Aristotle’s conception of the now as a limit between before and after: ‘What we perceive as present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation. This vividness lights up the discriminated field within a duration’ (Whitehead 2004: 73). Perhaps because its defi nition is ultimately enigmatic, the now is always immediately present,—not least in the automatic deference to the past in historicized consciousness: the now, of course, is where and when that deference occurs. (e) To begin with, ‘the present ‘now’ is not part of time at all’, Aristotle argues,—which makes it ineradicable. ‘A part measures the whole,’ he says, ‘and the whole must be made up of the parts, but we cannot say that time is made up of nows’ (Aristotle 1996b: 372–375; 218 a 5). Time is a measure of the duration of the motion and rest of an object: to be in time is to be subject to its measure (Aristotle 1996b: 404–405; 221 b 5ff.). The now is crucial: it discloses the passing of time. Paradoxically, the now is self-identical but also self-differentiating. Now has the property of always being now; but, each now is different: if it weren’t, there would be no experience of duration, no sense of before or after (cf. Aristotle 1996b: 382–383; 218 b 25ff.). Hence, Aristotle asserts ‘neither would time be if there were no “now”, nor would “now” be if there were no time’. However, they are not just interdependent. ‘Time owes its continuity to the “now”’: there is no independent time continuum beyond the now. Rather the now operates as a limit ‘prior and posterior’ to motion but not partaking in it: it ‘marks off time as before and after’, invests it with the capacity to measure durations in the past and future, the before and after its limits reveal (Aristotle 1996b: 384–349; 219 a 10 – 219 b 20; 390–395; 219 b 30 – 220 a 25; 412–413; 222 b 1ff.). Intriguingly, Aristotle implies that, far from being an ever-enduring present (e.g. a ‘long now’), now is ‘a division of an independently existing continuum that is change’ outside time that disposes time to be the means of measuring it (cf. Coope 2005: 29–30). Significantly, to take Hegel’s gloss on this argument, the now (along with the ‘here’) signifies the ‘generalized this’ of things [das allgemeine Diese], Being as such, ‘the truth of sensory certainty’ [das Wahre der sinnlichen Gewißheit (i.e. aesthesis)], the indispensable, non-negotiable basis of the existential situation (Hegel 1979: 85). Further, because it’s thus irreducible and inescapable, the now can’t help inducing apprehension. By contrast, it reveals as ‘logology’ the historian’s transcendent standpoint that presents history as the spectacular procession of events in an orderly temporal sequence. If now does represent the


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momentary intuition of sensory certainty, its function as the limit nevertheless enforces the misgiving that what is perceived is never the sum total of reality. Prompted by this limitedness, this intuition is imbued with the conviction that the unconscious, even if it cannot, or at least not yet, be known, might have more reality. Certainly, in this case it would be tempting to reach for history, as for a narcotic, for a strong sedative concocted of facts derived from analogical equivalents, identitary constructions, and sufficient reasons. That would make things right: that’s what history [crg] is for. But the history-effect is merely palliative. Particularly in a historicized world, it just tends to occlude present circumstances and their possible future ramifications. Instead, the limitedness of the now, its obscurity, invests the existential moment with cognitive and ethical urgency: ‘all morality is instantaneous’ (Bachelard 1994: 110). In the light of the then (late 1920s and early 1930s) present, dire political situation, discussed in the ironic introduction to The Shape of Things to Come, the author (H. G. Wells) puts the key question, the question no-one asks, to his fictional protagonist with precisely this urgency: ‘What were the essentials? [ . . . ] “What is really happening now?” I asked’ (Wells 2005: 11). Because it professes to say only what really happened then, history is blind to immediate ethical and cognitive urgency, for all its claims to act out of a ‘social obligation’ to maintain humane values and civil liberties (even if, or particularly when, these are frequently merely a cover for the Realpolitik of the modern liberal-democratic state, enforced by self-righteousness and weaponry) (cf. Tosh 2008: 142). But apprehension can’t monopolize the now: now keeps changing, its demarcation of before and after never remains stable. Moreover, there’s no reason to presume it disposes time to be a single, linear, evenly calibrated continuum. As the thermodynamic generation of chaos demonstrates, the passing of time proves also to be creative. The system concerned unfolds and proliferates unpredictably as its energy dissipates and it moves itself away from the conditions that initialized its dynamic. In this context, therefore, the now designates a point of bifurcation. It inflects motion with unexpected dissymmetry, the instant in which it veers off from predictability into probability (Prigogine 1994: 27–29, 33, 35ff.; 2001: 81–87).14 Consequently, in the now apprehension is not inevitable (as Wells’s question suggests). The ‘lived moment may remain obscure’ [Dunkel des gelebten Augenblicks], but, with its tinge of anticipation, its numinous unconscious may also trigger premonition, expectation, wonder, even hope (Bloch 1985: 80, 82, 84, 147). The now indicates that we human beings live ‘beyond ourselves’ [über uns hinaus]; so it’s pregnant with tendencies ‘not yet come into consciousness’ [das Noch-Nicht-Bewußte]. Obscure though it may be, this intimation would unveil the ‘true future’, sense ‘what has never been, [ . . . ] what is objectively new’ [Beruf zu nie Gewesenem, objektivem Novum] (Bloch 1985: 84, 116, 146). Thus the now intimates that ‘the authentic property of the world has not yet

212 Imprisoned by History emerged’ [das Eigentliche der Welt ist noch nicht heraus]. This qualitative enhancement of human reality is produced by its internal, dialectical momentum, by ‘the pulsating, throbbing, scorching darkness of the now’, not by the accumulated stock of empirical historical fact, ‘of things at hand that have become merely the way they are’ [ Vorrat [ . . . ] des bloßen gewordenen Vorhandenseins’]. The now is thus ‘actual experience of being on philosophy’s front-line’ [das eigentliche philosophische Fronterlebnis] (Bloch 1985: 84, 147, 149). The vital, cognitive value of now, comes from this, its front-line, offensive position. In not being part of time, not even being self-conscious or self-interested, it prompts knowledge and action not predetermined by the same old thing. The now is, therefore, a recurrent opportunity to pursue a humanly more essential form of cognition than history: ‘the intuition of the instant’, based on the ‘blink of an eye rather than on the corset’ (Lescure 1994: 139). The ‘specific instant [l’instant precisé] remains absolute’, asserts Bachelard, like Prigogine, citing Einstein. It has vital cognitive and ethical value because ‘there is only one reality, the instant’: duration, habit, and progress are just simple groups of instants (Bachelard 1994: 30, 90). Focussing on the ‘uselessness of history as such’ [l’inutilité de l’histoire en soi], the instant dispels historicized thinking and the historicized habits sustaining it (Bachelard 1994: 82). It exposes continuity and the longue durée (i.e. an extensive phase of serial time) as factitious. Articulating Bachelard’s radical line against Whitehead and Bergson, the instant makes them pure conventions facilitating historical knowledge by establishing its rational preconditions. Even so, continuity and the longue durée produce only illusions, deceptions, ghosts [fantômes],—akin, surely, to those spectres populating Glubbdubdrib (Bachelard 1994: 19, 33, 38, 95). Continuities, particularly those imposed by categorical coordinators, reinforced by the inertia of habit, are forms of nothingness [néant], ‘without any bearing on the essence of human being [l’être]’ (Bachelard 1994: 38, 48, 51). In particular, the instant disrupts identity. It defi nes it as the contingent product of repetition, habit, recurrent order that gives the appearance of substance and consistency. In fact, in its reactive mode, identity merely demonstrates that life ‘bears our image from mirror to mirror’ and that we are merely ‘reflections of reflections’ [illusio]. The instant suggests rather that identity could be meaningful only if established with thoughtful intention that would confront the individual with the wealth of possibilities inherent in each instant (Bachelard 1994: 70–72). Personal consistency, continuity, and progress would actually create identity through something like Nietzschean self-assertion re-affi rmed each instant (Bachelard 1994: 79–82). This existential effort invested in ‘the vast energy of transmutation’ inherent in human existence ensures liberation from being ‘slaves to the past, chained to our remorse, and bound to our fears’. It affi rms that ‘we are the sincerity to be who we are not’, that ‘true life is always present’ (Lescure 1994: 147, 149).


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Like the academic, historical artists Baudelaire censured, historians, therefore, ‘have no right to despise the present’ (Baudelaire 1976: 695). The entropic deference to the past removes a unique, cognitive opportunity. It cancels the immediate, aesthetic insight now that discloses an ‘essential quality’, an ‘eternal, invariant element’ in the phantasmagoria of contingent circumstances; it blocks the aesthetic intention ‘to extract the eternal from the transitory’, to expose what otherwise would remain historically unconscious (cf. Baudelaire 1976: 684, 685, 694). By contrast, history-focussed behaviour is predicated on historians’ (particularly public historians’) inherent surveillance and correctional function. As warders and gate-keepers, supported by a time-transcendent, pan-optical advantage, armed with affi rmative values, they reinforce the penal (i.e. disciplinary) code in the ‘open-prison the world is becoming’ (Adorno 1976: 30). Hence, for Foucault, Kant’s conception of the Enlightenment as humanity’s way out [Ausgang] of unthinking deference to the way things have always been, converges with Baudelaire’s admonition. In both cases, the key issue (which Kant uniquely raised) is what difference ‘today’ now makes both for history and for a philosophical agenda. Having based his advocacy of personal autonomy on a ‘singular moment’ [moment singulier] beckoning a new departure in history, Kant too had seen the present as a philosophical, aesthetic “front-line” (Foucault 2001: 1387). Foucault interprets the front-line, now, as the occasion not for comprehension, ‘the complete and defi nitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits’, but for ‘an ethos, a philosophical way of life, where criticism of what we are is both an historical analysis of the limits set for us and a test of their possible transgression’ (Foucault 2001: 1394, 1396). The cognitive priority of the present moment now refocuses cognition in terms of the situation of the individual, of what the individual has to do for him- or herself to make life meaningful (Foucault 2001: 1396; Augé 2008: 141–142). What historical knowledge looks like when re-orientated by today, now, appears in the ‘problematizations’ the individual’s situation reveals: thus historically specific data are validated only through issues with general implications for the present, now (cf. Foucault 2001: 1396).

3.3. Anomie, time-sickness, and final historicization ‘Not in the future, an object of longing, lies the true human being, but existing and real he lies in the present’ (Stirner 1972: 367). Lacking this compelling sense of now, the historicized world induces time-sickness. Hence the thrust of the present argument: historicization, a monument to anthropic conceit, a colossus of species-narcissism, is a cognitive technology that needs dismantling, just like the deeply entrenched, conventional attitudes that blocked the discoveries of the heliocentric universe, natural selection, and the compulsive unconscious. Though perhaps the ultimate scientific subversion of human self-esteem, it would actually inaugurate a

214 Imprisoned by History new reality principle. It would be based not on the overwhelming deluge of information but on the immediate totality of consciousness,—not on the ‘illusory uniformity’ of historical categories but on ‘the crude deliverances of sensible experience, [ . . . ] that world of imaginative reconstruction which for each of us has the best claim to be our real world’ (Whitehead 1967a: 161, 163, 165). That might help extricate time to call “our own” from the time-scales locked into history that enable historians—custodians of history as a dominant idea, hence the natural associates of dominant forces—to lock everyone and everything up in history. The world now, in its nowness, is itself an ethical imperative for the inauguration of social justice, for the implementation of human rights, let alone for personal self-fulfilment. To derogate from this compelling urgency, to substitute for it the same old historical apologetics of how things got to be the way they are, inevitably induces, in response to the prospect of historical deferment and the ruination revealed by serial time, a two-fold anomie. (a) From the standpoint of now, the immediate cognitive situation, historicization stands for both deference (i.e. deference to the past as a priority, as an authority) and deferment (i.e. the constant postponement of historical recognition through its predisposition to keep updating and re-evaluating knowledge already known). Deference and deferment are thus psychopathological symptoms of the entropic circumstances of human existence. Inherent in western time-consciousness is the apprehension of deferred destiny, the realization that truth, justice, and redemption surely will come,— but, as ever, not yet. Serialized time is thus experienced fundamentally as expectation: waiting for the desired end becomes programmed into culture in an ‘unprecedented, maniacal way’ (Deleuze 2006: 55). With Christianity the redemptive moment occurs late, at the end of time, after death,—of an individual, of a culture, of a people. So, serialized time becomes problematic: something must be done with it, something needs to be done with it. It hangs heavy on the mind, conducive to the melancholy tenor of human existence: ‘a general cause, [ . . . ], an inseparable accident to all men, is discontent, care, misery; were there no other particular affl iction [ . . . ] to afflict a man in this life, the very cogitation of that common misery were enough to [ . . . ] make him weary of his life; to think that he can never be secure, but still in danger, sorrow, grief, and persecution’ (Burton 1972: I, 272). This time, ‘the eternity that precedes and follows [l’éternité précédente et suivante] which absorbs the short duration of human life’, in which everyone stands ‘in line’, kept ‘in their place’ by historians, waiting expectantly, is also serialized historical time, otherwise technically ‘the emptiest’, and ‘insupportable’ (cf. Pascal 1963a: 508; §68–205; Ortega y Gasset 1962: 151; Valéry 1960b: 674). To fill up this ‘monstrous time between Death and the End, Death and Eternity’ is the obligation that devolves to a necrophile humanity (Deleuze 2006: 56, 61). What results, is history. Out of fantasmic rehearsals of the apocalyptic end of days, human beings arduously create a moral world.


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By dint of making this time manageable through causal connections, logical relationships of sufficient reason, and conceptualizations, they fabricate for themselves a comprehensive system of self-judgement (Deleuze 2006: 57; 68–70). With these means human beings can bring forward the long awaited moment of Apocalypse by constructing its earthly avatar, the state: the state as the key agency of history [rg], as the legitimate authority (public) history [crg] affi rms,—particularly the ‘heavenly Jerusalem’ of the security-conscious, modern state, reinforced by the military-industrial complex, self-empowered to rain down chaos and destruction on its enemies as means of enacting retribution and justice (Deleuze 2006: 61).15 What results from all this accumulated, inevitably historical knowledge, is that ‘man [ . . . ] is merely describing himself, [ . . . ] that the self he is describing is merely one of the more dead and dreary states that man can exist in’ (Lawrence 1995: 53). What results, is ‘the tight little cage of our universe’, ‘a mechanism of fate and destiny, a prison’ (Lawrence 1995: 76, 78). The metaphysically enforced, historical situation of human beings, the identitary thinking that makes all historical phases analogically equivalent, inevitably engenders melancholy: ‘This alone kills many a man, that they are tied to the same still; as a horse in a mill, a dog in a wheel, they run round without alteration or news; their life groweth odious, the world loathsome, and that which crosseth their furious delights, “What? Still the same?”’ (Burton 1972: I, 344). Further, this despondent recurrence of the same old thing reveals the prime motivation of historical enquiry, curiosity, to be a melancholic predisposition to indulge oneself with ‘superfluous industry about unprofitable things and their qualities’,—as in the case of the ‘antiquary’ (the prototype historian) who ‘consumes his treasure and time to scrape up a company of old coins, statues, rolls, edicts, manuscripts, etc.’ (Burton 1972: I, 365–366, 367). (b) The “now” is also urgent and makes historical deference illusory because historical time itself is ruined. In the historicized world, historically hyperconscious as it is, historians can shuffle historical periods and issues around like cards in a pack and, with sophist or magician dexterity, deal out all kinds of analogical and identitary hands. ‘Orderly sequence’, ‘braided time’, ‘trajectories’: these are just some of the tricks up their sleeve. But this sense of continuity or serialization exemplified by Elias or Droysen (amongst other historicists), has been undermined not just by the timespace compression of a globally coordinated world and the disruptive, dromospheric environment it creates, but also by the dynamics of chaos and entropy as the physical precondition for human existence. This particularly invalidates descriptions of phenomena based on trajectories and, where history in particular is concerned, dispenses with the ‘reductive, monotonous simplicity of a unique time, whether this time is shaped as invariance or as tracing the path of progress or decline’ (Prigogine 1994: 65–66; Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 366). Certainly, a stable chronological measurement technology, such as history, based on the stability of classical dynamics

216 Imprisoned by History may help manage human affairs. Conversely, and more importantly, given that a multiplicity of time-schemes presents itself, each scheme specific to its own system, time becomes an operator in its own right, a factor involved in the pace of the chaotic fragmentation of these systems (such as biological aging) (cf. Prigogine & Stengers 2005: 341–343). As an operator within the circumstantial preconditions of human existence, time has the capacity (as Shakespeare observed) to ‘make stale / The glistering of this present’ (The Winter’s Tale, IV.1.ll. 13–14). Perhaps he is echoing Aristotle’s assertion that ‘we regard time in itself as destroying rather than producing, for what is counted in time is movement, and movement dislodges whatever it affects from its present state’ (Aristotle 1996b: 402–405; 221 a 30 – 221 b 5). Certainly, time is evinced particularly by its ruinous effect on the edifice of history human beings fabricate for themselves. It disclosed itself to Volney, during his melancholic, nocturnal contemplation of the ruins of Palmyra, as a sublime, coercive force greater than history, hence with the authority to terrify tyrants, punish oppressors, compensate the poor and console the wretched (cf. Volney 1989b: 169). It thus discloses itself as a time that pertains neither to history, nor to nature, but to itself in its ‘pure state’ [temps pur], since ruins evince both ‘the lost functionality of vanished cultures and an imposing, but gratuitous presence’ (Augé 2003: 38–39). As a time on the ‘outside of history’ [temps hors histoire] (i.e. outside its carceral precincts), it discloses itself to the individual with the immediacy of aesthetic intuition, re-focussing him or her on the temporal duration of his or her own existence (Augé 2003: 43). Certainly, therefore, the ruin as a metonym for pure time cannot also signify (as Augé here too suggests) the need to rehabituate ourselves to historical consciousness, hence to relapse into time-sickness, to reincarcerate ourselves. The irreversibility of time operates here, especially in human experience in relation to this fundamental, existential circumstance. It energizes the now as a constantly recurrent, creative moment of protest and revolt. Not least, the now repudiates historical time whether as deferred redemption or as eventual ruin. *** Hardly a form of knowledge, rather a tricky, sophistical strategy of persuasion, history [crg] is driven by psychopathological compulsion, posttraumatic stress disorder, necrophile obsession. With its deceptive images [illusio] akin to feverish delusions, history is the form time-sickness takes. It’s the symptomatic expression of everything we know ‘in terms of our own deadness’ (cf. Lawrence 1995: 53). With its categorical coordinators it produces images of sense and purpose as alibis for its insidious necrophilia. Exposing this duplicity requires a fi nal glance at the methodological unconscious of history, at its tacit assertion of anthropic bias, its insistent ideological assertion of its own self interest.


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The Doomsday Argument is a particularly contentious version of the anthropic principle, but it bears directly on history’s alleged cognitive intention. Extending the basic premise that, though human existence requires special conditions, one’s place under those conditions is most probably nonspecial, it suggests that, in all probability, one is alive at a nonspecial moment, not very early on in the species’ existence, but much later, when most people who have ever lived are alive. It implies that most of the time in which human beings will be alive (i.e. the time span over which the human species as a species is likely to exist) has already passed, which foreshortens the future and reduces the future human population to a remainder (cf. Leslie 1998: 187ff., 237ff.; Rees 2004: 139–140). Its basic definitions are not unproblematic. How is “human being” to be defi ned and should it include all kinds of intelligent beings (such as chimpanzees) with largely the same genome? Would this defi nition include homo sapiens’ hominid precursors as well as its possible bionic descendents? Clearly, without consensus about the basic reference class, prediction fails. Moreover, the basis of the probability calculation reveals anthropic bias. On the one hand, what frames the perception of one’s position within the human reference class (however defi ned) and its temporal location? Why not base it on positive assumptions, given that future survival depends on future choices? On the other hand, evolution suggests species longevity is deceptive. Apparently, ‘the time taken by biological evolution on Earth up to our own present stage of advancement has been many tens of thousands of times longer than need have been the case if strong Darwinian selection pressure had at all stages been steadily directed towards the present outcome’ (Carter 1983: 358). Starting ‘from fi rst principles’ doesn’t predict whether the expected average time ‘intrinsically most likely for a scientific civilization such as our own to evolve’, would be ‘much less or much more [ . . . ] than is allowed by the external restraints that limit the duration of favourable conditions’. Certainly, it is ‘much less plausible a priori’ that ‘the intrinsically most likely evolution time came out to be of just the same order as the time allowed by external restraints’ (Carter 1983: 353). Consequently, some steps in evolution were critical (e.g. establishing the genetic code or cerebral development); but others were probably just incidental, since ‘many alternative evolutionary pathways would have been compatible with the ultimate emergence of civilization’. This means ‘that the apparent existence of an evolutionary ladder is to a large extent an illusion: an artefact of our still unduly anthropocentric imaginations which lead us to jump too easily to the conclusion that merely because we happen to possess some particular attribute it must be essential for “higher development”’ (Carter 1983: 362). The Doomsday Argument may be flawed: it still leaves an after-taste of apprehension. If future survival depends on future choices, is the correct choice guaranteed? In a historically self-centred world can the ‘unduly anthropocentric imagination’ produce allocentric projects for protecting

218 Imprisoned by History the planetary biosphere? Both the analogical calculations of “applied history” and the accelerating, historicizing dynamic of totalitarian capitalism suggest that it can’t and won’t (as, e.g., the difficulties of achieving international agreement on reducing emissions of greenhouse gases suggest). Moreover, an anthropic, evolutionary consideration reinforces this hypothesis of failure. The human species is unlikely to survive into the far future, not because it’s ‘intrinsically beyond our capabilities’, but ‘because living things usually do not live up to their maximum potential’ (Gott 1993: 319). The anthropic principle still does, therefore, generate the apprehension that, in all probability, homo sapiens has no long term prospects, that human history is in a late phase,—hence that the historicized world is predisposed by an anthropic bias, already programmed into its evolutionary course, to regard most of its history as behind it (cf. Davies 1999: 246ff). So, the world sees itself as historicized because it can’t see itself in the future accruing, or having accrued, much more of a past than it possesses now, in the present. Besides identitary thinking and analogical equivalences, this too explains history’s self-centredness. With a shortening future, with decreasing chances of future retrospection, it can’t help now constantly going back over itself, reassuring itself. Amplifying thus its presence, divining hitherto unexploited history-lode in the depths of the present with the aid of hypothetical hindsight from a conjectured, historically pre-empted future, it’s as though it were frantically attempting to defer its prospective demise. However, the alternative scenario is hardly more reassuring. Suppose the human species were to survive, if not ‘forever’, at least for a few millennia at a population level of tens of billions, if not trillions. The anthropic principle suggests that the atomized, amplified, ephemeralized history currently produced would probably not be atomized, amplified or ephemeralized enough to prove useful in that distant, most populous future. Historically speaking, the inhabitants of a more remote future ought to have a better understanding of history that would have long since invalidated the currently available historical knowledge. They would have had far more history to look back on, to identify with, than present historical observers in the reference class “people living in the early twenty-fi rst century”: they might have discerned a pattern of overall sense,—not just a sufficient reason for things having turned out as they did, but a comprehensive reason for them having actually done so. The anthropic principle suggests that, though this historical knowledge would be undeniably more comprehensive, it still would be of limited practical use, because it couldn’t help being deceptive. These future inhabitants, as members of a nonspecial reference class (i.e. “inhabitants of an unspecified distant future”), would still probably have no better knowledge of themselves than the present nonspecial reference class (“people living in the early twenty-fi rst century”) has of itself. Be it as self-reproach, be it as self-vindication, their historicized outlook would be of no avail. Thinking comprehensively with identitary categorical coordinators, relying on analogies and identical cases elicited from the reversible structures


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of historical time, projecting on that basis pre-emptive continuities, would blind them to their own decline. It would be unprecedented, nothing history could register, since whom would it register it for? It would also be historically inconceivable a priori, not least because, in a totally historicized world, history must take priority: by defi nition it doesn’t come last. This prospect seems dismal; but there’s a further variant. Suppose these inhabitants really did have a better understanding of history, suppose they really could legitimately demonstrate that after x-thousands of years humanity’s historical development did make virtually total sense: the anthropic principle would still intervene, their historicized predicament would still be deceptive. Wouldn’t it then suggest that, because history couldn’t make any more sense, because it was now almost totally complete, they must be amongst the last people in the world? Wouldn’t this then mean that the total sense of history, once achieved in the future, couldn’t work beyond that future? Wouldn’t it mean that, because it’s abstracted from the immediate prehension of the passage of nature, historical time should never have imagined itself as taking priority, as assuming precedence? Certainly, with their definitive, total historical knowledge, those ‘last humans’ [die letzten Menschen] might well persuade themselves they were special (Nietzsche 1988d: 19; I, §5). In fact, their position would be the very worst. At that latest time, in a totally historicized world with its energies totally dissipated, looking back on the past, identifying with it, even learning from it, would be pointless. Disabused and apprehensive,—rendered disabused and apprehensive by their now, at last, truly comprehensive, historical knowledge—they’d realize it had left them looking forward to nothing.

Appendix The following tables present in diagram form an overview of the main structures of the argument. (reprinted from Davies 2006a: 252–4) TABLE 1 Historics: schematic overview of the basic conceptual framework. Historics aims to isolate the function of history by contrasting its instrumental character with a broadly aesthetic attitude to the world. The conceptualizations in the left-hand column characterize history. They are either unverifiable, hypothetical, provisional, indiscriminate, or ultimately unpredictable. They are classed as illusio. Those in the right-hand column derive from aesthetics. They represent inferences, forms, and concepts achieved through reflection on primary, immediate experience. They are classed as aesthesis. HISTORICS: DEFINING THE NATURE OF HISTORY History as illusio

Knowledge as aesthesis

autochtonous reason in history religion state culture society economics

the immediate, human sense of things: – sensation – feeling – remembering – thinking – reflection – judgement

coercive processes [Geschichte]

self-possession [Eigensinn]

Historicism: (a) rationale: – organic – materialist / economic – metaphysical – cultural morphological – teleological – postmodernist (b) progress (c) tradition (d) heritage

the ordinary world of everyday life [Lebenswelt]

comprehension

apprehension

heterogeneity

discrimination / differentiation art, aesthetic medium: poetry / drama / music, etc.

technology

reflective thinking / symbolic form

222

Appendix

TABLE 2 Historics: schematic overview of the basic analysis of history. “History” refers to “action in the past” as well as to “understanding action in the past”: both aspects have to be kept in mind. Historics, however, also restates them in social terms, since it sees disciplines as functions rather than as substantive entities. Thus it fi xes on what history actually does rather than what it is. Historics shows how prevailing social forces, facilitated by the discipline itself, direct the “history function” in society. Because of unresolvable disparities between its disciplinary claims and its social function, history appears as “illusio”.

ANALYSIS OF HISTORICAL COGNITION The Structure of Historical Conciousness action in the past

understanding (comprehension)

res gestae [rg]

cognitio rerum gestarum [crg]

[illusio (i)]

[illusio (ii)]

intention / cause

horizon of expectation realization / outcome

fact: action / material evidence: “deed”

interpretation / evaluation

mentality [Geist / Esprit] sense production logistics / delivery technology (i): cultural enhancements / prostheses [techne] production process: artefacts commodities institutions

h i s t o r i c a l m e m o r y

common denominator of all sensibilities understanding [Verstehen] cognitive organization autochtonous reason in history technology (ii): information retrieval systems [techne / technasma] management-systems technics of management: historiography / theory of history / philosophy of history / historicism

Appendix 223

TABLE 3 Historics: schematic overview of the structure of historical understanding. Historical understanding is initially produced by both comprehension and apprehension working together. However, in the fi nal account the rôle of apprehension is discounted. Historical knowledge is a heterogeneous and abstract management technology. It makes its own synthetic arrangements.

HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING Functions / Modes / Properties function / mode:

comprehension (illusio)

apprehension (aesthesis)

X X X

X X X

(a) intellectual basis: – acquirement of knowledge – mental grasp – conceptualization (b) synthesis: – inclusivity (heterogeneity) – summation – total organization

X X X

(c) analysis: – sensation / feeling – discernment / discrimination – realization / appreciation

X X X

(d) temporal orientation – past: recollection – present: reaction / response – future: anticipation

X

X X X

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. Nietzsche’s phrase ‘the coercive force of language [dem sprachlichen Zwange]’ supplies The Prison-House of Language as the title of Fredric Jameson’s study of structuralism (Jameson 1974). Hence, also, the notion of imprisonment by history. 2. The terms ‘history [rg]’, ‘history [crg]’, ‘illusio’, and ‘aesthesis’ refer to the epistemological basis of Historics. See the schematic overview provided by the tables in the Appendix (cf. Davies 2006a: 9–12, 252–253; Davies 2004). 3. Inherent in the historian-function is the need to arbitrate on the validity of competing narratives: the Greek histor, as someone who learns through enquiry rather than by theoretical contemplation, is related to oida and idein, i.e. respectively “hear-say” and “having seen for myself” (Cassin 1995: 488). 4. Certainly, as in fi lm, the use of flashback and cross-cutting means that ‘there is no logical requirement [ . . . ] that histories have to be in Western chronological order’ (Hughes-Warrington 2007: 52). But even if they are not chrono-logical, b-type sequences constituted by or including flashbacks are still logical: they still presume sense and direction. 5. e.g. even the most esoteric topic of historical research, once fi nancially supported by a funding body, contributes to an income-stream for the university as a provider of skills for the work-force of the knowledge-based, creative economy. 6. With its 2002 campaign A Small Piece of History, the History Channel’s ‘new oral history project’ trawled the public sphere for significant personal memories ‘so future generations could learn from them’. As Terms & Conditions §14 makes clear, anyone submitting his or her memories to the History Channel loses all copyright in them, hence also any reproduction fees, though the Channel can use them to promote itself or English Heritage in any media it wishes. 7. cf. http://www.historyandpolicy.org. 8. TV gambling or online poker are typically illusory activities in an illusory, mediatised reality: ‘In a world of inherited privilege, poker comes to seem like a true meritocracy, democratic in a way that the real marketplace can never be; in a world of humiliating or dead-end or soul-killing jobs, as strange as it may seem, online poker becomes the repository of dreams of independence’ (Phillips-Fein 2006: 47). ‘The Western fi nancial system is rapidly coming to resemble nothing so much as a vast casino’ (Strange 1997: 1).

226

Notes

9. ‘The four pence from every National Lottery ticket which currently goes to heritage is a major source of fi nancial support for the heritage sector’ (The National Trust + Accenture 2006: 9). 10. cf. History Associates Incorporated (http://www.historyassociates.com/ about/index.htm) (cf. Dumoulin, p. 101). See also, e.g. the illusions fostered by US economic and political power after World War II: ‘Cultural imperialism became an important weapon in the struggle to assert overall hegemony. Hollywood, popular music, cultural forms, and even whole political movements, such as those of civil rights, were mobilized to foster the desire to emulate the American way. The US was constructed as a beacon of freedom that had the exclusive power to entrain the rest of the world into an enduring civilization characterized by peace and prosperity’ (Harvey 2005: 56). 11. ‘Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Committed to delivering innovation, Accenture collaborates with its clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. With deep industry and business process expertise, broad global resources and a proven track record, Accenture can mobilize the right people, skills, and technologies to help clients improve their performance’ (http://www.accenture.com/Global/About_Accenture/default.htm (accessed 02.04.2007)). 12. SOA = Super Output Area. ‘Super Output Areas (SOAs) are a new geographic hierarchy designed to improve the reporting of small area statistics in England and Wales’. (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/geography/soa.asp (accessed 10.04.2007)). 13. Chapter 3, Section 1 takes the issues raised here further by arguing that history is epistemologically predisposed to ideological exploitation. 14. Translation note: Ausgleich has a range of meanings, including “evening out” (e.g. of irregularities), “easing” (e.g. of tensions), “reconciliation” (e.g. of differences), “settlement” (e.g. of a debt), “balancing” (e.g. of an account). But the German also has other resonances: the stem “gleich” can mean adjectivally the “same”, “identical”, or “equal”. (Hence also Gleichschaltung which translates literally as ‘switch to the same’, ‘switch to conformity’.) The English translation of Mannheim’s Ideologie und Utopie renders the phrase Zeitalter des Ausgleichs as ‘epoch of equalization’ (Mannheim 1979: 251). Consonant with Scheler’s essay ‘Der Mensch im Zeitalter des Ausgleichs’ [Man in the Age of Equalization] [1927] that defi nes the concept, Mannheim’s argument makes it clear that equalization has nothing to do with egalitarianism. 15. The terms ‘vicious bifurcation of nature’, ‘extensive abstraction’, and ‘prehension’ derive from Whitehead’s neo-positivistic theory of knowledge (cf. Whitehead 2004: 30, 74ff., 185; 1967b: 176, 228, 234). 16. The concept of the ‘historical unconscious’ is developed in Chapter 3. 17. Fancy, apprehension (cf. ‘anxieties’), and theological order are characteristic features of the discourse of history’s scientific self-vindication (cf. Historics 2006a: 33, 67–69, 75, 91). 18. ‘The Bard as Management Role Model? How the fool in King Lear could teach management gurus a valuable lesson’ is the title of a press release that appeared on 5 February 2007 in the University of Leicester’s weekly eBulletin. . . . It announces a new module on ‘Shakespeare and Management’ on the MBA course. The module ‘looks at how Shakespeare’s work can be used in management training and encourages students [ . . . ] to develop a broader understanding of how effective literary texts in general can be in offering insights into management techniques’. The module leader stresses ‘the distinctions between fiction and the reality of management styles. He regards it as impoverishing both Shakespeare and Management to try and create an

Notes

227

artificial affinity between the two.’ He further states that ‘because Shakespeare is often regarded as an “expert” on life and human nature surely he must be able to teach us about management and leadership. But [he warns!] Shakespeare wasn’t writing about real people, he was writing about fictitious characters’. He points out that Shakespeare was writing ‘in a different time, a different context and about different types of leadership—kings and queens rather than heads of industry’. Finally, he is quoted as saying: ‘If these management gurus want “solutions” from drama then they are looking at the wrong level. They need to appreciate the “shop floor” person, the whistle-blower, the fool in King Lear for example. If anyone has the answers they do’ (http:// www.2.le.ac.uk./ebulletin/news/press-releases/2000-2009/2007/02/nparticle.2007-02-02.3303817647 (accessed 5.02.2007). For much, much more of the same, see Thomas McGrath, ‘Shakespeare and Management: A Study in Cultural Appropriation’ (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Leicester 2005). 19. Sir Geoffrey Crossick was chief-executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, one of the leading financial sponsors of humanities research in the United Kingdom, from 2003 until 2005 when it was replaced by the Arts and Humanities Research Council with a broadly similar mandate. His redundant (tautological) formulations are redolent of the vacuity typical of managerial position-statements. The point is: if knowledge can only be known through the past that it has, we must first know that the past exists. That means we have knowledge of something (i.e. that there could be some such thing as the past) before knowing that knowledge has a past: i.e. we actually do have knowledge (i.e. of the past) that isn’t known through its past. In other words, the proposition is viciously circular: it contradicts itself. There’s no need to go into the other issues: e.g. that knowledge, even knowledge of the past of knowledge, is the product of an always present cognitive act; or that to say (a) that the humanities understand the world we make, and (b) that subjectivity is a form of understanding, amounts simply to the basic, quite redundant truism: (c) that we need understanding to understand what we do.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. cf. Elias 2000: 209–10. I have modified the English translation. It tends to substitute a variety of abstractions for terms used consistently in a materialistic sense: e.g. Verfl echtung is variously rendered as ‘interrelationship’, integration’, ‘interdependency’, ‘interweaving’ (cf. ‘interwovenness’ (Karlsson 2003: 11)). Verfl echten, which does mean ‘intertwine’ or ‘interlink’, is based on fl echten which means physically to ‘braid’, ‘plait’ or ‘weave’ something (as in ‘basket-weaving’). Significantly, given its coercive connotations both here and in Elias’ argument, the phrase jemandem auf einen Rad fl echten translates the torture-practice of ‘breaking someone on a wheel’. 2. For clarity and accuracy in this quotation I have modified the published English translation. Further, Mannheim’s reference to the ‘historical process’ does not escape the earlier criticisms of this figure. The fact that he uses it, reveals an inconsistency that only reinforces his argument. After all, if the total reality of history eludes one’s capacity to comprehend it, how could he know it is a process? If, as he says, all knowledge is socially conditioned, he would only ever discover that history, as it is socially conceived (e.g. as a ‘process’), masks its actual reality. As he remarks: ‘Historical events appear as a process only as long as the class which views these events still expects something from it’ (Mannheim 1979: 129; cf. 1995: 127).

228

Notes

3. Historically speaking the same old thing is the same as the latest thing: ‘[ . . . ] the Cutty Sark was transferred to the wool trade where it achieved international fame ratcheting up record sprints between Sydney and London to deliver last minute sales. With an intensity akin to today’s formula one, newspapers, dock workers and City traders followed its dashes round the world’ (Hunt 2007: 32 (my italics)). In this heterogeneous discourse that makes the two objects interchangeable, where anything can be the same as anything else, the anachronistic equivalence is underscored by the hyperbolic similes [illusio], themselves imported from a further field of meaning, athletics. 4. Historical processes ensure that change and identity are synonymous: hence, historians’ anachronistic analogies. For a similar remark, see (e.g.) Thomas Huxley’s comment in the 1894 ‘Prolegomena’ to his Romanes Lecture on ‘Evolution and Ethics’ (1893): ‘There can be no doubt that vast changes have taken place in English society since the reign of the Tudors. But I am not aware of a particle of evidence in favour of the conclusion that this evolutionary process has been accompanied by any modification of the physical, or the mental, characters of the men who have been the subject of it. I have not met with any grounds for suspecting that the average Englishmen of to-day are sensibly different from those that Shakspere knew and drew. We look into his magic mirror of the Elizabethan age, and behold, nowise darkly, the presentment of ourselves’ (Huxley 1911a: 38–9). 5. In the original text: ‘aber gerade, wenn der Blick für diese fundamentale Geschichtlichkeit der Menschen frei wird, eröffnet sich ihm zugleich die Gesetzmäßigkeit, die Aufbaueigentümlichkeit des menschlichen Daseins, die sich gleich bleibt.’ Here too the English translation misses the identitary implications of Elias’ argument: ‘But at the very moment when this fundamental historicity of human beings is clearly seen, we also perceive the regularity, the structural characteristics which remain constant’ (Elias 2000: 403). 6. cf. the discussion of Celan’s poem ‘Death-Fugue’ (Weiser 2006: 213): ‘The author reveals the factological “skeleton” as a literary technique for reconstructing emotions and traumatic experience, which thereby blocks a historical analysis of the literary text’s “historical basis”. Felstiner calls the “black milk” metaphor scandalous, because it states a factual contradiction for the very purpose of transmitting this fact [i.e. of being in an concentration camp]. It is the extremum, the Impossible in itself. But what if there is no metaphor here at all? [ . . . ] In this case the imaginary loses to the reality of the historical past [ . . . ]. But the reality described by Celan is no longer just the reality of the concentration camp, but also the endless, hopeless reality of the captive’s memory.’ 7. The English translation deviates from and so—here as elsewhere—attenuates the force of the coercive proposition in the original. The German text runs: ‘wenn die Zusammenarbeit der Menschen, die die Grundlage für die Existenz jedes Einzelnen bildet, derart funktioniert, daß es für alle, die in der reichgegliederten Kette der gemeinsamen Aufgaben Hand in Hand arbeiten, zum mindesten möglich ist, dieses Gleichgewicht zu fi nden [ . . . ].’ The translation has simply: ‘[ . . . ] if the co-existence of people with each other, which after all is the condition of the individual existence of each of them, functions in such a way that it is possible for all those bonded to each other in this manner to attain this balance, [ . . . ].’

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/england/london/5378780.stm (accessed 28.09.2006).

Notes

229

2. See: http://www.timeout.com/london/restaurants/features/1522.html (accessed 28.09.2006). 3. As (e.g.) the long-running and popular BBC archaeological exploration programme, ‘Time Team’, demonstrates: week by week it takes the audience through all the technical procedures and forms of professional expertise that make the evidence of the past legible. 4. See: ‘History Matters—Pass it on: About the Campaign’, at http://historymatters.org.uk (accessed 20.09.2006). 5. ‘Why History Matters’ at http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-trust/wthecharity/w-policy-history_matters_update.htm (accessed 05.02.2009) 6. e.g. in the UK the ‘dysfunctional housing market’ has produced an ‘increasingly detached underclass’: ‘Today, a million children live in overcrowded, rundown, damp or dangerous housing. The number of homeless people in Britain has risen to 391,000; and across the UK 93,000 families are living in temporary accommodation, twice the number when Labour came to power. The average price paid by fi rst-time buyers has doubled in five years. House prices are now beyond the reach of fi rst-time buyers in 93% of towns, up from 37% in 2001’ (Braund 2007: 32). In July 2007 the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported ‘that Britain is moving back to levels of inequality in wealth and poverty last seen more than 40 years ago’. It also pointed out that ‘throughout this period, the personal wealth held by the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population grew as a proportion of the national share (from 17 per cent in 1991 to 24 per cent in 2002)’, (JRF 2007: 1, 2). 7. In fact Baudrillard seems to formulate here an abbreviated version of Sextus Empiricus’s refutation of causal explanations as being circular (Sextus Empiricus 2000a: 338-9; III, 20–23) (See Chapter 1). 8. The argument here does not intend to imply that the Aristotelian concept of potency converges with the potential of the unconscious (as defi ned by Freudian psychoanalysis). Aristotle confi rms what seems to be an a priori cosmological principle, that ‘even before the creation of our universe there was an arrow of time and that this arrow has no reason to disappear’ (Prigogine 2001: 218). Rather, within the sphere of purely human existence, the unconscious can be seen as a timeless, always present substratum: the Oedipus myth is thus always true. 9. With the front-page headline, ‘Britain: the most spied on nation in the world. Our Big Brother state stands alongside Russia and China in the snooping league’ and an article entitled ‘Ever felt you’re being watched? You are. Big Brother really has got his eye on you’, The Daily Telegraph, 2 November 2006, summarizes a report by the Surveillance Studies Network commissioned by the Information Commissioner whose job is to ‘monitor the extent of Government intrusiveness’. The report defi nes UK society as a de facto surveillance society. With an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras (i.e. one for every 14 people), the already existing surveillance systems ‘represent a basic, complex infrastructure that assumes that gathering and processing personal data is vital to contemporary living’. It also points out that this society where surveillance is ‘endemic’ ‘bespeaks a world where we know we’re not really trusted’, since ‘surveillance fosters suspicion’. The report envisages that by 2016 the various surveillance technologies will be working in combination to provide unprecedented levels of data gathering: i.e. CCTV systems, the National Identity Register, biometric data on ID systems, tracking technologies in mobile phones and ID cards, DNA information will together monitor people’s movements, behaviour, and consumer preferences largely without them even being aware of it or able to escape from it. Both the level of surveillance and its possibly nefarious uses ultimately spell ‘social suicide’ since they

230 Notes

10. 11.

12. 13.

undermine the trust on which social relationships depend (Johnston 2006a: 2; 2006b: 4). Expérience can be translated as both ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’. In an article entitled ‘Pioneers in a new age of discovery’ reporting a breakthrough in understanding the make-up of the human genome, The Independent newspaper describes the ‘second half of the 20th century’ as ‘the age of the new biology, when molecular genetics began to explain many of the distinguishing features of humanity, from inherited diseases to the origins of man’. It also quotes James Watson, one of the fi rst to unravel the structure of DNA in 1953, asserting (in 1990) that unravelling the full sequence of the human genome would be comparable to the goal of landing a man on the moon (Connor 2006: 3). In the historicized world even the historically unprecedented event has an unprecedented precedent: identitary thinking ensures these unprecedented events are “like” each other. These are allusions to books by Furet (1997), Bloch (1974), and Williams (2007), respectively (cf. Bibliography). http://www.beamish.org.uk/ (accessed 17.11.2007).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. Even before his inauguration (20 January 2009), the presidency of Barack Obama was being described as historical. His agenda for change was being framed in historical retrospect, both in relation to the history of race relations in the USA (by the media) and in relation to Abraham Lincoln as a role model (by Obama himself). 2. cf. http://www.historyassociates.com/services/index.htm (accessed 08.05.2008). 3. ibid. 4. ‘Neugierde’, translates from German literally as ‘desire for the new’. Hans Blumenberg’s study, Der Prozeß der theoretischen Neugierde [The Process of Theoretical Curiosity] (1966), explores the concept of curiosity as a motivation for scientific enquiry. 5. A linguistic point: in this discussion ‘civil’ translates the German words ‘Sitte’ (n.) and ‘sittlich’ (adj.) Droysen uses to defi ne the function of history. ‘Sitte’ means ‘manners’, ‘tradition’, ‘common decency’, but in this context mainly implies ‘civil society’. 6. The discussion that follows identifies the main principles of Droysen’s theory of history since they are still operative in current historical scholarship. Needless to say, there’s no space for acknowledging either the varying emphasis they receive or the inconsistencies arising between different versions of the lectures in the quarter of a century over which they were reiterated. 7. The identity principle holds formally. However, in ‘learning through enquiry’ (i.e., into facts and issues) historical knowledge is particular and pragmatic. It’s neither the ideal, theoretical knowledge [nous] Aristotle refers to in his Metaphysics, nor the theoretical reason [nous] that, according to Hegel (himself citing Anaxagoras), actually does rule the world (Hegel 1961: 51). On the association of histor with oida (‘learning through hearsay’), see Barbara Cassin’s exhaustive study of the sophists (Cassin 1995: 488). 8. Anthropic bias is a complex issue involving ‘an elusive, controversial, and multifariously paradoxical set of problems’ (cf. Bostrom 2002: 204). It’s probably only fully accessible to philosophers of science and cosmologists,— and there seems to be little consensus amongst them about the forms it takes and its internal logical consistency. Certainly, caution is advisable whenever

Notes

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

231

analogies for historical “processes” are sought in the procedures and results of natural science. Here, it simply provides an opportunity for a candid assessment of historical knowledge practices. A simple analogy, by way of illustration: two urns, one containing ten tickets, the other one thousand. Not knowing which is which, you draw number six. The odds are you used the urn with ten tickets: it’s unlikely you would draw a number as small as six from the urn with a thousand tickets (Rees 2004: 137). Similarly you are very unlikely to exist at an early stage of the human population. Biologists, anthropologists, and cosmologists may well debate whether homo sapiens is an ‘extremely young’ species or whether it’s in its fi nal phase, as the Doomsday Argument conjectures (cf. Schaeffer 2007: 326): the central issue here is that neither view vindicates the historian’s allegedly privileged cognitive situation. US Census Bureau, Historical Estimates of World Population, at: http:// www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldhis.html (accessed 01.06.2008). ‘Ninety-five per cent of the world’s population increase is taking place in the developing world [ . . . ]. It is in the developing world that the pressures to provide a public history will seem most acute. Indeed, the volatility of these societies [is] such that there will appear to be particular need for the development and exposition of unifying national myths [ . . . ]’, (Black 2005: 180). Public history provides myths [illusio] for controlling the multitudes in the future. A stable, predictable, dynamic system would be a pendulum oscillating from a fi xed point following a calculable trajectory, its attractor the position it reaches when at rest. Suppose, as in a chaotic system, the pendulum were oscillating from a point that kept shifting, the randomly looping paths its oscillations describe would defi ne its chaotic attractor (cf. Prigogine & Stengers 2001: 79-81).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. A further irony may be intended here. Neoptolemus’s murderous career is hardly a testimony to the effectiveness of the “beautiful discourse” of the wise and aged Nestor. 2. According to the translator, the consensus is that Plato is not the author of this dialogue. 3. The sophistical, story-telling function persists, along with a modernized version of its pre-requisite magic-lantern, television, the ‘small screen’: ‘The Holmeses, Starkeys and Schamas are the storytellers of our age. They are the ones who bring research out of the academy and offer it to the many’ (Downing 2004: 16). 4. An example of this mass-hypnotism is the National Trust’s report Why History Matters (2007). The affi rmations of history, encapsulated in numerous sound-bites from the public, work like the inane mantras voiced by the ‘last human beings’ in Also sprach Zarathustra (Nietzsche 1988d: 19; I, §5)—as in this melancholy reflection from an 11-year-old child: ‘There is no escaping from history. It is all around us. You will be history one day. I will be history one day, the mouldy orange in the fruit bowl will be history one day’ (p. 5); or this one from a 10-year-old: ‘I love visiting these historical places because it makes me think where I have come from’ (p. 16). But these children can be excused: they are merely reiterating what their teachers or parents have told

232 Notes

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

them. The adults’ comments are just as infantile, just as naïve: e.g., ‘If we forget history we will have no way to know ourselves’ (p. 11); ‘Delving back into the past gives me a sense of meaning, and of our place in the greater scheme of things’ (p. 10); ‘We must learn to relish our place in the world. Love our culture and understand how our history has led to our present lives’ (p. 23). One comment (from a certain Linda Colley) sounds like astrology: ‘History cannot tell you what to do. But it might warn you what to avoid—and what to expect’ (p. 24). e.g. the same Hugh Trevor-Roper who documented the life of a confidence trickster and counterfeiter in the fascinating Hermit of Peking. The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse, revised edn., (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), was initially taken in by the forged “Hitler Diaries” in 1983. These terms come from Heidegger’s Identität und Differenz. It defi nes the identity principle (A = A) as (i) a formula of equivalence [Gleichheit] (when the terms are different); (ii) something being ‘the same with and for itself’ [selber dasselbe]; and (iii) a necessary ‘belonging together’ [Zusammengehören] (cf. Heidegger 2002: 11–19). After the initial shock of the terrorist attack on Mumbai (26-29 November 2008) and as its scale and brutality became clear, the media began to refer to it as India’s 9/11: in the historicized world the latest thing is inevitably the same as the same old thing, as though that might anaesthetize one’s immediate sense of apprehension (cf. Davies 2006a: 4). ‘It seems unthinkable, but for the fi rst time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year’ (Connor 2008:1). How big the smallest fish in the pond is, depends on the smallest size of fish your net can catch. The point is: you don’t know a priori what size of net to use. If you assume that you already know what size to use because you think you are ‘best placed’ to make that assumption, the chances are you haven’t allowed for the possibility of a misleading self-selection effect (cf. Bostrom 2002: 1). ‘Placed before’ translates into German as vor-gestellt, a Vorstellung, i.e. something imagined, an image, a performance. Here too the garden analogy signifies indifference to human suffering. The terms Lebenszeit and Weltzeit come from Hans Blumenberg’s study on the cultural significance of temporality, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (1986). To spell it out: ipso facto there isn’t process that wouldn’t involve change, nor change that wouldn’t involve process; to trace is to presuppose trajectory, the idea of trajectory prompts the tracing of it. Prigogine describes these random bifurcations as introducing ‘history’ or ‘an historical element’ into the physics and chemistry of dissipative systems (Prigogine 1994: 31; 2001: 83). But ‘history’ and ‘historical’ here signify nothing more than they do in common parlance, i.e.: ‘significant event’. They refer to anything but the central concern of the present study: history as the systemic regulation of reality, operating on the basis of equivalences and analogies constructed by means of identitary structures to enforce historyfocussed thinking and behaviour, hence to affi rm dominant political and economic values. As in the spectacles in Iraq in March 2003 or in Gaza in January 2009 watched on TV by the whole world.

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250 Bibliography OTHER DOCUMENTS Leicester City Council (2007) Leicester Link, March. The History Channel & English Heritage (2002) Is there something you’re not telling us? A small piece of history. The Story of Berlin. Die Erlebnisausstellung der Hauptstadt (2002).

Index

A a-type sequences (of events), 11, 144, 149. See also b-type sequences academic culture, 132; academic experts, 87; academic function, 174, 175; academic knowledge, 174; academic studiousness, 86; administrative mentality of, 147; instinctive conformism in, 131; specialization, 36, 38, 43–44 accidents, 97, 106, 124, 133, 160, 163, 166; catastrophes, 165–166; contingent circumstances, 15, 37, 191–192, 213 administered world, 29, 33, 70, 96, 147, 185 aesthesis, 2, 3, 8, 11–12, 14–15, 35, 46, 49, 72, 77, 80, 86, 110, 136, 141, 143, 157, 161, 167, 170, 191–192, 194, 201, 210; aesthetic dimension, 73 akribeia, 105 alignment of personal and social consciousness, 15, 18–19, 25–26, 28, 48, 62 amplification (of historical knowledge), 91, 101, 130, 159, 184, 185, 204 anaesthetic (history as), 3, 123, 163; narcotic, 3, 71, 73, 211; sedative, 30, 211; stimulant, 30 analogy, 60, 66, 139, 154, 167, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192, 196, 203–205, 208, 211, 215, 218; analogical reasoning, 1, 188. See also equivalences anomie, 15, 30, 38, 43–45, 168, 198, 214 (see also despondency) anthropic bias, 7, 14, 92, 128, 153, 155, 160, 168, 171, 182, 195,

197–198, 216–218; anthropic conceit, 54–56, 112, 117, 120, 205, 213; anthropic principle, 14, 108, 141, 155–160, 170–171, 189, 191, 195, 201, 217–219 anthropocentrism (history as an expression of): anthropocentric fantasy, 143; anthropocentric perspective, 140; anthropocentric thinking, 137; anthropocentric vision, 140 apprehension, 6, 8, 11, 15, 31, 34–35, 38–39, 45, 55, 60, 69–70, 76, 80, 82, 90, 92–96, 98, 101–104, 106, 118, 127, 155–156, 166–167, 175, 177, 191, 194, 198–199, 203, 207, 210–211, 214, 217–218 atomization (of historical knowledge), 37, 42, 45, 169. See also ephemeralization; atomization authoritarianism (exerted by history), 87–88, 105, 152 authority, 181, 183, 187, 190–192, 203, 214–216

B b-type sequences (as historicizing management of events), 11, 93, 100, 144, 149, 202–203. See also a-type sequences biotechnology, 55, 119; biotechnicians, 119. See also eugenics

C capitalism, 7, 15, 17–18, 23–25, 27, 45, 89–90, 94, 97, 119–120, 125– 127, 161,180, 184; accumula-

252 Index tion, 134–135, 163; capitalistic production, 16, 134; enslavement, 177; schizoidal disorientation, 97; schizoid mentality, 90 catachresis, 29–30, 148, 151, 192 categorical coordinators, 2, 13, 36, 42, 50, 67, 70, 82, 104–106, 136, 141, 145, 150, 161, 163, 167, 183, 186, 188–189, 195, 203, 205, 207–208, 212, 216, 218 cause (causality and causation in the historicizing management of reality), 8, 12–14, 35, 50, 52, 60, 95, 136–137, 139, 146, 154, 163–167 certainty, 4, 5, 8, 40, 42 chains (in historical and sociological explanation), 52, 57, 71, 76, 79, 108, 110, 112, 124, 151, 152, 181, 203. See also coercion chance, 156, 163, 166–167, 203 chaos, 67, 77, 163–164, 167–168, 170–171, 203, 206, 211, 215; chaotic dynamic, 91, 208; chaotic fragmentation, 216; chaotic systems, 164, 166, 205; creative unpredictability of, 171 civilizing process, 53, 74, 76–78, 112, 137, 167, 176 coercion (exerted through historicization), 105, 152, 176, 181, 188, 202; coerced behaviour, 73; coerced existence, 125; coercive correction, 194; coercive culture, 46; coercive designs, 13; coercive dynamic, 78; coercive effect, 203; coercive environments, 83, 112; coercive figures, 68; coercive force of history, 15, 136, 143, 169, 174, 191–192, 203, 205, 216; coercive images, 57; coercive occlusion (effected by history), 192; coercive practices, 94; coercive prospect (offered by history), 204; coercive rhetoric, 30, 106; coercive self-interest, 29; coercive thinking, 59; coercive thought-styles, 35, 46, 48–49, 73, 74, 110; coercive totality (of history), 47 cognition (in relation to history), 14, 92, 131, 135, 155–156, 168, 177, 183, 185, 202, 212–213; cognitive advantage, 120,

139, 159; cognitive apparatus, 182; cognitive aptitude, 134; cognitive centrality, 133, 161; cognitive destitution, 185; cognitive imperatives, 106; cognitive intention, 7, 83; cognitive norms, 183, 184, 191; cognitive obligation, 60, 94; cognitive patterns, 107; cognitive potential, 45, 140; cognitive powers, 182; cognitive priority, 87; cognitive privilege (of history), 16, 41, 106, 131–132, 135–137, 139, 141, 143, 155, 158–160, 162, 168, 170–171, 187–189, 191, 207; cognitive redundancy, 3; cognitive self-centredness, 16, 19; cognitive situation, 12, 83, 176, 183, 200–201, 214; cognitive stability, 169; cognitive supremacy, 88, 104, 105; cognitive value, 36, 84, 127, 132, 144, 162, 163, 186, 190–191, 202, 205–206, 208, 212 commodity thinking, 16 commonplaces (common places of historical confinement), 3, 19, 33, 60, 65, 67, 69, 94, 98, 103, 106, 124–125, 133, 138, 151, 181, 186, 191, 208; commonplace identities, 193; premise of place, 132; social cohesion, 34, 131, 203 comprehension, 5, 7, 11, 40, 43, 88, 104–105, 115, 138, 148–150, 152, 159–160, 176, 178, 181, 183–184, 191, 196, 200–203, 205, 207, 209, 213, 215, 218– 219; comprehensive designs, 2; comprehensive framework, 25; comprehensive knowledge, 5, 142, 154, 170; comprehensive knowledge-structure, 18; comprehensiveness, 151, 158; comprehensive organization, 16; comprehensive regulation, 17; consciousness, 3, 138, 140–146, 154, 156–157, 165, 168, 171 constraint, constraints (exercised or imposed by history), 59, 74, 75, 80, 106–110, 125, 152; correctional constraint, 59; carceral constraints, 206 correctional function (of history), 137, 176, 187, 213; correctional

Index authority, 57, 160, 163, correctional capacity, 130, 162; correctional effect, 158; correctional intention, 141, 190, 199; correctional machine, 186; correctional responsibilities, 155; correctional stance, 178; correctness, 9. See also coercion creative economy, 121 c-type sequences, 93. See also a-type sequences; b-type sequences culture: commemorative culture, 49; culture industries, 23; culture of commercialism, 84; culture of illusion, 23; culture of reproduction, 23; cultural practice, 175, 178–179; cultural privilege, 180 cunning of reason, 102 curiosity, 135, 215

D déjà-vu, 82, 90, 91, 127 deception (in historical culture), 49–50, 130, 172, 175–176, 184, 190–191, 199–200, 202; deceptive practices, 180, 197 (see also sophistry) demographic dynamic (of history), 161–163 despondency, 15, 30, 35–36, 38, 42, 44. See also anomie discipline (required and enforced by history), 1, 2, 34–35, 39, 40, 42-43, 44, 48, 64–65, 70, 86–88, 129, 132–134, 136, 155, 161, 174–175, 179, 184, 194 dromomania, 124; dromospheric environment, 215; ever-accelerating dynamic of reality, 124

E entropy, 215; entropic age, 190; entropic universe, 201; experiential depreciation, 207–209 ephemeralization (of historical knowledge), 40, 162, 169 equivalences, 60, 62–63, 65–67, 186, 188, 192, 195–196, 205, 218 ethics, 118–119,129, 146–147, 153; ethical rectitude, 130; ethical urgency, 211 eugenics (as history), 114, 117; eugenic aims, 32; eugenic conception, 113; eugenic goals, 29; eugenic

253

ideals, 30; eugenic intention, 32; eugenic objectives, 45; eugenic perspective, 113 everyday life, 22–23, 26, 28, 83, 87, 101, 106 evolution, 50, 56–57, 62–63, 113, 136–137, 140, 149, 153, 160, 162, 164, 166, 178, 206, 217; evolutionary process, 89

F figurations, 75–76, 79; binding configurations, 48 figures (in historical explanation), 49, 50–52, 57, 58, 73; biological and geological figures, 58; braiding, 78; dynamics of interweaving, 78; figure of growth, 51, 53–55, 78; human “interwovenness” in history, 46; making, 50, 52, 64, 67–68; process, 50–51, 57, 58, 63, 68, 73, 75–76, 78, 80; shaping, 83, 98, 100, 104–105, 113, 116, 118, 120. See also evolution fundamentalism, 35–36, 40, 42, 101, 106, 112, 115; dogmatic faith, 40; dogmatism, 9; fanaticism, 6; fundamentalist reflexes, 167; religious fundamentalism, 68; religious fundamentalist conflict, 2–3; superstition, 9; zealotry, 6, 9

G galleries, 17, 20–21, 23, 26, 28, 121. See also museums God, 133, 140, 146, 148, 168

H heritage, 20–21, 47–48, 51, 58, 61–62, 84, 86–87, 89, 97, 131, 193; heritage dividend, 22; heritage industry, 20, 25, 117 historian, as: cleric, 185; clerical authority, 40–42; existential paradigm, 86; high priest, 40–41, 94, 128, 133–136, 141–142, 150, 160, 195; gate-keeper, 112, 128, 195, 213; information engineer, 28, 158; opinion-former, 131; policy advisor, 129; resource manager, 28, 87, 158, 185, 187; responsible citizen, 129; scholarly

254 Index administrator, 28; storyteller, 105; surrogate priest, 141; technical expert, 128, 130, 131 historian-function, 37, 83, 86, 88, 129– 132, 158, 186–187, 188, 192, 195, 197; historian-manager, 203; historian-technicians, 5 historic environment, 47–48, 84 historical capital, 187 historical catastrophe, 43 historical classifications, 70 historical cognition, 157, 177 historical consciousness, 3, 8, 24, 41, 49, 52–53, 80 historical context, 49–50, 70, 134, 142, 152 historical credulity, 187 historical culture, 24, 26, 34, 46, 72 historical dereliction, 23 historical discourse, 36, 42, 182, 186, 205, 208; discursive effects in, 130, 176 historical dynamic, 164 historical environment, 19, 34 historical evidence, 7 historical expertise, 130 historical explanation, 10, 165, 167, 205 historical facts, 3, 8, 30 historical hyperconsciousness, 8, 18, 34, 53, 79, 82 historical identity, 15, 69, 72. See also identity historical illusion, 4 historical images, 145, 176–177, 185 historical inevitability, 56 historical interests, 46 historical knowledge, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 18, 20, 29, 34–35, 40–41, 43, 45–46, 57, 60, 64–65, 67–68, 73, 82, 85–86, 89, 91, 95–96, 98, 100–101, 103, 127–132, 135, 139, 144, 146, 149–150, 151, 155, 158–159, 166, 175, 184, 201, 212–213, 215, 218–219 historical narratives, 3 historical objects, 34 historical order, 94 historical potential, 93, 96, 100, 102, 124 historical practice, 137, 154 historical processes, 1, 2, 15, 64, 67, 91, 103, 134, 148

historical production, 36 historical reality, 14, 90 historical representation, 69, 82, 104 historical research, 101, 136, 144–145 historical scholarship, 42 historical science, 135, 142, 147–149, 151 historical situation, 18 historical thinking, 49, 129, 136–137, 139, 144 historical thought-styles, 134 historical unconscious, 37–38, 42, 83, 91–93, 95, 98–106, 114, 118, 125, 164, 166, 179; parapraxis(as its symptom), 98, 193; repetition-compulsion (as its symptom), 98 historical unconscious (social configurations): existential constraints, 88; experiment (as history), 4, 9, 114–115, 117; experimentation, 92, 112, 114, laboratory, 83, 106, 112–118, 120; prison, 81, 83, 106–109, 111–112, 120, 125, 206, 215; work-place, 83, 106, 120–121, 125–126, 203 historical values, 34 historical world, 136, 144, 150 historicism, 1, 50, 128–129, 154, 167, 169, 181, 188, 203; historicist thinking, 202 historicization, 3, 9, 16–18, 23, 33, 35, 36, 42, 44–46, 51, 55, 64, 82, 85, 94, 97, 101, 104, 107, 109–110, 117–119, 124–126, 135, 149, 155, 158, 169, 175, 177, 184–185, 189–190, 192–193, 213–214; historicizing capital, 17; historicizing dynamic, 162; historicizing ideology, 47; historicizing mentality, 29, 34, 39, 46–47, 63, 80, 98, 134–135, 155, 195, 208; historicizing psychopathology, 98; historicizing reconstructions, 208; historicizing rhetoric, 191, 194; historicizing strategy, 177, 191; historicizing thought-style, 49, 141; self-historicization, 128; self-historicizing culture, 34, 46; self-historicizing world, 163 historicized consciousness, 22, 24, 27, 31, 59, 65, 73–74, 82–83, 85, 91–92, 104, 107, 109, 210

Index historicized culture, 17, 27, 30, 45, 135, 175, 183, 184–185 historicized knowledge, 34 historicized existence, 74 historicized future, 195 historicized life, 33, 98, 106, 112, 175, 194 historicized mentality, 110 historicized mind, 81, 84, 102 historicized reality, 2, 25, 132 historicized society, 138, 187 historicized thinking, 19–20, 25, 31, 48, 57, 59, 66, 73, 78–80, 85–86, 90, 106, 111, 117, 135, 147, 151, 160, 168, 189–190, 197–198, 212 historicized thought, 65, 105–107, 132, 163 historicized world, 2, 3, 8–9, 15, 19, 24, 26, 28, 31, 33–37, 40, 44, 49, 52–55, 62–64, 68, 72–73, 77, 79–80, 83–86, 88–92, 95–96, 98–101, 103–104, 106, 109–115, 117, 119–120, 124, 127–128, 130, 133, 138, 146, 150, 153, 158–167, 169, 175– 177, 180, 184–185, 187–189, 191, 193, 195–196, 198, 209, 211, 213, 215, 218–219 history: affirmative function, 141; behavioural corrective, 195; bureaucratic regulation, 152; dysfunctional organization, 30, 43, 168; experience-supplement, 9; faith surrogate, 184; general self of mankind, 140, 150; global surveillance-system, 133; ideology, 45; ideological claims, 206; ideological prejudice, 208; illusion-generating system, 23; impersonal agency, 51, 113; incarceration, 86, 105, 107, 109–110; information management-system, 194; informationmanagement technology, 147, 165, 176; knowledge management-system, 147; management instrument, 202, 205, 209; management-system, 92, 96, 98, 150; managerial functions, 138; managerial technology, 17, 97, 134, 190, 192, 198; megamachine, 5, 59, 89, 96, 97, 117, 124, 126–127, 154, 179;

255

narcissistic compensation, 139; narcissistic illusion, 143; nostalgic projection, 8; open-prison, 213; penitentiary, 181, 194; privileged cognitive function of, 128; quasi-religious dogma, 37; reality-surrogate, 8; religionsubstitute, 40; self-cultivation, 114; self-delusion, 86, 92, 130, 133, 141; self-enforcing tautology, 151; self-experimentation, 119–120; self-identical character of, 118; self-identity, 69, 73; selfimage, 63, 86, 88, 90, 97, 120, 151, 168; self-incriminated consciousness, 98; self-interest, 82, 83, 86, 119; self-perpetuating logic, 80; self-validating authority, 94; social ligature, 204; social-management technology, 5, 41; species-narcissism, 213; surrogate theology, 41; symbolic capital, 84, 134; technological appliance, 8; technological device, 181, 204; technology, 5, 46, 54, 59, 62, 78, 167; technology of technologies, 40, 69, 70, 83, 111, 119, 127, 147, 151, 158 history-focussed behaviour, 15–17, 20–22, 24–27, 29–31, 33–37, 42, 46, 48, 58, 69, 77, 82–84, 86–87, 95, 103, 106–107, 109, 115, 121, 128, 158–159, 161, 163, 169, 180, 187, 191, 213 history ideology, 45 history technology, 8, 179, 209 homo sapiens, 114, 117, 137, 154–155, 158–160, 165, 170 human self-incrimination, 96 human species, 56, 75, 77, 80–81, 87, 118, 120, 128, 137, 139, 153, 160, 162, 168, 170, 195, 198, 217–218 humanism, 112, 118 humanities, 34–40, 42–45 humanity, 88–89, 91, 102–103, 106, 112, 118–120, 122, 126–128, 136–137, 139, 143, 146–149, 152, 153, 159, 162, 171

I identitary thinking, 6, 13, 16–17, 35, 46, 59–60, 63, 65, 67–70, 72,

256 Index 86, 90, 105, 110, 117–118, 132, 137, 141, 143, 145, 148, 155, 170, 181, 196, 205, 215, 218; identitary categories, 78, 86, 87, 181, 182; identitary certainty, 179; identitary circumstances, 208; identitary constructions, 104, 211; identitary conventions, 13; identitary devices, 165; identitary formations, 119; identitary illusion, 9; identitary logic, 9–12, 14, 34, 61, 86, 97, 100, 104, 115–116, 119–120, 127, 188; identitary nominations, 98; identitary norms, 185; identitary practices, 19, 186; identitary precedents, 106; identitary procedures, 6; identitary process, 79; identitary propositions, 136; identitary rationale, 73; identitary stability, 165; identitary structures, 195; identitary terms, 179; identitary thought-forms, 60; self-mirroring propositions in, 23 identity, 18, 29, 30, 47–48, 50, 54–55, 59, 62, 64, 68, 70–71, 73, 78, 89, 94, 177, 182, 186–187, 190, 196, 204, 212; identical cases, 6; identical structures, 6; identification, 69; identity construction, 18; identity formation, 19; identity-forming procedures, 6; national identity, 29, 53; synthetic identity, 31 identities, 2, 6, 9, 18, 34, 37, 42, 131, 136–137, 161, 167, 170 identity principle, 36, 60, 62–65, 67–69, 81, 83, 91, 98, 132–133, 137–139, 161, 171, 182, 186, 188 ideology (in history, history’s uses of), 7, 15, 18, 20, 23, 28, 37, 38, 46, 48, 61, 67, 69, 88; ideological authority, 106; ideological coercion, 61, 71; ideological deception, 33; ideological foundation, 72; ideological function, 87; ideological history, 28; ideological identities, 69; ideological intent, 72; ideological persuasiveness, 45; ideological reconfiguration, 91; ideological self-legitimization, 90; ideologi-

cal self-projection, 7; ideological thought, 87; ideological totality, 117 illusio, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 11–13, 18, 19, 23, 25, 28, 33–35, 37, 40, 42, 46, 48–49, 50, 52, 53, 59, 60, 69, 72, 77, 79–80, 86, 88–91, 96, 97, 104, 108, 110, 120, 124, 130, 133, 141, 143–145, 148, 156–157, 160, 162, 166–167, 175–177, 179–180, 184, 186– 187, 191, 193–195, 197, 207, 212, 216–217. See also aesthesis images (as history), 9, 12, 16, 18, 23, 24, 40, 41, 49, 71, 78, 131, 138, 141, 143, 145–146, 166, 170, 176–181, 184–187, 189–190, 192–193, 199, 203–205, 212, 216; copies, 145–146, 148, 151, 166, 177; counter-image, 143, 145, 150; “image-ing” strategies, 192; image-objects, 180; imageprojecting subject, 178; imaging epistemologies, 178–179, 191; imaging technologies, 179; imprints, 177; mental-images, 8, 144–145, 147, 149, 150, 177, 179, 182; mental image-making capacity, 179; pictures, 7, 181, 182; projection, 92, 106, 122, 180, 190; regulative images, 61; representations, 38, 142, 143– 146, 150, 166, 170, 180, 186; thought-images, 144, 150–151; world-image, 176–181, 185, 189. See also likeness

K knowledge already known, 20, 37, 127, 141, 150, 184, 191, 214

L latest thing, 17–18, 23, 31, 128, 135, 162, 180, 193, 196, 209; late knowledge, 5; latest times, 5 lessons of history, 2, 3, 44, 85, 166, 184, 197 liberal culture, 32, 147; liberal education, 27, 32; liberal-humanism, 137, 139; liberal world-view, 153 likeness, 5, 12, 60–62, 68, 78, 105, 176–177, 180–182, 185–187, 189–190, 192, 193, 198, 203–

Index 204, 207; like-experiences, 116; referential simulation, 7, 18, 21; semblance, 9; simulacrum, 17, 23, 68, 187; verification, 6; verisimilitude, 5, 6, 8, 105

M magic lantern, 78, 204; magic lantern spectacle, 9, 175 memory, 90, 94; remembrance, 82 meta-historical schemes, 4 methodological unconscious (of history), 134, 153, 155, 157, 159160, 197, 216. See also historical unconscious mind, 3, 11–12, 14–15, 18 modernization, 20 museums, 21–24, 27, 28, 34, 46–47, 57, 61, 65, 121 myth, 46, 54; historical myth, 129, 187

257

observation selection effects, 14, 156, 157, 159–160; self-sampling assumption, 155, 157–159; selfselection effects, 197 Oedipal structure of history: Oedipal conditions, 95; Oedipal formation, 98; Oedipal model, 94; Oedipal organization, 104; Oedipal scheme, 96; Oedipal structure, 96, 97, 132; Oedipus complex, 96

P

nature, 5, 6, 10, 11, 13–15, 45, 54–55, 59, 63, 69, 117, 138, 206 neo-liberalism, 15, 17, 25, 34, 47, 90; neo-liberal culture, 30, 32–33, 48; neo-liberal cultural policy, 26, 180; neo-liberal economic system, 121; neo-liberal economics, 26; neo-liberal economy, 24; neo-liberal ideology, 17, 23, 27, 31, 57, 79, 131; neo-liberal politics, 45, 82; neo-liberal social policy, 191; neo-liberal society, 25, 30, 31; neo-liberal state, 15, 29, 94 nothing, 172–174, 181, 185–187, 190, 193–194, 196, 198, 202, 205, 207–208, 210, 219; nothingness, 127, 162, 212 now, 49–50, 56, 57, 64, 71, 81–82, 85, 86, 88, 90–92, 97, 99–103, 105–106, 109, 111, 119, 120, 123, 128, 134, 141, 144, 146, 151–152, 155, 158–159, 162–163, 166, 172, 174–175, 177, 187, 190, 196–198, 201, 206–208, 210–216, 218–219; the long now, 197–198, 210; nowness, 177, 187, 207, 214

politics of knowledge, 174 postmodernism, 34, 133; postmodern architecture, 18; postmodern double coding, 18, 23; postmodern economy, 23–25; postmodern ethos, 37; postmodern living, 20; postmodern relativization, 31; postmodern theory, 1; postmodern man, 76; postmodern metropolis, 58; postmodern situation, 80; postmodernity, 66; postmodernist critics, 132 pre-emptive occlusion (of the world by history), 49, 175–176, 196; pre-emptive historicization, 195; scholastic pre-emption, 86–88, 91. See also academic culture present, 46, 48–49, 52–53, 57, 62, 65, 66, 71, 82, 88, 90–92, 94, 100, 102–104; extended present, 196–198 production, 16–18, 31, 38–40, 43, 117, 131–132, 135, 139, 142, 149, 151, 158, 169; production process, 132 prosopopoeia, 186, 196 psychopathology of historicized life, 94, 111; psychopathological selfreplication, 7 public history, 28, 130, 134, 154, 188, 190, 208; public historians, 189, 194, 213 public policy (history and), 20, 130, 141, 147, 167, 175 public value, 16–17, 20, 22, 25, 29–30, 58, 69, 84, 121, 126, 131, 174–175; economic value, 84, 121, 126, 131

O

R

objectivity, 60, 67–68

reality principle, 86

N

258 Index redundancy, 1, 35–39, 41–43, 45, 85, 90, 95, 132, 163, 165, 188, 190, 192 reference class, 131, 155, 157–159, 191, 195, 217–218; reference group, 148, 189. See also observation selection effects rhetoric of incarceration (employed by history), 204; behavioural compliance, 69, 134–135; carceral intention, 174, 183, 203; carceral mentality, 30, 70; mental coercion, 2; persuasion, 6, 28; persuasive force, 36; persuasiveness, 2, 16, 132, 143; rhetoric of coercion, 132–133; rhetoric of ineluctability, 48, 49, 110; self-coercion, 75–77, 79; social coercion, 79; strategies of incarceration in, 46, 50; strategies of pacification in, 61; thought-coercion, 59–60, 64, 70, 151, 186, 192. See also coercion ruins, 2–3, 5, 15, 34, 45, 55, 81, 180, 207, 216

S same old thing (history as), 9–10, 17–18, 20, 24, 31, 35, 37, 39, 65–66, 97, 103, 119–120, 124, 128, 135, 141, 150, 154, 161, 163, 174, 180, 196, 203–204, 209, 212, 215; sameness, 12, 17, 187, 198. See also likeness scepticism, 3, 4, 6, 175 self-centred science (history as), 82, 128, 130, 132, 134–135, 137, 140, 143, 144–150, 154–155, 158, 162–163, 167–168, 171, self-centred science, 173, 177–180, 183, 187, 189, 192, 194–195, 206; self-affirming strategies, 85; self-centredness, 173–174, 187, 218; self-centred practice, 91 self-organized criticality, 89, 164–167, 205; self-organized historical criticality, 165; self-historicizing world, 180, 203. See also chaos sequentiality, 95, 105 singularity, 83, 88–89, 119 social level, 32–33, 48, 62, 77, 86, 131, 147, 209; equalization, 33

socialization: socialization of history, 121; socialization of production, 121, 126; socialization of work, 16, 121–122, 180–181, 208 sophistry, 88, 91, 105, 175, 182, 186, 191, 205, 207; self-deception, 175; sophistical argument, 191; sophistical arts, 199; sophistical compliance, 131; sophistical conceit, 187; sophistical culture, 151, 175–176, 189, 193, 197, 199, 208; sophistical cultural practice, 184; sophistical deceptions, 188; sophistical device, 202; sophistical image, 8, 17; sophistical knowledge, 109; sophistical performance, 9; sophistical persuasion, 209; sophistical practice, 185; sophistical predisposition, 205, sophistical sleight of hand, 209; sophistical strategies, 186, 192, 216; sophistical stricture, 73; sophistical tricks, 41, 177, 186, 189, 204, 215; sophistical ‘verbal effect’, 73; sophistical word-play, 204; sophists, 105, 172, 174–175, 186–187, 199, 215; sophist as magician, 198, 215; story-telling, 9 spectacle, 9, 16, 17, 89, 99, 107, 121, 177–178, 180, 189, 193, 200 state, 85, 31, 140–142, 147, 152, 154, 158, 168, 215; liberal-democratic state, 211; statesman, 85 sufficient reason (principle of), 12, 16, 36, 51, 60, 62, 69, 82–83, 91, 105, 132–133, 137–138, 154–155, 157, 161, 165–166, 168–171, 178, 186, 191, 202, 205, 211, 215, 218. See also identity principle

T technology, 88, 122, 124, 179; technical expertise, 174, 191; technical management procedures, 29; technicians, 119, 185; technological management, 133; technological rationality, 163; techno-sphere, 130, 158 theology, 152; theologized world, 40 time, 84, 92, 172, 178, 180–181, 186, 188–190, 193–199, 201–205,

Index 210–212, 214–217; historical time, 189–190, 192–195, 197, 198–200, 202–205, 214, 215–216, 219; time-images, 189, 195; world-time, 205 time-sickness, 15, 35, 38, 80, 106, 163, 168, 198, 213, 216. See also anomie; despondency thought-style, 131, 161 total mobilization, 58, 87, 89, 123, 181

259

totalitarian capitalism, 15, 19–20, 23, 30, 58, 122, 123, 126–127, 135– 136, 169, 180, 218; economic totalitarianism, 131 totalitarianism, 15, 16, 61, 90, 113, 176, 180; totalitarian management system, 147

V violence, 60, 69, 72, 112, 122; ideologically motivated violence, 72

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