THE CRISIS IN THE HUMANITIES AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY: AN INQUIRY VIA ALTHUSSER
Journal Name:
- Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Mimarlık Fakültesi Dergisi
Keywords (Original Language):
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Abstract (2. Language):
In April 1997 the Society of Architectural Historians, which can be seen as the
sentinel of institutionalized knowledge in relation to architectural history in
North America, held its fiftieth annual meeting in Baltimore. This time, in
contradistinction to the other meetings of the society, to the historic Lord
Baltimore Hotel of the 'Post-Modern' downtown Baltimore, where the meeting
was held, there was an influx of young people with quite unorthodox approaches
to history together with figures such as Mark Wigley, Beatriz Colomina, and
Anthony Vidler who are 'notoriously' known as theory buffs rather than conventional
historians. Moreover, one of the most attended sessions of the meeting
turned out to be the one with the title 'Confronting the Canon: Teaching
Architectural History', which broached questions about both the content and the
methodologies of canonized teachings of architectural history. The issue was to
propound critical ways of going beyond the institutionalized body of knowledge
and methodologies that came to be taken as the essential substance of architectural
history, which are now thought to be in need of at least some revisions, if
not abolition. Actually the very surfacing of such a debate under the auspices of
the Society of Architectural Historians is a symptom of something deeper and
going on for the last couple of decades not only in architectural history, or history
for that matter, but in the humanities in general.Due to the recent explorations in Western intellectual circles (here I am particularly
thinking of French Post-Structuralism, various feminisms, and the
anti-Orientalist attack initiated by Edward Said among others), something which
I would call an epistemological shift had taken place, which changed the attitude
toward 'knowledge' and its production processes. One common point of the
above-mentioned, admittedly diverse, positions is an insistence on the idea of
'knowledges', including the ones which were regarded as universally valid, being
produced from the perspectives of certain subject positions, and very often from
that of the white European male. This belief led into a distrust toward the ways
of producing knowledge which were used to be regarded as neutral. And indeed
there arc striking accusations against certain established bodies of knowledge
which are regarded almost as commonsensical by now. For instance, Martin
Bernal, in his colossal book Black Athena of 1987, claimed that the Afroasiatic
roots of the ancient Greek civilization had been systematically suppressed by
North European scholars. According to Bernal, in the nineteenth century a
version of Greek history, which he calls the Aryan model, that did not exist until
then and still more or less shapes the general view about the genesis of the ancient
Greek civilization, had been developed. This model explains the Greek civilization
as 'the result of the mixture of the Indo-European-speaking Hellens and
their indigenous subjects' after an invasion from the North which is thought to
have overwhelmed the local 'Aegean' or 'Pre-Hellenie' culture (Bernal, 1991).
Vis-a-vis this position which essentially sees Greece as European, Bernal
proposes to go back to the ancient model that he claims was also the conventional
view among the Greeks themselves in the Classical and Hellenistic ages and
which situated Greece basically in the Levant, on the periphery of the Egyptian
and Semitic cultural area. This model would explain the emergence of the Greek
culture as the result of colonization around second millcnium B.C. by the
Egyptians and the Phoenicians who had civilized the native inhabitants and
would acknowledge the Greeks' considerable borrowings from Eastern Mediterranean
cultures.
By the same token, Edward Said, in his ground breaking book Orientalism of
1978, suggests that in the West, in time, a certain imaginary representation of
'non-west' has been developed under the name 'Orient' which has been constructed
radically as other than the 'Occident', /'.£., mysterious, unchanging and
ultimately inferior to the West, in order to systematically undermine and
dominate certain geographies, particularly the Islamic Near East. And furthermore,
according to Said, this discourse has been disseminated not solely through
fiction writers or 'dandy' travellers but formal academic disciplines and institutions,
as well.
Even though it is perfectly probable not to agree with each and every detail of
these revisionist attempts, it is not possible to deny the fact that they are raising
important questions about the nature and information-gathering strategies of
institutionalized bodies of knowledge as well as the neutrality of some of their
procedures. This is exactly what Jacques Derrida is targeting in his 'Restitutions'
where he masterfully problematizes the simple-minded positions in relation to
neutrality and objectivity of the academic scholar, in this case the eminent art
historian Meyer Schapiro (Derrida, 1987).
Schapiro claims to collapse Heidegger's argument in 'The Origin of the Work of
Art' since Heidegger misattributes the boots in Vincent Van Gogh's 'Old Shoes
with Laces' to a peasant woman, around which he weaves his mythos of 'the folk'.
In the essay 'The Still Life as a Personal Object', Schapiro maintains that the
boots actually do belong to a city dweller rather than a peasant and even to Van
Gogh himself. Derrida, however, with a virtuoso performance not only disrupts the whole debate by raising the possibility of the boots' not being a pair, but also
suggests that Schapiro, who was seemingly 'restituting the boots to their owner',
i.e., to the city dweller and to Van Gogh, actually was paying his homage to his
deceased friend Kurt Goldstein to whom Schapiro's essay was dedicated and who
as a Jew much suffered in the hands of the Nazis before he fled from Germany
in the thirties. Derrida suggests that Schapiro's seemingly scholarly stand against
Heidegger is very much shaped by his desire to undermine Heidegger's folkic
mythos that he associates with the Nazi ideology.
I have mentioned these examples in order to emphasize the pervasiveness of
skepticism in the humanities today: it is no longer possible to deny or dismiss it
as a Post-Modern fad. It led to crises in many öf the academically sanctioned
disciplines due to the questioning of the basic assumptions and premises on
which these disciplines are founded. And of course history, among others, took
its share, as well. I think at this juncture it is crucial not to overlook a fine nuance:
While it is not possible, as some would do, to cling to a position prior to all these
developments and go on with the business-as-usual, it is also not productive and
far too yielding for a sufficiently rigorous intellectual stand to deny the possibility
of the production of any historical knowledge, as some extreme Post-Modern
currents do. In order to be able to go beyond singular cases and 'micro history',
which is the dominant practice now, and to be able to see the larger tahleaus by
avoiding the abyss of relativism, what is needed is to develop new ways of
producing valid historical knowledge. I should also add that, as we will later see,
the validity of such knowledge will come from its explanatory power rather than
its being a total and exact portrayal of reality, a position not possible to hold on
to anymore.
What is necessary now is to diagnose the problem and decipher some concepts
that we take for granted, such as 'objectivity', 'reality', 'history', and 'historical
knowledge'. First the diagnosis: The problem of subjectivity that I have brought
up earlier as the basis for the rejection of any supra-subjective and general
historical knowledge can be laid down in terms of some psychoanalytic concepts
such as 'transference', 'working through', and 'acting out*.
Transference which in its general psychoanalytic sense means 'any displacement
of an affect from one object lo another, specifically the displacement of affect
toward the parent, to the analyst' is innovatively applied to the realm of historywriting
by the Intellectual Historian Dominick LaCapra (Chaplin, 1978). La
Capra (1985) maintains:
One problem is the transferential relation between practices in the
past and historical accounts of them. I use 'transference' in the
modified psychoanalytic sense of a repetition-displacement of past
into the present as it necessarily bears on the future. 'Transference' is
bound up with a notion of time not as simple continuity or discontinuity
but as repetition with variation or change, at times traumatical^
disruptive change. Transference causes fear of possession by the
past and loss of control over both it and oneself. It simultaneously
brings the temptation to assert full control over the 'object' of study
through ideologically suspect procedures that may be related to the
phenomenon Freud discussed as narcissism.
According to LaCapra, narcissism, which involves the impossible, imaginary
attempt of totally integrating the self and trying to elaborate a fully unified
perspective, is an alluring response to the anxiety of transference. For the
historian this means to assume that the past is totally transparent to her/his and
s-he is in total control of her/his production. In psychoanalytic terms this is called
'acting out' that is carrying into action the repressed impulses, which are brought to conscious level in the course of analysis. The historian may attempt to give the
impression of mastery by totally identifying the past with her/his own 'self or
'culture'. Yet, LaCapra warns us that transference is as much denied by an
assertion of the total difference of the past from the present of the historian by
its total identification. The important thing is to be aware of the transferential
displacement: The considerations at issue in the object of study are always
repeated with variations, or find the displaced analogues in one's account of it.
That is, the historical account of something is not an exact replica of the past; it
is an analogue and always a certain degree of displacement is at issue in the
account of the historian. Accordingly, what is to be done is not to suppress this
'problem' but try to 'work through', that is, to be engaged in the ultimately
impossible task of mastering the conflicts arising from the transferential displacement
and to inscribe this struggle within the historical account itself, hence
making it self-conscious.
A somewhat different but related position is that of Louis Althusser's. Against
naive 'empiricism' which would hold that knowledge is the abstraction of the
essence of the object to be known by the subject to know, Althusscr talks about
a distinction between the real object 'which survives in its independence, after
as before, outside the head' and the object of knowledge, [which is] a product of
the thought... [that is] a thought-object, absolutely distinct from the real-object,
. . . [the] knowledge of which is obtained precisely by the thought-concrete'
(Althusser and Balibar, 1970).
Althusser claims that this distinction involves not only those two objects, but also
their respective production processes. According to Althusser,
While the production process of a given real object (e.g., a given
historical nation),takes place entirely in the real and is carried out
according to the real order of real genesis . . . the production process
of the object of knowledge takes place entirely in knowledge and is
carried out according to a different order, in which the thought
categories which 'reproduce' the real categories do not occupy the
same place as they do in the order of real historical genesis, but quite
different places assigned them by their function in the production
process or the object of knowledge (author's emphasis).
What Althusser brings with this notion of two different objects, 'the real' and
'the thought one', which do not occupy the same place and are the products
of two different processes, can be seen as complementary to the concept of
transferential displacement between the real past processes and the
historian's account of them. The 'real' historical flow is not the same with the
historical account of it which is a product of thought that operates within a
different order than the real historical process. In other words, the first step
toward the production of valid historical knowledge is to refrain from equating
the above mentioned objects and processes. We write history through
abstraction. It depends on concepts; it is not simple observation. History is
not an absolute out there, waiting to be captured by the historian through
her/his data collecting activity. The facts, the data, do not speak, cannot speak
by themselves. There is always a mediator, an agent, the historian. And as we
have seen, the historian inevitably speaks from a certain subject position
which may involve some biases that should be 'worked through'. One way of
working through can be indexing those conflicts, inconsistencies, and discontinuities
arising from the subject position of the historian together with the
terms and conditions of the production of historical knowledge within the
produced knowledge itself.Now the question is how to achieve this, how to go from the acceptance of the
transfcrential relation and the distinction between 'the though! object' and 'the
real object' to the ways of producing valid historical knowledge. In order to be
able to disclose the conditions of the knowledge production what is needed is to
know the medium, the theoretical and epistcmological frame within which that
knowledge is produced.
At this point I have to agree with Althusscr who claims that 'history jas a
discipline] lives in the illusion that it can do without theory in the strong sense.
without a theory of its object and therefore without a definition of its theoretical
object'. According to Althusser,
What acts as its theory is its methodology, i.e., the rules that govern
its effective practices, practices centered around the scrutiny of documents
and the establishment of facts. . . . History therefore (adds
Althusserj takes its methodology for the theory it lacks, and it takes
the 'concrete' of the concrete obviousnesses of ideological time for its
theoretical object. This dual confusion is typical of an empiricist
ideology. What history lacks is a conscious and courageous confrontation
of one of the essential problems of any science whatsoever: the
problem of the nature and constitution of its theory, by which I mean
the theory within the science itself, the system of theoretical concepts
on which is based every method and every practice, even the experimental
method and practice and which simultaneously defines its
theoretical object (Althusser and Balibar, 1970, 109).
What Althusser means is the necessity for the discipline of history to generate
its own concepts, to expose its immanent assumptions and to develop the
mechanism through which historical knowledge will be produced. Here at this
point, as Peter Scholtler has stated, an analogy can be drawn between Lucicn
Febvre's, the Annates historian, and Althusser's conceptualizations of history.
Schotller tells us that for Febvrc only a history which formulates problems can
account for historical reality, not compiling or narrating the 'facts' that seem to
come to the historian on their own accord (1). Historian should consciously
prepare a research object, he must first of all'manufacture'. This is Febvre in his
enigmatically titled Combats [or History:At that time historians lived in a puerile and pious respect for the
'facts.' They had the naive and touching conviction that the scientist
was a man who, putting his eye to his microscope, at once perceived
a pile of facts. Facts given to him, facts manufactured for him by an
indulgent Providence, facts which he had only to record. It would have
been enough for one of these doctors in method to put his eye to the
lens of a microscope, however briefly, and to observe a histological
preparation, for him to perceive at once that it was not a question of
the histologist observing, but interpreting what must indeed be designated
an abstraction. Five minutes, and he would have assessed, in the
scientist's appropriation of what he had first of all prepared at length
and with difficulty, in accordance with a preconceived idea, the personal
contribution of the man, of the researcher who only acts because
he has posed a problem and formulated a hypothesis. . . . Without
preliminary theory, without preconceived theory, no possible scientific
work (2).So, what can be these theories, theoretical concepts leading to a valid and
self-conscious history-writing? The starting point should most probably be the
notorious issue of causality, that is, the problem of 'how to explain movement in
history', 'how to envisage the mechanism of forces which constitute the impetus
behind the historical process', in other words, 'where to locate causes as well as
the effects'.So, what can be these theories, theoretical concepts leading to a valid and
self-conscious history-writing? The starting point should most probably be the
notorious issue of causality, that is, the problem of 'how to explain movement in
history', 'how to envisage the mechanism of forces which constitute the impetus
behind the historical process', in other words, 'where to locate causes as well as
the effects'.So, what can be these theories, theoretical concepts leading to a valid and
self-conscious history-writing? The starting point should most probably be the
notorious issue of causality, that is, the problem of 'how to explain movement in
history', 'how to envisage the mechanism of forces which constitute the impetus
behind the historical process', in other words, 'where to locate causes as well as
the effects'.So, what can be these theories, theoretical concepts leading to a valid and
self-conscious history-writing? The starting point should most probably be the
notorious issue of causality, that is, the problem of 'how to explain movement in
history', 'how to envisage the mechanism of forces which constitute the impetus
behind the historical process', in other words, 'where to locate causes as well as
the effects'.So, what can be these theories, theoretical concepts leading to a valid and
self-conscious history-writing? The starting point should most probably be the
notorious issue of causality, that is, the problem of 'how to explain movement in
history', 'how to envisage the mechanism of forces which constitute the impetus
behind the historical process', in other words, 'where to locate causes as well as
the effects'.So, what can be these theories, theoretical concepts leading to a valid and
self-conscious history-writing? The starting point should most probably be the
notorious issue of causality, that is, the problem of 'how to explain movement in
history', 'how to envisage the mechanism of forces which constitute the impetus
behind the historical process', in other words, 'where to locate causes as well as
the effects'.Traditionally there were two ways of constructing the mechanism of causality, or
in Allhusser's words 'effectivity'. The first type, which he names as transitive, is
by far the most pervasive practice in conventional histories; that is, to construct
a linear account of consecutive incidents in time, one leading to the other. Here
I am thinking of history text books where history is 'made' through the deeds of
great men and wars without any interference from other realms of social totality.
This is not to say that these histories are consciously based on a certain type of
causality, rather they are the products of a confusion that I have tried to point
out earlier, the confusion of the thought object of historical knowledge with that
of the real historical process. This, of course, is a simple-minded attitude which
reduces the effectivity of the whole social totality, which is indeed a very complex
structure, to the effectivity of one of its elements, that is, to the effectivity of one
single social sphere. Given the fact that 'reality' is far too complex and different
social spheres, or instances in Althusser's words, are quite interdependent, or
overdetcrmined if you like, it is necessary to view social totality as a whole in
order to grasp the historical process.
Here another danger shows itself, that is, to envisage simple, deterministic relations
between different spheres of social totality, to assume that each sphere is a
microcosm of the whole. This iswhat Althusser calls 'expressive causality' and which
he traces particularly in Hegel's thought. For this type of causality he claims:
[I]t presupposes in principle that the whole in question be reducible
to an inner essence, of which the elements of the whole are then no
more than the phenomenal forms of expression, the inner principle
of the essence being present at each point in the whole, such that at
each moment it İs possible to write the immediately adequate equation:
such and such an element (economic, political, legal, literary,
religious, etc., in Hegel) = the inner essence of the whole. Here was
a model which made it possible to think the effectivity of the whole
on each of its elements, but if this category, inner essence/outer
phenomenon, was to be applicable everywhere and at every moment
to each of the phenomena arising in the totality in question, it presupposed
that the whole had a certain nature, precisely the nature of a
'spiritual' whole in which each element was expressive of the entire
totality as a ' pars totalis' (Althusser and Balibar, 1970, 186-187;
Althusser's emphasis).
While Althusser's target is mainly economic reflectionism which dominated
Marxism for quite a while, examples of reflectionism, that is, instances of conflating
different spheres of social totality can be seen in many contextualist and
socially concerned art histories, as well. In contradistinction to these two types
of causalities which cannot fulfill the difficult task of representing the complexity
of'reality', Althusser develops a third type -structural causality. This starts from
the idea of social totality, or social formation in Althusser's words, as a complex,
hierarchical and de-centered structure, and history is seen as the structural
process of the evolution of these complex formations or societies. Social formations
are complex structures different spheres of which are reflections of neither
each other nor the total structure as a whole, as they are in the case of expressive
causality. While different social spheres or instances are interdependent, determining
the other instances and determined by them at the same time, they retain
a certain degree of autonomy.
The concept of relative autonomy is a crucial one as it enables one to view different
social instances and practices against the larger tableau of social totality, while
avoiding to mislocate the dynamics behind those in other instances, as done in the
case of explaining aesthetic phenomena solely on the basis of economy. We may say
that in principle aesthetic practice is related to economic practice, but it is not
determined solely by it, as vulgar economistic explanations would have it.One of the significant issues from the perspective of history-writing is the nature
of the structure Allhusser propounds. He claims:
[T|he effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing
object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its
mark: on the contrary, it implies that the structure is immanent in its
effects, a cause immanent in its effects ... that the whole existence of
the structure consists of its effects, İn short that the structure, which
is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing
outside its effects (Althusscr and Balibar, 1970,188-189; Althusser's
emphasis).
He locates the causes within the very structure where the effects are displaced,
providing a new path for history-writing -the possibility of taking a cross-section
of a certain 'social formation' at a given time and looking at any unfolding
vis-â-vis other practices and contradictory relations within that 'social formation'
rather than tracing a linear chain of causes back in time. Althusserian structure
has no origin, no beginning or end as is the case in the Hegelian one: the structure
which is in its effects is also ever-prc-given (tojour-deja-donne). That allows one
to locate the causation mechanism within the structure itself at each determinate
moment and enables Allhusser to maintain that 'in the last instance economy
determines' without falling into the trap of cconomism, as the last instance never
comes if the structure is ever-pre-given.
There are two immediate implications of all these formulations: first, 'time' in
historical accounts cannot be a linear flow which is thought to reflect the 'real'
linear historical process as the causes are synchronous with the effects, they are
not outside or prior to the effects. Accordingly, historical lime, that is the time
İn historical accounts, is something that should be constructed. We should be
aware of the fact that among historians there were attempts to develop different
models of time. I am particularly refcring to the Annates historians who had come
up with the idea of different times, different cycles in history, long, medium, and
short terms. Fernand Braudel, one of the most prominent members of this school
of history which initiated a productive collaboration between history and the
social sciences, in his now classical essay 'History and the Social Sciences'
articulated the concept of long duree (long term) by which he means an almost
unchanging structure whose evolution/transformation may take millenia and
which he usually equates with geographical constraints. According to Braudel,
however, there is no escape from the short-term:
Let us try to make ourselves clearer, and speak not of 'events' but of
the short term, the tempo of individuals, of our illusions and rapid
judgement, this is, above all, the chronicler's and journalist's time.
Alongside great, so-called historical events, chronicles and
newspapers present the ordinary accidents of life: a fire, a rail disaster,
the price of wheat, a crime, a theater production, a flood. Anyone can
see that there is a short time period for all forms of life, whether
economic, social, literary, institutional, religious, geographical (even
a gust of wind, a storm), or political (Braudel, 1972,14).
Hence, for Braudel the almost unmoving structure of long term should be
complemented with the short term, the tempo of the individual and the intermediate
cycle that he calls the conjuncture, the tempo of the societies. If we go
back to the Althusserian ever-pre-given structure, another implication of it is an
undercutting of the teleological understandings of history. In such a structure
historical process has no end, no determined objective where it is heading toward,
since what is happening is the reciprocal interaction of causes and effects in a
determinate moment.
12 METU JFA 1997 BELGİN TURAN
By the same token, historical knowledge, if produced through above mentioned
Althusscrian, and psychoanalytic concepts, would not be a predictive knowledge,
but an interpretive, explanatory one. Its validity would come from this explanatory
power rather than a claim to absolute truth. As Lucien Febvre sensed
years ago, even the natural sciences do not have that claim anymore. Today it is
widely accepted that sciences are theory dependent, value laden and culturally
affected. The impossible project of total objectivity of the scientist is not tenable
anymore. So, in good scientific-realistic manner history should accept that it is
based on assumptions, that it is theory dependent, and it should make these
explicit together with all the complications/conflicts arising from transferential
displacement. For a self-conscious, critical historiography which will produce
valid historical knowledge we should start developing concepts and a theoretical
frame that 1 have merely started here and we should try to inscribe the conditions
of production of knowledge within the produced knowledge itself.
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Abstract (Original Language):
Son yıllarda Batı düşün dünyasındaki gelişmeler sosyal bilimlerin bilgi üretim
mekanizmaları konusunda şüphelere yol açtı. Yakm zamana kadar evrensel ve
yansız olduğu düşünülen bilgi(ler)in belli özne konumlarından üretildiğinin
ortaya konulması üst anlatıların yanısıra tarihi bilginin de geçerliliğinin
sorgulanmasını getirdi. Geldiğimiz noktada tarihçilerin bu gelişmelere kayıtsız
kalmaları artık mümkün değil. Krizi atlatmak ancak tarih disiplininin kendi
varsayımlarını, ön kabullerini irdelemesi, 'nesnellik', 'gerçeklik', 'tarihi bilgi' gibi
geçmişte saydam olduğu düşünülen kavramlara gerçekten açıklık getirmesi ile
olabilir. Öncelikle geçmişte olanlar ile onların tarihi anlatımları arasındaki
'transferential' ilişkinin farkında olunmalıdır. Tarihi anlatı bir yer değiştirmedir,
bir analogdur, anlattığı şeyin kendisi değildir. Tarih bu anlamda Althusser'in
dediği gibi gerçek (real) bir objedir ve bir bilgi objesi olan tarih anlatısından
farklıdır. Tarihçi geçmişe bütünüyle hakim olamayacağını kabul etmeli ancak
yazım sürecinde ortaya çıkan çelişkilere ve kaymalara karşı da çaba göstermelidir.
Mutlak doğruyu yakalamak iddiasında olmayan ancak belli bir açıklayıcı gücü
olabilecek bir tarih yazımı için tarih disiplini önce Althusser'in gösterdiği gibi
kendi teorisini (metodolojisinden farklı olarak) geliştirmeli yani kendi
kavramlarını ve tarih bilgisinin üretileceği mekanizmaları oluşturmalıdır.
Teleolojik ve indirgemeci nedensellikler yerine Althusser'in önerdiği sosyal
yapıyı merkezsiz, karmaşık bir oluşum olarak tanımlayan yapısal nedensellik
üzerine kurulacak ve dolayısıyla tarihi bu karmaşık oluşumların yapısal evrimleşmesi
olarak görecek bir tarihçilik, disiplinin öznellik, indirgemecilik ve
kurmaca olma iddiaları karşısında kaybettiği meşruiyetini kazanmasını
sağlayacaktır.
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