127 | Hayden White's Forms of History

You can't take the totality of every single thing that happened. You would just have a heap then. That you would just have this bad infinite, this bad infinity of the heat of this fact. I love the heap. You need, you need. We love heaps. We love the heaps. Yeah. As philosophers, the heaps are at it. We got to do some of the constructing heaps to construct holes. [Music] [Music] Hello, this is what's left of philosophy. I'm Will. Here with me today is Lillian Gil and Owen. Hey, y'all. Hey! Hello. It's not everyone. Today, we are reading the works of the American historian and theorist Hayden White. So, the basic premise of Hayden White's thought about history is that historical writing is shaped not only by facts, but also the literary structures, language, and storytelling choices that the historian makes to present these facts as a coherent narrative. We read some of his magnum opus, Metahistory, and then some essays from the content of form. So, they put you all in the frame of mind of what is going on with Hayden White. Basically, the question is something like, is there some necessity of presenting history past events in a form of a narrative? We do have examples of historical presentation that doesn't take a narrative. And the two examples that he focuses a lot on and what we've read are either analysis or chronicles. And that was basically our just you listing dates and saying what did or did not happen. Good harvest, bad harvest, ex-dyed, ex was born. When you look at that, there isn't any actually narrative structure. There's just the mere reporting of what has happened. We might think of it as almost the sort of a Higalyan bad infinity of one damn thing after another, and then, and then, and then. The chronicle, at least you're the way that Hayden White talks about it, for modern historical consciousness, seems to be an advance on this. The chronicle tries to give a sense of what links these events together. It has what he calls a social center. It's the chronicle of a city state. It's the chronicle of a person's life. It's a chronicle of some type of agency. But the what you know is lacking in the chronicle is that they're, you know, it just turn what they use in the language of it just terminates. There's no sense of closure. There's no sense of what was the meaning of all of this. So we then have modern history. He, you know, a lot of the way he focuses on is the emergence of historical consciousness in the 19th century. The idea is that what narrative does is that it not only takes facts, particular facts, but shows that we can give particular reasons and coheres to what those facts ultimately mean. And so what he is arguing in essence is that narrative offers not just an explanation of what has happened, but to use the sort of a German language of Verstein, an understanding of what is all about. And so anyone who's read sort of Marxist theories of history or even conservative theories of history like Burke, know that narrative isn't just an adornment that you put on top of what has actually happened. It tries to shape them into some coherent form that allows our consciousness to respond to them such that we understand the meaning of human action. There are several arguments he's giving about what narrative is doing, but to say a little bit about Hayden White's particular approach to all of this and White Mathers is he identifies as what he calls a formalist. He thinks that actually history as much as we want it to be a science, and I think he's thinking like the sort of the idea of the hard sciences where he merely report on what happens. History is also a poetic act. And for him, the formalism is that he thinks there are these discrete elements of poesus, of craft, of making that are ineluctively a part of the modern historians project. So in meta history, he says that history beyond simply just reporting on the facts has three ways of trying to offer an explanation or an argument. There's explanation by employment, and I imagine that we're going to be talking a lot about that today. And explanation by employment is he thinks historians can shape a history according to either it being a romance, a comedy, a tragedy, or a satire. So he's a formalist because he thinks any history is going to have some combination of these elements in so far as it is a narration and not merely reporting what's going on. Then there's explanation by formal argument. I won't go into this, but it might come into discussion, which is formalism, organism, mechanism, contextualism. And then finally, explanation by ideological implication, anything's anarchism, conservism, radicalism, and liberalism. So what is the so-what of all of this? Well, basically, Hayden White wants to say that as much as we want to try to reduce history to a science, there is no actually extra-ideas. Ideological ground that can justify the choice of shaping a historical narrative in a particular way, whether it's a romance, and by romance, it means this history that has, as it's a is its telos, the sort of ultimate self-identification of humanity with society. Or shaping as a tragedy, that shows that despite how much we might try to unify our practices and some sort of moral ordering of the world, impersonal processes or fate, intervene, and then the test of the ultimate derension of humanity and society. Or the comedy, where it turns out, even despite our foibles and despite our flaws, all's well that ends well to use the sort of the Shakespearean language there. And so what he wants to say is that there are ways that history can make arguments to us that are clearly more than simply just presenting the facts as they are, about eliciting particular responses and our expectations of what narrative closure will entail. So what I find really interesting here is that he wants to show that the process of crafting history needs to pay attention not just to what has happened, but how do we render it intelligible? He's trying to respond to a series of questions of why do we desire narrative from history? And if I could venture a kind of proposition is because in many ways, when we look at history, we look for a type of reflection of what it is that we are doing to make sense of our social actions or human practices as if they were a coherent whole. And history seems to offer that promise. And for white, he thinks that history as as possible coherent whole emerges once there is a broader society that we can take to be the subject of this history. He engages a lot with Hegel who thinks that "Mondristorical consciousness emerges once see of the subjects' relation to law, legality, and legitimacy becomes possible." I think the corollary of this claim is that histories, at least the modern histories that we understand, aren't quite possible in societies that are not stable, societies that are beset by the constant sort of scarcity of hunger and of death. He thinks you'll more get the annals that were just like, "Bad harvest this year." Good harvest this year. And so this idea that even the mode of how we do history is intrinsically linked to the type of societies and stability of the size that we have, he thinks that the mode of narration of history is also reflection of us trying to comprehend and make coherent what types of societies we in fact live in. Now, all sorts of actions or prescriptions will issue forth if you take it that history is ultimately romantic or ultimately tragic or ultimately comedic or satirical. And we can say, I can say a bit about satirical, which is this idea of all these attempts to have a sort of synoptic view of how human history goes will always be frustrated. It's almost a way of saying that you won't actually get that meaning that you're looking for. So when we look at what Marx has done, what Burke has done, even what we look at, like C.L.R. James is the Black Jacque of Bins, Kafka is the trial, the novels of Austin, where you're constantly getting as the attempt to present history in a particular form. And White's point is that there really is no universal or abstract way to judge which way history ought to be presented to human or political consciousness. So what I find interesting and what I'd like to talk with you all about is why is important for us to give narrative form to history? And whether the tropes that we often use in order to make history sensible to us, one of my favorite moments is when Hayden White talks about that famous point in the 18th Romero of Louis Bonaparte, where Marx says history of peace twice, for a satiragety than as far as, and then he stops and goes, what possible logical or scientific evidence could possibly justify Marx framing it that way? And so you can either go with the sort of the analysis school that hated this stuff of narration, say, that's just merely orientation junk that we just need to talk about personal processes. Or you can say that actually that is part of the argument. That is part of you know his understanding that the mere fact of historical event can be interpreted in a number of ways and the only reason his story is important is precisely because you have to make those decisions on how you're going to present these events. And so I find that it's important to talk about the politics of history not simply as what happened but also about the choices of how we present what happened and what can justify those choices whether it's simply a political choice or whether it's imminent to the things themselves but anyway at least wants to bring to the fore that narrative isn't simply an aesthetic ornament that actually responds to our senses of what constitutes human practice, what makes action intelligible and how that interacts with broader institutions and impersonal processes. I could say so much more about his idea that the narrative history is essentially always an allegory that you know when we do history you know it's always meaning something else and what it explicitly says or even the role of metaphor methanomi I was thinking of Mike Davis's city of courts that's all about Los Angeles where Los Angeles clearly meant to be a methanomi for the political economic structure of the US as a whole but at least he's bringing to it for that this is what we all do and the idea of simply doing a history that simply reports the facts and nothing else he thinks there is no history without an ideological choice he even ends one of his processes with this question of could be ever narrate without moralizing and so that's pretty much Hayden White's proposal that there's an in the limitable poetic moralizing component to modern history and we can reckon with it but we cannot simply refuse it or we can only refuse it by I think he thinks regressing to simply doing chronicles or announce with that I'll leave it there and ask what you all thought of Hayden White and the narration of history yeah it's an extremely rich and dense endeavor that he's undertaking here and I really I take it to that like part of what he's off a reputation of the idea that history historiography could be scientific in the way that is looked for both by the kind of analysts in like the you know Ferdinand Browell school or the Marxist school right who want to say that like you know historical materialism is a science of history but you know what are the what are the scientific facts that one can point to justify that history happens first is tragedy and second time as far as and yeah that's definitely not a scientific proposition clearly it is motivated to use White's language in its topological form by aesthetic and moral considerations that can't be apodictically certain or verified but which like lens coherence to the narrative as a historical mode of discourse or mode of expression I was on the phone yesterday with Owen and we were trying to figure out what the third moment is because it seems like a history continues to repeat and I think that we've come to the conclusion that it's first is tragedy second time as far as and third time as humiliating yeah that's all right we're living in the age of humiliation the third repetition well there's got to be a fourth and I just want to jump in over quick I know I was just talking for a long time with the introduction but I think it's also important that White it's really important for him that simply because narration isn't reducible to what I think he calls what the nomological deductive form of the proposition in other words you it's not reduced to the scientific excavation of laws that might be true or false propositions that doesn't mean it has no truth value whatsoever that you think it's a particular level of truth value at the level of meaning and you know I maybe I didn't talk about this as coherently as I wish I might have he talks about this interplay between explanation and understanding and that you you can have an explanation of a series of historical events you can have a knowing how and why a series of things have happened but not understand the whole of it what all of that is meant to signify for us and so you know whether it's Marx's 18th-primary or to go back to the episode we most recently recorded on the the Gotha program I asked what in titles marks this narration of these stages of post-copal society well it's because he's trying to offer a meaning of the whole and you don't get that simply by just saying how and why something happened that you know it's his way of trying to grasp the whole of the movement and all of that so he does think that there is a truth value you can really see the influence of hermeneutics and like you know he references recurrence time and narrative you know a bunch of times in the text because you know recurrent is really like really flushes out this distinction between explanation and understanding but he says like you know explanation on the one hand just that what it quite simply is just like a massing like a heap of data points or event points you know or facts understanding for him involves appropriation you have to like make it somehow yours and that's where narrative also becomes like evidently becomes essential to understanding to really make it yours you have to like be able to identify and so you know to some degree with the personages or the subjects of the like statistical event or to disidentify with them or whatever it might be like you need to fit it into some kind of I don't know some kind of hole that makes sense to you right to make it yours and so that sounds like okay well then you're adulterating the objectivity of history but obviously his point is in the language that the hermeneutics is hermeneutics people uses well he in a way yes but there is no such thing as pure objectivity what you get is like what you really aspire to is the fusion of horizons like a fusion of the of the present and your own place in it and sense of that place and what it means to you with events from the past right like and yes you're not getting an entirely objective history which is impossible but you're also not just in event you're not just like interpreting it through some fantasmatic lens where you just make up any old thing right archival details are important there are constraints that yeah yeah history for fidelity because that's a good way of putting it yeah so I feel like maybe I had a somewhat different interpretation of this text like because I can see why there would be constraints of fidelity like I would like to preserve that idea but I actually thought that like my experience in reading this text was like oh this is you know what an insensitive critique of like the like the historical form and like chronology of its development and like what a what a strong argument against you know the anti theoretical historians or any social scientists and then I kind of thought that like the thesis was a bit more radical I mean I think you guys are just kind of staying at like the kind of first level of what he's saying and I'm wondering what you think about the because I think there's other levels here that may or may not be as amenable to the idea of like yeah there are feasab- you know because I would like to make this text a bit more you know in my view pragmatic or like compatible with truth values of some kinds but as I got deep into it I was like oh like maybe not like it may in fact be like to him that there isn't a strong like narrative all the way down yeah like there's not a strong distinction for example between explanation and understanding and all understanding is a process of narrative moralization that's what creates the coherence of the understanding and I was never given a strong reason in the text to you guys this whole discussion of the Holocaust and like is it true you could there's no there isn't better and worse narratives of this like something isn't closer to the truth and I kind of thought he said he might have bit the bullet a little bit and said well it's an interpretive lens and there's not necessarily a better an interpretation that has better or worse there's just ones that we prefer to find meaningful for better or worse reasons so I interpreted a little bit as him being like look the problem is that you gave up meta-narratives and then you double down on you know in sociology it's mid-range theories and in history it's like we don't do theory we just create we just compile the facts but then you're nonetheless stitching it all together with the narrative form and so you're moralizing without admitting it so that was the critique I really vived with but then I thought it took the Nietzschean turn of like well actually it's just a judge you know a Nietzschean kind of a rentian turn it's just a judgment that you're gonna make and there and there you can say there are better and worse judgments but it struck me that that might have to do more with your morals than would actually occurred you know because if narrative is moralization then it's just like you want to have the better or worse interpretation might not so much be based on what is what is true does that make sense yeah yeah I so I take it that what he was doing with when he was talking about the Holocaust wasn't that there's a dispute about the fact of its occurrence I took it that he was saying something like the meaning that we are going to draw from the fact of that occurrence in terms of how it is we should make sense of what political policies or political horizons we should establish that can never actually be so all simply at the level of the fact of its occurrence. So I think he would be OK with the idea that people who try to revise, say, the Holocaust and say it never happened. I don't think he'd say something like, well, those historians aren't to be taken seriously. But the real problem is that it just turns out the fact of a thing occurring doesn't actually tell us what's supposed to mean for us in the present. That that's where the real conflict has to happen. So I think that there are two levels. There's the thing that occurred. And then there is the normative understanding we draw from it. And I take it, he's trying to say that the normative understanding we draw from it is never just going to be a direct expression of the thing that occurred. That's why allegory is always going to intervene. And so we can do that self-consciously, or we can kind of mystify what it is that we're doing with history and think that the facts can just speak for themselves. So isn't that different than questioning the truth value? But I think it might be slightly sideways of what I'm saying, because it's not the facts that I was hit thought he was denying. Because I think what you're saying-- he is saying what you're saying. I'm wondering if he's saying-- the more radical thing I'm wondering about is the status of causation. I think he thinks that causation itself. So when you explain what led up to a fact, he thinks this is always narration. And in as such, it's always moralization, which means we don't have grounds outside of just moral judgment about which causal analysis is better or worse, not the raw fact of a thing having occurred. That's what I mean. Yeah. No, that's a real challenge, what you're saying. And I do think it is a challenge for him. It's a real challenge to materialist, the materialist explanation of historical causality, which you wouldn't want to say, which a Marxist wouldn't want to say is just a facet of narrative. Because part of what narrative does, it constructs relationships between cause and effect, to construct some kind of coherent whole or some chronological some kind of continuity. But yeah, is he saying that feudalism transformed the feudalism, like changed into capitalism? And that is one Marxist way of understanding how that happened. The Marxist explanation and how that happened is a narrative among others, but it doesn't have more like teeth or purchase in reality than-- Well, he's committed to that. But I mean, of course, if you are a Marxist, you're going to think that your narrative is more compelling and you're going to offer what your interpretation of the social scientific data of why that is. But I think I get passed about this because it's not because if there's even one Marxist explanation of feudalism, capitalism, and not a production, I'm looking at Hyros Banagy and he's blowing up other Marxists being like, no, what you all think is a motor production is simply something that you're imposing upon and that's not really what's going on. So these conflicts over what mean or we're supposed to get over causation can only have significance because at least he thinks, because we embed in a particular narrative that will say that will allow so ranked the order of importance of particular events. Is it famine? Is it passages of laws? Is it peasants uprisings and all of that? And so we're always doing that. And I don't think that maybe for Hayden White that leads to a type of relativism of like, look, there's all these conflicts of narratives. We don't necessarily go down that route. But it seems to me important to know that Marxists, liberals, conservatives, you're all trying to offer narratives. And the point of offering that narrative because you understand that there could be multiple interpretations of an event. What I like about Hayden White's point is, if there could only be one interpretation of an actually historians, what would be the point of the historian? They wouldn't talk about it. They only intervene when they know that there is possibly an equally plausible interpretation. And they want to say, for whatever reason, whether it's by ideological implication, whether it's formal argumentation, whether it's your emplotment, this is the better way of understanding it. This is really tricky. I think this challenge is a really good one. Of course, I think most of us were trained-- the four of us, I think, were kind of raised and trained in this very shaky non-foundationalist postmodern soil. So I'm not as uncomfortable as maybe I should be in actually taking seriously this question. But I do take it that if there are prior aesthetic moral and political considerations that frame which sort of like, topological, narrativeizing, moralizing, by produce in turning the annals into a narrative, into a coherent discourse, into a coherent historical story, the basic Marxist idea is that history-- there are two, it's been the history of class struggles. This frames what kinds of explanations I'm going to take as being plausible or allowable. And I think that part of the idea would be that, yeah, there's a liberal way of narrativeizing history that doesn't take that framing as a kind of given, as a precondition. But the Marxist rejoinder to that, I think, has to be like, but our story isn't just my preference. It can account for more. It's got more explanatory power in terms of making sense of what we get in the annals and in the chronicles, that it's more predictive is more-- it's more comprehensive, less facts seem obscure or unintelligible, I think. And I think we can say that without saying that this is therefore a scientific conception of history, but it's not just like my story versus yours, and there's no way of making any evaluative claims. But that still might not be enough. It's science and art, though, for Hayden White, though. Yes, yeah, yeah. It's science and art. Well, this is the question, right? I think maybe, like, Millions' question is a really good one because he spends so much time being like, look at the poetic part of this, right? Look at the poiseous, the moments of the art element of narrativization, that he says history is art and science, but I'm kind of losing track of where the science is. It sort of feels like all poetics is maybe the question. Yeah, that's just a little-- the example I was thinking of was the contrast between the story that the British, the classical political economists tell us about where wealthy equality comes from versus Marx's history of the origins of wealthy equality, which is primitive accumulation. The nice history that the classical economists tell, which we're all aware, is some people were really thrifty, some people were really hardworking, and they just started to accumulate wealth. And Marx was like, I have a different story. Well, this massive disparities in wealth started accumulating in a massing in certain people's hands because of plunder and savagery and theft and violence. And those are two very different ways of narrativizing. And one is just a complete and total fantasy. The other is mored in-- and again, OK, you have to be careful of like status. Yeah? Because it is still narrative. I think Hayden White is sick. I actually grant basically-- I don't know-- a lot of this. But I just think that's maybe a good way of teasing out that sticking point. That one of those-- the primitive accumulation story is one that is also mored in historical reality. And which gives you, like Gil said, a lot of explanatory power, understanding how-- especially if you understand that primitive accumulation is not some discrete time in the past, but a continual facet of capitalism. Yeah, so here's the ambiguity. I'm going to let-- we'll get the last word, because I don't want to come out swinging again. Because I'm not-- that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm just generally trying to get this-- So I'm going to read-- This is a great question. It's such an interesting problem. It's like the central question, I think. OK, this is where he talks about how the kind of perspective he has on history is the one that recovers the notion of the sublime. So he confesses-- as soon as he starts writing about the sublime, I start thinking, oh, this is getting a little fashion. And he said, in the politics of contemporary discussions of historical interpretation, the kind of perspective on history that I have been implicitly praising is conventionally associated with the ideologies of fascist regimes, something like Schiller's notion of the historical blind sublime, or Nietzsche's version of it is certainly present in the thought of such philosophers as Heidegger and Gentile as an intuition of Hitler and Mussolini. But having granted as much than he goes on to explain why this isn't necessary. Because what is true about their conception of history, which is the Nietzsche in conception of history, is that it is utterly meaningless. And because what is metaphysically true is its meaninglessness, then all you have is judgment. That's the kind of-- that's the leap. So you don't have to make bad judgments like that. And you don't have to say certain things are not real when they are. But you do have to say one must face the fact that when it comes to apprehending the historical record, there are no grounds to be found in the historical record itself for preferring one way of construing its meaning over another. So that was the sentence that got-- so I get that the facts don't read us a narrative. But when you go one step further and then you also say, there are no grounds in the facts at all. In the historical record, I feel like that is a more challenging claim. Because it's like the meaningless-- and then the shock of like, ah, things just keep happening, creating English, creating joy, the sublime. That's what it is. Yeah, I mean, when I read that part, it seemed to me that that essay was where Hayden White was most forcefully saying that this is his particular position on this, which is rather different. and what he does in the meta history. He's like, so here's how I'm going to go about breaking these down. But, you know, yes. So if I were to play devil's advocate, it seems to me what he is talking with the meaning and historical record is he is trying to say insofar as what we look for from history is not just that, you know, there's a sequence of events that even that there's causality, that, you know, ex-doing something led to why doing something. But he's trying to say something like all of these other histories that, you know, bracket out the sublime, the idea that, you know, our concepts cannot actually grasp the totality of all that this is, is he wants to say, well, it might be possible that, you know, what we find in historical record is nothing about the destiny of ourselves as a species is nothing about what it is we ought to authorize going forward in the present. What he tries to get to is, I think it is a version of ethical decision is among his part is to say, once you confront the meaninglessness of historical record, you will now know that the past can authorize any number of things you can do. And so it's actually up to you to take responsibility for the meaning you're going to accord to the past. That isn't just imminent to it waiting to be unfurled teleologically by the reading the history of clashed struggle, reading the history of industrious individuals, reading the history of God or what have you. And so it's his, I don't know if he'd be a liberal and all of that because he even seems to think liberal versions of history want the bracket out to sublime. But he wants to say that this is how you actually will get political responsibility when you realize that history actually can authorize any number of political constitutions. Yeah. I'm bothered by the decisionism, I guess. I think I'm worried. Because what are the-- there are no grounds. This doesn't seem correct to me. I think I'm like, maybe am I a stupid-- I'm usually a stupid modernist, I usually can't have myself. But is it true that there are no grounds in the facts at all to sanction? What is the nature of the way in which the animals or the archives do produce limits on different kinds of possible narratives? How does that actually work? Because I want to say with Owen that, yeah, Marx's primitive accumulation story, better, a better story than what the bourgeois political economists tell me. But when I try to think about why I think it's a better story, I want to appeal to the facts. I want to appeal to the record. And this precisely seems to be what I'm not allowed to do if my prejudgment of what constitutes the historical record is informed already by my aesthetic and moral commitments. And then that happens through this, like, politicizing pre-vision of what he calls the historical field. So I feel the-- I just put another way of answering this. I don't know the answer, but another way of posing this is maybe it's good to explain a little bit exactly how it is that he differentiates between fictional storytelling and historical storytelling. Yeah, I mean, he doesn't distinguish it, but by the fact that fictional storytelling engages with invention and the historical storytelling doesn't, because-- Yeah, they both do. And I mean, that's true, I think. Yeah. The way that he distinguishes is-- well, he does have a criterion of reality that historical storytelling is dealing with you. Certain sequences of facts that actually happened, and fiction does not need to link itself to that. But he certainly thinks that historical storytelling takes on a lot of the strategies that fictional storytelling does. And OK, here's my answer of why maybe Hayden White is wrong, whole meaningless thing. Maybe this is also me as a good modernist, but what you actually do get with the mon historical record is the effort of agents and human beings to render themselves intelligible, to make clear to themselves what it is that they are doing, and what it is that they ought to do. And so, in fact, what we get with maybe the historical record as we get more and more complex and, quote, unquote, stable forms of society is the increase in capacity of human agents to make intelligence themselves the structure of their actions. And that we take some joy in being able to understand that. There's that's why Hamlet can still move us. That's why reading James's black jockabins explicitly as a tragedy can still move us because it says something about the intelligibility of human action and what it means to be a free creature. He disposes of that. He thinks that actually the historical record end of itself is just a massive thing set of happen that, of course, have causal relations to one another, but there isn't actually any meaning imminent to it. I don't necessarily buy that story. And it is another story he's telling. It's just a story that refuses to give us the catharsis of that there's some closure to it, that we have to, like, take it upon ourselves to do that. So, you know, I mean, I'm the short-work question. I was answering there, but I, you know, the difference between historical and fictional storytelling is, you know, the sense of the reality of what human action is. And fiction can sometimes disclose that, but history is trying to show that that is what has actually happened in our past. I mean, I think fiction-- I think it's worth meditating on this point because it's fiction writing can disclose understanding. It just doesn't disclose what happened. So I do think it is quite critical to think about history as a narrative form, to try to pull apart that distinction, because if what we're after is understanding the past, it's just not true that you have to know all the facts to gain that kind of understanding. You read a good novel. You feel like you understand something about the place. Sometimes it's a little inevitable. - A tale of two cities. - Yeah, like sometimes it's a little ineffable, but you, you know, talk to a friend who knows a little bit more about literature than you, and they'll help you get it, you know? - Yeah. - So I do, yeah. It's not the fact that it's not the only way to disclose understanding is sort of what motivates the-- - Would you all accept-- - Yeah, go ahead. - I was gonna say, would you all accept this claim that fictional storytelling or literature can't explain if we understand explain as you're getting into the how and why of causal relations, but can offer understanding. While it seems like history, in meta history, he talks about there are different aims of different types of historical narration, but certainly some take it that their primary objective is to offer an explanation. Maybe not always understanding. Sometimes the idea of some historians is that we're not gonna actually be able to grasp what all of this means, but I can tell you why something happened. And maybe that's frustrating for us and contemporarily, but seems like history without explanation, it would simply just be almost indistinguishable from fictional narrative. And so that has to be some pretense to offering explanation, but he doesn't think that exploits you can stand on its own for what we at least expect from the historical discipline as mothers. Maybe we're no longer mother. - Yeah, I think it's so interesting how many political debates or how certain historical events and the way that we interpret them or appropriate them in the present and the role they add in the unfolding of history becomes like a real intense political debate, right? So, over the French Revolution, you have liberals who are invested in a certain reading that involves the some seeds of the origins of totalitarianism and in Jack of the-- - It's a tragedy. - In the terror. - Exactly, yeah, exactly. And then of course, you have Marxist and anarchist and all these different ways that are all these arguments and they will of course have very different principles of selection in terms of what elements of that event, but what facts of that event they want to pull out. And that's why he's like totally right about this point by the way that there is no non moral way to go about doing history because as soon as you start selecting events that you think, because you can't pick everything. You can't take the totality. This is a point that like, you know, I think we made the Mike Davis episode way back 'cause, you know, he's very good about this. Like you would just have this bad infinite, this bad infinity of the heap of this facts. - I love the heap. - You need-- - We love heaps. - We love the heaps. - Yeah, look, as philosophers, like heaps are at him. (laughing) - We gotta do some of the constructing heaps. - We can construct holes. (laughing) - Yes. - Yeah, the quick thing I want to say about that, I think the sort of the eye-opening moment I had with Hayden White. And yeah, when we get to the third essay about the meanness of history, I also did have this moment just like, oh man, like, we were going, we were doing so well. And are you telling me that this is what's behind all of it? But the eye-opening, for me, was the argument by employment. And so the way of not just you selecting which things we're going to rank as important, though I think it's also important to say that of course you Marxists will have a social theory that allows them to order what is important. So for most Marxists, the fact that some random guy crossed a street, that's not going to be the thing that's most important in the narration of history of trying to explain capital accumulation. But you. Depending on the type of Marxists, sometimes the principal selection will be the idea of who is going to be the protagonist of history So you look at what the proletariat is doing Others they will be looking more in personal structures of the the movement of capital and say well in the 18th Primera Marx kind of says actually the proletariat they get moved off stage They're no longer playing the the protagonist role But I think it was an eye-opening mode made of the idea of wow Yeah, if you narrate history as either a comedy or tragedy or a satire or romance that that also authorizes Different types of inferences of what it is as possible for us to do our horizons of expectation and I found myself thinking would be possible for Marxist to write a satire not satirizing other ideologies But the idea of history as a satire as something that doesn't have a type of closure or I could say Marxist writing history as a tragedy But certainly not history ultimately as a tragedy Ultimately as you know the frustration of you the human capacity for understanding and that was sort of you I don't know I thought that that was really insightful to think that there are also particular forms that you Have elective affidities with particular modes of thought. I want to follow you here But could you could you help unpack a little bit specifically what's meant by satire in his vocabulary? What he means by satire is almost the the explicit refusal of any type of Full comprehensive closure for what it all means whether it's romance of you know the the The human creature overcoming the forces of darkness whether it's tragedy the ultimate human Calibility whether it's comedy which I already did the all as well the ends well satire almost your Points to mirror back and says all that closure that you want you're not gonna get it That actually fund them at the human reality cannot be comprehended in any way that's gonna give you that catharsis You're looking for I guess I'm having trouble I'm having trouble in my mind distinguishing between satire and tragedy on this account Because to me that sound like that that description or that definition right like the ultimate like lack of closure A sort of like ultimate meaninglessness sounds like not meaningless tragic. It doesn't end in meaninglessness though Like you when I say when Hamlet dies. I think we don't have like so what was that all about? We have this you at least you We're stationed by this idea damn bro make a choice Like what the hell? By think yeah, what satire makes makes fun of or you know refuses the idea that you're going to be Ultimately sad so I'm like oh, so that's what it's all about in fact it says that pretense you're gonna get that That's not actually what history will offer or literature will offer and all that and I was just saying I couldn't see a Marxist right right in a satirical history that fun really turns to the audience is oh that expectation of closure You're looking for the expectation of the the where four of this you're not going to get it I'm happy to be wrong. I'd be it should be read what a Marxist satirical history would be But you know it seems like you have to have this commitment that there is a sense to all of this And that is what empowers us hopefully Yeah, interesting. I mean I thought one part that we haven't taught we haven't discussed yet is that how what an interesting I mentioned this in my first comment, but If you were to contextualize this argument, so I saw this was published in like 1987 so We're like fully in the throws of the postmodernism, you know, there's a lot of momentum toward the kind of argument that he's making But I almost thought it was a kind of he what's it was suggested to me in the preface was that it was trying to be a sort of imminent critique of Of the history history is a discipline, but also partially The the meaninglessness associated with the postmodern turn so I do think he tried to say I don't feel like he resolved this for me But the some of the things we're poking at I think he was surely aware of because he did say this was about rescuing history from it's from From itself, but the other thing is the Way of talking about the social sciences which you know differs from like the Focodian critique as opposed to like an exercise of power Which is like when people Which is a view that doesn't necessitate an agent you actually have more agents You know telling stories Unawares and somehow in in bad faith. So I thought this was one of the more compelling critiques of like a really hard positivism that I that I'd ever heard like if you ask, you know people in political science or sociology If they're in like the kind of soft sociology stuff they might actually just be the type of people who say oh yeah, it is all a narrative But assume you have people who are Just anti-theoretical in the sense that they only want to talk about the mid-range Um mid-range social phenomena everything is highly conscripted. There's no role for theory because if the facts You know if the data doesn't show me then you don't have any basis for it I'm sort of surrounded by this stuff. There are some social scientists that are more theory Friendly, but I thought it was a really compelling way of putting what we all know which is that it's not just that you're The categories you use to frame the world with are like value-laden It's actually that you're imposing an ordering that has a sort of restricted justification within the discourse that you are a part of and that's the Focodian critique of the exercise of power or the relationship between you know truth and power But there's a step backward which is the bad faith idea that you are not putting things into a narrative Which like anybody who watches like presentations by people who profess to not be making a theoretical claim but then kind of make it clear there's a kind of moral to the story Like surely this is true, you know, I found that compelling Yeah, me too. I mean, you know It comes comes back to not just the idea of the principal selection but Given the types of creatures that we are there are always trying to make intelligence put before us The idea that you can refuse some ordering frame and just you put the the facts themselves and you know disregard even what sort of pre-critical maybe theoretical framing might have for it I think he's trying to say that that's disingenuous and the reason why I wanted to discuss this and have us read it is I love being a Marxist and all of that but I also think that it's important to reflect on Well, why is that the adequate choice and say you know we can say that you know it has more explanatory power But I think it's important at least Make explicit that that's what's going on there rather than maybe pretend to the idea that there aren't other attempts to interpret these phenomena and that you know This is actually a way of everyone else is doing sort of ideological myth-making on just presenting the facts and I think what he's trying to show is that the facts have a kind of significance to us because We we make use of particular narrative structures to communicate that And so that's at least insightful even though of course other things might not there's Another dimension to his his discourse, right? Is that like as well as there being kind of prior aesthetic poetic considerations There are prior political commitments that inform the structure of narrativeization and again he gives us four he loves his four is it's very funny a fourfold right? Yeah, we're always doing fourfolds, but for him it's uh right the political Orientations broadly speaking our anarchist conservative liberal and radical right and maybe like one sort of takeaway here is that like just as there is no non Moral mode of narrativeization is also no non-political form of interpretation of hermeneutic or of narrative structure in discourse and like perhaps then like the lesson is simply that we out to Aval that right and just be like look I'm aware that there is a politics informing how it is that I am making sense of This set of historical data and that the narrative that I construct on this basis is informed by in my case Eradical politics and and because I think like you know one thing that happens is I've been thinking a lot about cults recently for no reason at all But like as we all know I mean like for me the the classic my favorite early exposition of this problem is in Sartre Santi-Semite and Jew right but that like the reason why it's so frustrating to deal with cult members Of which there are many and various kinds is that like you want to just show them that the facts that they think are true or not Right, but it turns out that that's impossible because their interpretation is prior to how they are how they are able to encounter fact Right so that facts even when they seem to refute say a fascist position Only serve to reinforce the deeper level of the conspiracy and like I think then that when you come to someone And you try to say look this historical narrative that you've got is Incorrectory inadequate listen to mine. It's more objective and more neutral I think people can they can smell the disingenuousness in there right? I think I think people can tell that there is a politics and a morality that informs your historical narrativeization And so like it might be more like effective to you know like I said about this stuff when attempting to Convert others which is a huge part of our contemporary political Problem the problems that we're dealing with with is like a seeming inability to successfully carry out conversions of the faithful. I'm not entirely sure about the limits of this as an effective rhetorical strategy, but I do think that people can tell when you're pretending to be disinterested, but you're really not. Yeah. There's a certain way in which people that have skepticism about medical things, let's say, that you might come to them and say, "Well, these experts say this, this, and that." You might be better grounded or more than some actual factual conditions, but it's also true that a lot of people that make those kinds of arguments are liberal technocrats, and they actually just like they over-invest in deptocratic expertise. People reject people like whistle at that. Right? I think you're right, Gio. There is no way to come at some ridiculous, obviously account of history or account of events, conspiratorial and all that, with just the right information. People will actually snap out, like you said, that, come on, there's something, you yourself have an agenda and just put it really cross-leaf. But we all have a weather where it's not. Whether you're aware of it or not. No belief simply is isolated, that it has a particular crystallization and form. And so it can actually even, I don't know, this is the last thing I'll say, it can even help explain why what might seem to be a particular isolated belief that we may or may not agree with, we think is ridiculous and all of that. But it can also help us contextualize and say, "Well, if this idea of, say, like your liberal technocracies over-coded in this idea of the talk about vaccines and all that, that can help you understand what's going on there. That's not like pure irrationality. It's the idea that this is a symptom of a particular type of political project that is taking form. That's trying to hide itself as if it's simply about this one thing. But it's really irradiated with this particular structure of what social action should look like, what society should look like, etc. And so in that way, I think it could be really revealing to help us to be like a god-a-marion, achieve that fusion of horizons of really understanding where people are coming from, rather than something being like, "Oh, will that person must be crazy or they must think I'm crazy?" Is that we're responding to particular, narrativeological forms? Good point. This is slightly potential, but I just want to say I think Marx is such a master of combining the elements of science and narrative. Even capital itself is thought through with poises. We all know about all the different tables and bundles of yarn and all that that goes on in capital. There are metaphors and references, the literature, references, the law. Drama? And then of course, then he writes other works like the Communist Manifesto, in which narrative, historical narrative, and even in Plotman, a sense of the protagonist and where they are going and what is coming. And the language that he uses to describe history, and the movement of history in that book, is just like this weaving of science and narrative and the meaning-making and a moral that I think is truly unique to him. Mark that car. We like him. That does it for us today. New episodes of What's Left The Philosophy Come Out Every Two Weeks Wherever You Get Your Podcast. Also check us out on YouTube for videos and live streams. We'd like to take a minute to think some of the people are supporting the show and Patreon. We could do this without you and we're really grateful. 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