Hayden White discusses the constructed nature of history. While he respects that history is concerned with "real events", he says that the methods of construction are very similar in history and in fiction. Both construct narrative around events in an attempt to provide logical or meaningful cause and effect. However, he also goes into the idea that even the idea of narrativity in history is constructed, by culture. He points to examples of history that did not attempt to provide cause and effect, but just lists of events--called Annals. White isn't trying to discredit history though, as shown by the disclaimer at the beginning that he realizes that history is based in events from actual space-time.
With those ideas in mind, it begs the question: What would a history with awareness of this construction look like?
Let us for the moment assume that White's ideas are correct (I hold that these ideas are true but I am aware of controversy). What seems to be the problem is that narrative will always have bias, and White even claims that beyond that, the nature of language is going to provide bias. So how does one undo that bias? My proposal is to first write history from as many perspectives as you can. Start with the annals, try to not narrativize, but just give the things that happened, without any cause and effect. Obviously, there will be cultural bias going on when you decide which events to leave in, but it would provide the reader with a stronger "factual basis" before reading the "stories". One could then explain the point of the annals, as a way of immediately getting the reader to confront their own cultural understanding as non-objective. Tell one story, then provide another, then another. Take the narrative and explain the other perspectives. This allows the reader to have more agency in understanding history. One of these histories could even be that authoritative, "objective" textbook history. However, when you put them all on equal playing fields, you remove the ability of history to argue effectively, so you can then add another thing to this history.
At the end of each perspective, or even claims within the different perspectives, one can provide their complete view, completely lacking in the supposition of objectivity, their personal thoughts. Which still allows one to put forward an argument. Because one of the problems of postmodernism is that it renders the--for example--story of the civil war when told from Confederate sympathizers, and the story from members of the union, on equal footing. This, I would argue, is a problematic thing because I think it is completely fair to undermine the narrative of the Confederacy. So the personal thoughts is where a historian can do that and make a claim for social justice, or whatever topics they wish to address.
This doesn't fix all the problems that postmodernist discourse reveals about history. However, it does help with what I feel are the most important ones. It helps with arguing with supposition of objectivity. It helps with cultural bias and understanding the construction of culture. However, it does fall into the trap of postmodernism--that it asks you to not hold any beliefs as higher than others, but we are incapable of not doing that, and in fact probably should. I have a personal "truth", or "moral code" by which I live, and while I try to take into account cultural relativism, and construction of narrative and ideas, I don't pretend to be able to fully commit to postmodernism. And neither does my proposed history.
I see you have come around to my idea of the separation between data points and a constructed narrative of causality. I can't decide whether I should be happy that my ideas somehow worked their way into your brain, or sad that I can't argue with you any more :).
ReplyDeleteI didn't come around. What I was saying is it should be one of many systems shown. I was not saying make objective data points. I still think the kind of points you were talking about are not very useful, cause they don't give much to talk about. But I am suggesting producing an "annal" of sort to go along with the narrative. That is not data points that are objective, that just removes cause and effect.
DeleteWe've been discussing this question a lot in class lately, and I think I agree with the idea of history as so-called "data points" rather than the complete relativism that seems to be inherent in postmodern interpretations of history. The problem, which you mention in this post, is that not all perspectives are completely equal. The civil war is a great example of this: there could be two perspectives, but one is deeply morally wrong. I also think that the whole question of postmodern history could veer really easily into "fake news" type debates. To a point, yes there are various narratives, but there is still an objective truth that you can't just ignore. It makes sense to consider different narratives, but at a certain point some will be true and some won't.
ReplyDeleteInteresting post! I think you addressed a lot of the issues we've been discussing with crafting a history that's as close to objective as possible. I have been noticing that the undying devotion to the equal privileging of all narratives, as postmodernism holds, can have the negative consequence of giving undue respect to ideas that potentially don't deserve them. Objectivity is finicky like that- it can actually be damaging, because it implies equality amongst all things. While this might be a general goal, it leads to the equalization of clearly harmful ideas with nonharmful ones, like, as you noted, those of the Confederacy and the Union. Still, if we reject this idea, we have then to acknowledge stronger probability of a historian's bias negatively influencing the historical narrative.
ReplyDeleteI like this post a lot, and it helps me with some of the ideas I was having trouble with yesterday. I still have some questions though. What does this history with multiple historical narratives look like? Mine was a google doc, is yours like an anthology? If so, how do we determine which historical narratives to include in the anthology, without factoring in our own cultural bias of which perspectives are meaningful and worth reading about?
ReplyDeleteSo I pictured it actually as an academic book in which each chapter was a different perspective. It could be long but it would help. The other thing I would add is that, yes it is difficult to decide which narratives to include. I would choose the narratives that I feel confident showcasing, I might not try to write from the perspective of a black person, but instead do what Doctorow did and try to understand the perspective (like with Coalhouse and Doctorow not writing what he's thinking). I think the other problem is that I am not entirely convinced that history is even about striving to find an objective truth. I think (and this is constructed culturally, as White points out) that for us history is actually about taking an idea of the truth and crafting a narrative based in that truth. There is an attempt at accurately representing facts, but because of the fact that history happened in the past, we cannot actually know that, so we must also value the narrative in and of itself.
DeleteAside about including the annals. The problem with the annals is that it removes causation. So while there are things about it that are perhaps more grounded in reality than narrative because there is less opportunity to make subjective the information (although there is some), it fails on the level that narrative succeeds on. We know that cause and effect exists, it is naive to think that things happen independently of one another, and the annals remove any indication of that, therefore having there own fallacies. They are just different from the problems in narrative history.
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