ANKERSMITS POSTMODERNIST HISTORIOGRAPHY: THE HYPERBOLE OF OPACITY

JOHN H. ZAMMITO

ABSTRACT

Ankersmits articulation of a postmodern theory of history takes seriously both the strengths of traditional historicism and the right of historians to decide what makes sense for disciplinary practice. That makes him an exemplary interlocutor. Ankersmit proposes a theory of historical representation which radicalizes the narrative approach to historiography along the lines of poststructuralist textualism. Against this postmodernism but invoking some of his own arguments, I defend the traditional historicist position. I formulate criticisms of the theory of reference entailed in his notion of narrative substance, of his master analogy of historiography with modern painting, and nally of his characterization of historical hermeneutics. In each case I nd him guilty of the hyperbole which he himself cautions against. While it is true that historical narratives cannot be taken to be transparent, in taking them to be opaque Ankersmit puts himself in an untenable position. Finally, Ankersmit seeks to buttress his theoretical case by an interpretation of the new cultural historical texts of authors like Davis and Ginzburg. While this is a concreteness heartily to be welcomed in philosophers of history, I cannot nd his construction of this new schools work plausible.

In History and Tropology, a collection of his most important essays over the last decade, Frank Ankersmit presents a very coherent and ambitious argument for the emergence not only of a new historiographical theory but of a concomitant practice which signals the rise of postmodernism within the discipline.1 Accordingly, an engagement with Ankersmit may be the most economical vehicle for establishing what is at stake in the current clash of paradigms. Ankersmit is a worthy interlocutor for two reasons. First, he recognizes as his point of departure that historians should decide upon historical practice.2 For
1. F. R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley, 1994). Henceforth all references to this text will be in the form HT. Ankersmits book documents an evolution in his own thought, along with that of the intellectual discourse in which it has partaken, and we will have to be attentive to this trajectory of argument and its culmination, so as not to misread interim positions for ultimate ones in his essays. In particular, Ankersmit moves from a discourse of narrativism in his earlier essays towards a discourse of representation in the nal chapters in which only certain features of the original construction of narrativism remain important. 2. HT, 238. [T]here is no point outside historiography itself from which rules for the historians method can be drawn up: if historians consider something to be meaningful, then it is meaningful and that is all there is to it. (Historiography and Postmodernism, HT, 164 [originally published in History and Theory 28 (1989), 137-154]). [C]ritical philosophy of history has the task of reecting on the results rather than on the presuppositions of contemporary historical writing. (The Reality Effect in the Writing of History, in HT, 135).

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him, the test of theory is ultimately in practice, and the verdict is still out: it still has to be seen whether postmodernism is more successful than histori[ci]sm in its support of historiographical practice.3 But second, and even more important, Ankersmit strives seriously to acknowledge the importance of historicism in historical practice. [N]o historical theory has guaranteed historical writing greater and better-deserved triumphs than histori[ci]sm.4 This is not to say that Ankersmit is uncritical. Indeed, he proposes that historicism has halted halfway and that postmodernism represents a historicism carried to its radical conclusion.5 In response, I propose to defend a position which he articulates only in passing: Twenty years ago philosophy of history was scientistic; one ought to avoid the opposite extreme of seeing historiography as a form of literature. Histori[ci]sm is the juste milieu between the two: Histori[ci]sm retains what is right in both the scientistic and the literary approaches to history and avoids what is hyperbolic in both.6 I would argue, against Ankersmit, that postmodernismhistoricism taken to the limitis precisely the hyperbolic move he cautions against.7 As Brook Thomas points out, there is a tendency for poststructuralists to fall prey to the very totalization which they claim to abhor.8 Jean Howard, reecting on the tension between poststructuralism and the historical effort of the New Historicism, muses at one point: if one accepts certain tendencies in poststructuralist thought, is the possibility of an historical criticism even conceivable?9 John Toews raises the same question: one begins to wonder if it is possible to avoid the pitfalls of a referential or representational theory at all without ceasing to do history and restricting oneself to thinking about it. Has the theory of linguistic density and complexity of texts, contexts, and their apparently circular relationships outrun its possible utility as either a clarication of, or guide for, historiographical practice?10 The issue is ineluctably about referentiality and empiricism. Ankersmit acknowledges: It is true that neither histori[ci]sm nor even postmodernism will or can deny that history is an empirical discipline in which historical reality, however conceived, is described or represented on the basis of empirical data.11 Yet this acknowledgment is tougher for Ankersmit to be faithful to than he would like to believe. He certainly insists that the philosophical point of a critical philoso3. HT, 238. 4. Ibid. 5. Ankersmit, Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 194; 222-223. 6. Ankersmit, Introduction, HT, 34. 7. See my earlier essay, Are We Being Theoretical Yet? The New Historicism, the New Philosophy of History, and Practicing Historians, Journal of Modern History 65 (1993), 783-814, for my argument about the hyperbolic moment in postmodernism. 8. B. Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old Fashioned Notions, in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York and London, 1989), 200. 9. Jean Howard, The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies, English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), 19. 10. John Toews, Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience, American Historical Review 92 (1987), 886. 11. Ankersmit, Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 194.

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phy of history is to face the challenge to clarify the nature of historical representation rather than . . . too facile an injunction to abandon the concept of representation for the writing of history altogether.12 I agree with this and with his amplication of this commitment: the real dispute between the histori[ci]st and the postmodernist concerns the nature of historical experience and the place of historical reality in the historians interpretation of the past.13 Ankersmit recognizes the tight bind such terms for the debate place on the postmodernist theorist: the postmodernist notion of the simulacrum and of the historiographical hyperreality seems to leave no room whatsoever for the autonomy of historical reality and for an authentic historical experience of that reality.14 He will have to go to some extreme lengths to circumvent this dilemma, as we shall see. Ankersmit identies himself and other postmodernist theorists of history as narrativists, but he does not mean at all by narrativism what one would suppose. It is altogether to be distinguished from story-telling.15 Ankersmit himself traces the evolution of this latter (superseded) narrativist idea about history through three phases. First, with such gures as Gallie and Louch, it signied a concern with rhetorical contrivance in the narrow sense of strategies for occasioning the reader to suspend disbelief.16 The second phase of narrativism is closest to a methodological or even epistemological idea, namely the search for narrative arguments, the idea that narrative represents a form of explanation genetic explanations. The key gures here were Morton White and Arthur Danto.17 Yet a third phase of this (rejected) sense of narrativism is that in which phenomenologists like Ricoeur, Carr, and Olafson argued that narrative interpretation emulated and was grounded necessarily in the structure of lived experience.18 Ankersmit identies his own sense of narrativism, rather, with Hayden

12. Ibid., 192. 13. Ibid., 194. 14. Ibid. 15. Ankersmit writes: all association with story-telling to which the term narrativism might give rise should . . . be avoided. Narrativism should rather be associated with (historical) interpretation. (The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History, in HT, 45 [originally published in History and Theory, Beiheft 25 (1986), 1-27]). See McCullaghs review of Ankersmits Narrative Logic (The Hague, 1983) in History and Theory 23 (1984), 394ff., where McCullagh notes that Ankersmits title is deceptive. 16. Ankersmit, The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History, HT, 62; an example of this mode is A. Louch, History as Narrative, History and Theory 8 (1969), 54-70. 17. See, for example, A. Danto, Narration and History (New York, 1985). 18. P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols. (Chicago, 19841988); D. Carr, Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity, History and Theory 25 (1986), 117-131, and Time, Narrative and History (Bloomington, 1986); and F. Olafson, The Dialectic of Action (Chicago, 1979). Ankersmit cites Hayden Whites rebuttal: no one and nothing lives a story (White, Tropics of Discourse [Baltimore, 1978], 111). But Ankersmit also acknowledges some connection, only in the inverse direction: The notion of the self is a historical, narrative interpretationthe narrative interpretation that is presupposed by all other historical interpretations. This is the kernel of truth in AngloSaxon hermeneutics. (Six Theses on Narrativist Philosophy of History, in HT, 43). The phrase Anglo-Saxon or analytical hermeneutics derives from F. Olafson (F. Olafson, Hermeneutics: Analytical and Dialectical, History and Theory, Beiheft 25 [1986], 28-42). Olafson used it to dis-

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Whites linguistic approach to historical writing.19 Indeed, Ankersmit acknowledgesas do all postmodern theorists of historythe seminal inuence of Hayden White.20 For Ankersmit the decisive development in the theory of history in the last several decades has been the movement from description and explanation, which he associates with the epistemological approach to history (from Hempel to Von Wright and Dray), through the hermeneutic and narrativist theory of interpretation, to an even more encompassing theory of historical representation. Ankersmit writes, following Hayden White: [T]he historical narrative is a complex linguistic structure specially built for the purpose of showing part of the past. In other words, the historians language is not a transparent, passive medium through which we can see the past as we do perceive what is written in a letter through the glass paperweight lying on top of it . . . [W]e do not look at the past through the historians language, but from the vantage point suggested by it.21 Ankersmit argues that the hermeneuticist or interpretive approach to historical practice has been caught up in paralogisms of transparency. First, it adopted the ideal that a work of history should be transparent with relation to the underlying historical reality it depicted, that is, that one could read the world without distortion through the work, in the classic phrase, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist. Second, and in high tension with the rst, it held that one could similarly discern transparently through the work the intentions of the historian who wrote it.22 The work was held at one and the same time to be in unproblematic epistemological relation both to its object and its subject, its referent and its author. But in neither

tinguish his project (in company with others, from Collingwood to Dray to Von Wright) in the analytic tradition from continental hermeneutics. Ankersmit notes two decisive features here. First, this school of thought remained quite analytic: that is, it worked strictly with the tools of analytic philosophy of language and it sought epistemologically adequate explanation. But second, it recognized a distinctiveness in the object of inquiry, namely intentional human action, and therefore insisted upon an interpretive (hence, hermeneutical) strategy to achieve that explanation (philosophy of action over against the strict covering-law approach). Indeed, it is this focus on agency or intentional action that most sharply distinguished analytical hermeneutics from its continental counterpart, for the latter, as Ankersmit correctly notes, was overwhelmingly grounded in textual interpretation. (The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History, HT, 50.) 19. He denes his idea of narrativism as a philosophy of language analyzing the historical text as a whole (Introduction, HT, 6). 20. Ankersmit adverts to White especially in the Introduction to History and Tropology (7-19), but Whites inuence is decisive and acknowledged throughout. For White see not only Metahistory (Baltimore, 1973), but the more radical developments in Tropics of Discourse and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987). 21. The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History, HT, 65. In short, Ankersmits central claim about the nature of historical representation is that We do not look through language at (past) reality; the historians language is not a medium wanting to erase itself (ibid., 71). 22. That, according to Ankersmit, was the operative assumption of conventional historiography. This may be why he insists that traditional historiographyeven more than traditional hermeneuticsfailed to live up to Gadamers critique: Historiography [in its traditional form], contrary to appearances, is not a fulllment of the Gadamerian requirement of the historicization of the historical subject but is, in fact, a double refusal to do so. (Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 221)

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case could this be true. Neither the naive realism of the rst notion of transparency nor the equally naive access to authorial intention have withstood critical investigation. This has been the upshot of the debates about hermeneutics since Dilthey. Ankersmits essential criticism of traditional hermeneutics has to do with its penchant toward the self-effacement of the historian, the ambition towards authorial transparency as the token of objectivity. The omnipresent, tacit assumption always is that the historians own experience of the past will unavoidably lead to subjectivity, to a distortion of the past and to the illegitimate interposition of the historian himself between the past and the reader of his text.23 The Rankean ambition that the historian must completely disappear from the text Ankersmit labels the decisive naivete of traditional historiography. By abandoning even historical hermeneutics for representation Ankersmit is subscribing to a textualist approach in the strong poststructuralist sense:
For the new historiography, the text must be centralit is no longer a layer through which one looks (either at past reality or at the historians authorial intentions), but something which the historiographer must look at. In the new historiography this new postulate of the nontransparency of the historical text leads to a concentration on the conicts, hesitations, ambiguitiesin short, on what Paul de Man has styled the undecidabilities of the historical text, in which the nontransparency of the text reveals itself.24

Generally, the thrust of postmodernist theory of history is to demonstrate that we are unable to distinguish between difference in historical reality (or historical forms or ideas) and mere difference in interpretation.25 There is an undecidability (to stay with de Mans terms) between what is made and what is found in historical representation.26 In Ankersmits terms: [W]e cannot be so condent about the possibility of telling historiography apart from history itself.27 There are two dimensions to the aporia which this suggests. First, the text occludes the reality it depicts. It is the texts obscurities which constitute this opacity.28 But, second, the historians own involvement in the construction becomes highlighted by this occlusion.
23. Introduction, HT, 20. 24. The Reality Effect in the Writing of History, HT, 128. 25. Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 187. 26. Ibid., 190. This postmodern depthlessness is a ubiquitous trait which we have already seen in literary new historicism, and which Fredric Jameson has used to identify postmodernism generally: the distinction between reality and representation becomes blurred (F. Jameson, Postmodernism, New Left Review 146 [1984], 58). 27. Ankersmit, Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 219. 28. Ibid., 129. Stephen Bann makes the same point: the historical text purports to be transparent to the action which it describes, and yet such a notion of transparency by-passes the necessary stage of mental representation . . . (Analysing the Discourse of History, Renaissance and Modern Studies 27 [1983], 81.) Hans Kellner has called this, borrowing a phrase from Bann, getting the story crooked. That is, Kellner does not believe that there are stories out there. Instead, he urges us to foreground the contructed, rhetorical, nature of our knowledge of the past. That is, historians do not nd the truths of past events: they create events from a seamless ow and invent meanings that produce patterns within that ow. And, in the fashioning, other sources take over, sources derived, not from the evidence, but from the language that purportedly represents the evidence. (Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked [Madison, Wisc., 1989], vii, 7, 24, 54.)

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The decisive breakthrough to postmodernism, according to Ankersmit, comes with the historicization of the historical subject.29 Philosophical hermeneutics showed us we are always already in what Hans-Georg Gadamer called Wirkungsgeschichte.30 Yet Ankersmit really wants to radicalize even Gadamer.31 Wirkungsgeschichte dissolves itself into an endless proliferation of historical self-reections within an ever-expanding historiographical present.32 The new area of maximal critical investigation is no longer the interaction between text and its historical context but rather the interaction between the text and the historian.33 [T]he historicization of the historian and historical knowledge effects a coalescence of the level of the writing of history and that of historiography (the history of historical writing) . . . 34 Given that the only access to the past is through the various representations (interpretations) that have been constructed already, Ankersmit claims, it becomes increasingly problematic to dissociate the original past from its reconstructions. [A]ll we have are constructions produced by historians on the basis of . . . traces [the past has left us] (that is why the term constructivism is used . . . ) . . . Even the word reconstructivism would be out of place.35 If I may coopt terms, the contemporary situation, as Ankersmit invites us to understand it, witnesses the displacement of Wirkungsgeschichte by Rezeptionsgeschichte.36 Historical representations are not so much contradicted by historical reality
29. Ankersmit uses this phrase several times, usually invoking Gadamer: HT, 128, 219. Gadamer wishes to draw our attention to the fact that how we experience the text and its meaning cannot be dissociated from the question of what the text means to us in our present situation, that is, how the text applies to us and to our own world (Introduction, HT, 23). This is what Gadamer meant by philosophical hermeneutics, and what Page, Bambach, and others have discerned as the new, radical philosophical historicism: C. Page, Philosophical Historicism and the Betrayal of First Philosophy (University Park, Pa., 1995); C. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca, 1995). 30. H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. (New York, 1992), 300ff. Ankersmit sees himself specically taking off from Gadamers philosophical hermeneutics which he acknowledges to be perfectly adequate for such pursuits as intellectual history or history of philosophy but which is shown to be incomplete by the emergence of history of mentalities. (Introduction, HT, 23; Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 220-222.) 31. Gadamer is interested in the historicity of experience (die Geschichtlichkeit des Verstehens) and not in the experience of historicity (die Erfahrung der Geschichtlichkeit) (Introduction, HT, 23). It is not at all clear what Ankersmit intends with this chiasmus, especially as a conception of Gadamers project. 32. Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 222. 33. The Reality Effect in the Writing of History, HT, 127n. 34. Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 219. 35. The Use of Language in the Writing of History, HT, 84-85. 36. Theorizing the difference and drift from Wirkungsgeschichte to Rezeptionsgeschichte would naturally begin with Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Robert Jauss and their theories of reception, especially Jausss pivotal manifesto, Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory, in H. R. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetics of Reception (Minneapolis, 1982), 3-45. The essential point I would make is simply that what fades, as Ankersmit would have it more generally, is the authority not of the authors intention, but of the very text itself, beneath readers constructions of it. See H. R. Jauss, The Identity of the Poetic Text in the Changing Horizon of Understanding, in Identity of the Literary Text, ed. M. J. Valds and O. Miller (Toronto, 1985).

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itself but by other historical representations.37 All we have is the intertextual interplay between the historical narratives we happen to have on some topic.38 Historical reality is simply what is common to the available narratios of a given matter: Their overlap determines what historical reality actually is like for this set of texts. . . . 39 What makes each one unique is the differences that remain. As ever new narratios are added, this uniqueness or identity can and must change; therefore no narratio has a permanent, essential identity. It is only in juxtaposition, in mutual contestation, that they take on any determinacy, any contour that is meaningful.40 Ankersmit sees this as theoretically homologous to the (post)Saussurian argument about the lability of signiers. The reality of the past is an effect caused by the tension in and between historical texts.41 As Ankersmit elaborates this idea: these rules and codes . . . unconsciously and unintentionally construct the historical object and the reality of the past. They do not analyze a previously given historical reality but dene it rst. Historical reality is not a datum but a convention created by the reality effect.42 Intertexuality is all. Ankersmit writes: Narrative interpretations are Gestalts, that is, proposals (to see the past from a certain point of view).43 This leads him (falsely) to infer: Narrative interpretations are not knowledge but organisations of knowledge.44 What is false about this is the denial that the organization of knowledge is knowledge. It isand of the most precious kind.45 Ankersmit gets very murky trying to establish the ontological and epistemological status of his notion of narrative substance. C. Behan McCullagh is very hard on him for this in his review of Narrative Logic, and not altogether unjustly.46 Some clarity can be achieved, however. The essential point is to recognize that Ankersmit wishes to insist upon
37. Ankersmit, Historical Representation, HT, 116 (originally published in History and Theory 27 [1988], 205-228). 38. Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History, HT, 26. 39. Ankersmit, Reply to Professor Zagorin, History and Theory 29 (1990), 283. 40. [N]arrative unity and coherence always come from the outside, as it were: they do not have their source so much in the narratio itselfat least not exclusively soas in what happens in the controversy concerning several narratios on the same topic (The Use of Language in the Writing of History, HT, 78). 41. The Reality Effect in the Writing of History, HT, 140. Here the decisive inuence, elaborating upon Saussure in the direction of poststructuralism, is R. Barthes, The Discourse of History and above all, The Reality Effect (now reprinted in Barthes, The Rustle of Language [Berkeley, 1989], 127-148). Hence Ankersmits title. 42. Ankersmit, The Reality Effect in the Writing of History, HT, 145. 43. Six Theses on Narrativist Philosophy of History, 4.1.2 and 4.2, HT, 37. 44. Ibid., 4.3, HT, 38. 45. Ankersmit vests his ideas about truth and knowledge all too narrowly in discrete statements. This is reected in his idea of natural science, which seems inconsistent with postpositivist theory of science, and most saliently in his rejection of any idea of truth or knowledge which has integrative function. He assigns this to a presumably non-cognitive category he calls insight. Thus he terms interpretation a movement against truth, arguing that the risk garners insights which mere chronicling of facts could never achieve. Interpretation is more interesting but also less certain . . . Yet here the fatal error of equating knowledge with certainty (a crippling legacy of Cartesian foundationalism), which Ankersmit has not transcended but only inverted into hyperbolic skepticism, dismisses precisely what is essential: empirical, fallible knowledgewhat he calls insight. See Introduction, HT, 7. 46. C. Behan McCullagh, Review of Narrative Logic, History and Theory 23 (1984), 394ff.

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the holism of an interpretation, or narrative substance: hence Gestalt. At the same time, however, he wishes to underscore that it is a representation, that is, it is separate from yet refers to reality (if we may be allowed, for the moment, the use of these terms). This is what Ankersmit means by insisting, Narrative logic is strictly nominalist.47 His examples make his intention perfectly clear: a term like Cold War or Renaissance is a heuristic device for historians, not an ontic substance in the past. On the other hand, once historians stipulate a reference for this phrase, they can apply it to the (real) past and dispute its determinate features (though Ankersmit would hold that this dispute is always only between narrative constructs and not in relation to the past itself). Ankersmit goes so far as to argue that when not only historians but ordinary language users adopt such usage, conventional reality will be vested in it by the entire culture. Thus ordinary language users know what they mean by the phrase First World War, and are prepared to understand by that signier an event in the real past. History can contribute what W. H. Walsh has called colligatory concepts to the lexical pool of ordinary language.48 But even were this not the case, these heuristic devices would remain viable tokens for ongoing historical discourse, matter for thought, inquiry, and dispute. Yet here Ankersmit believes he comes to the nub of the problem: Our speaking about the past is covered by a thick crust not related to the past itself but to historical interpretation and the debate about rival historical interpretations.49 The issue for Ankersmit is to differentiate the ontic status of the narrative construction as a medium from the past reality it claims to represent. Ankersmit means his nominalism to be taken seriously at the level of interpretive constructsnarrative substances are heuristic constructs coded in language (that is, texts)but he has no doubt about the epistemological verication of singular statements. These do describe the past and they can be established true or false.50 But they serve another purpose within narrative substances, according to Ankersmit: to dene or individuate a specic narrative interpretation . . . 51 What he means is that the selection of a set of such statements constructs an interpretation; it is simply the set of its singular statements. Here, however, we come upon a at contradiction in Ankersmits text. In the Six Theses he writes: A historical narrative is a historical narrative only insofar as the (metaphorical) meaning of the historical narrative in its totality transcends the (literal) meaning of the sum of its individual statements.52 This (somewhat clumsy) locution is Ankersmits version of Hayden Whites seminal discrimination of true history from mere annal or chronicle.53 And yet in another essay in History and
47. Six Theses on Narrativist Philosophy of History, 4.7.1, HT, 39. 48. W. H. Walsh, Colligatory Concepts in History, in The Philosophy of History, ed. P. Gardiner (Oxford, 1973), 127-145. 49. Six Theses on Narrativist Philosophy of History, 4.5.1, HT, 38. 50. Ibid., 5, HT, 40. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 5.2.1, HT, 41. 53. On Whites distinction of real history from mere annals or chronicle see Metahistory, 5-7.

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Tropology Ankersmit writes: the narrative substance does not add anything to what the individual statements of the historical narrative express about the past.54 What occasions this serious slippage (beyond change in time of composition) is Ankersmits concern about the ontological status of his narrative substance. He endeavors, after the most analytic fashion, to offer a formal logical denition of it: N1 is P, or N is pi . . . pn, where pi . . . pn represent individual statements, and P means contains pi . . . pn.55 Yet one wishes here to ask what the operation is that he has in mind: summation or integration? For the former entails discrete elements, while the latter presumes continuity and thereby achieves a closure unavailable to the mere sum (except at a limit approaching innity which Ankersmit specically excludes). Here we might have had a nonmystied sense of that crucial increment that the whole achieves beyond the sum of its parts. Of course even then we would still remain gurative with (quasimathematical) language (and, as Ankersmit avers, metaphors ought to offer new access to the strange [make it more familiar]56). So, what are we to make of his contradiction? I say, go back to Hayden Whites crucial insistence on the indispensably interpretive character of historical writingwhich is all Ankersmit needs anyway. As Ankersmit correctly observes, historians generally consider the history of historical debate about a certain historical issue as not merely propaedeutic to new historical insight but as a crucial part of it.57 The following observation is sound as well: Only through the rules and codes which discipline the historian and his work can a stabilization of the historical object be reached, and only then is collective historical enquiry and historical debate possible.58 He elaborates at another point: In the past two centuries historians created a series of more or less complicated intellectual constructions, in the form of notions like people, state, nation, social class, social structure, intellectual movement, which could come to embody the distance between past and present. . . . These notions have proved to be useful tools for the historian and it is unthinkable that they should be discarded.59 Yet Ankersmit accuses historicism of positivism in this endeavor: [H]istorism sought to reify each of these historical periods . . . to present them as objects of historical experience . . . [showing] an intellectual mentality coming quite close to that of positivism.60 He later argues that what a postmodernist history must do is precisely to discard these ideas, however unthinkable he just
54. Ankersmit, Historical Representation, HT, 114. 55. Reply to Professor Zagorin, 279-280. 56. Of course, metaphor can also defamiliarize the commonplace and create strangeness. For the range of theoretical issues on the creativity and intelligibility of metaphor, see Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1993). 57. Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 220. 58. The Reality Effect in the Writing of History, HT, 145. 59. Ibid., 158. 60. Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 206.

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pronounced this, and he claims that indeed historians of mentalities are currently doing just that.61 This, it seems to me, tumbles him into hyperbole. What entitles Ankersmit to think that historical interpretations, however they have encrusted the past in itself (to employ a Hegelianism), are not related to the past itself? They certainly refer to at least some part of it, though Ankersmit rejects that verb.62 Yet we can agree, certainly, that insofar as these historical interpretations mediate our experience of the past, they may well distort it in itself. Part of the problem here is what Ankersmit is after by the past itselfand how we could gain access to it. Practicing historians are less interested in the past and History than they are in concrete aspects of itwhat they call, for example, the Cold War or the Renaissance. The other part of the problem is that if these interpretations mediate the past, they must be understood to do so in at least an ambivalent sense: not merely distorting, but also providing access. It seems rather extreme to charge that avoiding the past as some pure totality is craven, and that historicism has hidden from all the real issues in staying wide of speculative philosophy of history, or at most gesturing to such a totality under the rubric Universalgeschichte.63 Similarly, there seems scant warrant to repudiate the conceptual discrimination of interpretive concepts for segments of the past and a focus on their internal structure. To do so is to repudiate not just historicism but historical practice altogether. The actual past may provide us with arguments for preferring one narratio to another, but in historiographical discussion it is never compared with narratios in toto in the way we can compare reality with singular statements in order to establish their truth or falsehood.64 There is reason to question the cogency of this claim, since even though historians certainly do not try to grasp the past as a whole in an interpretation, they certainly do endeavor to gain a grasp and dispute the grasp of other historians over more than mere singular statements. And just in the measure that arguments to sustain such claims to grasp segments of the past invoke evidence and lay claim to truth, Ankersmit has not really made the kind of clarifying deconstruction he thinks he has. The guiding analogy, the master metaphor for Ankersmit, is the idea that historical writing is like representational painting.65 What Ankersmit wishes to achieve by this master metaphor of history as painting is to see historical writing,
61. Whether we think of the micro-storie, of Alltagsgeschichte, or of deconstructivist intellectual and cultural history, in all cases we witness a revolt . . . of the marginal against the important, without, however, the marginal ever aspiring to take the place of the historists or the positivists categories of the important (Introduction, HT, 29). 62. Ankersmit wishes to deny that narrative constructs refer to the past, though they do apply to the past: Narrative interpretations apply to the past, but do not correspond or refer to it (as [parts of] statements do). (Six Theses on Narrativist Philosophy of History, 3.3. HT, 36) 63. See Ankersmits harsh comments on Universalgeschichte, Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 207. 64. The Use of Language in the Writing of History, HT, 87. 65. The suggestion is rather that the historian could meaningfully be compared to the painter representing a landscape, a person, and so on . . . (Historical Representation, HT, 102) History should be subsumed under the concept of art since both represent the particular as such (ibid., 108).

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just like the work of painting, as a thing distinct from what it represents. Representation, as Ankersmit understands it, takes on a substitutive function: it not only stands apart from what is represented, but displaces it, taking on opacity.66 Substancesthingsaccording to Ankersmit have a certain unity and coherence which he identies precisely as opacity. But the historical past is no such thing: it is [t]he historian [who] gives this unity and coherence to the past through his narrative proposal as to how the past should be looked at. Unity and coherence are not properties of the past but of the narratio . . . 67 The historians language does not strive to make itself invisible like the glass paperweight of the epistemological model, but it wishes to take on the same solidity and opacity as a thing.68 As he notes, This is . . . why I would prefer to speak of historical representation rather than of historical interpretation. For the former term is more suggestive of the ambition of the historical text to function as a substitute and of the similarities of the work of art and historical writing than the latter.69 Historiography possesses the same opacity and intensional dimension as art.70 Ankersmit wants to contend that the history of conventional historiography can be compared to the development of representational painting in the West since the Renaissance, with the crisis of conventional historiography in postmodernism analogized to the challenge of high modernism to representationalism in painting. As in the case of naturalist painting, the historical narrative implicitly exhorted its reader to look through it and, in the same way as the brush strokes of naturalist painting, the linguistic devices the historian had at his disposal allowed him to create an illusion of (past) reality.71 But with high modernism, we no longer look through the representational medium of art but see only it. Art becomes like a metaphor for which no literal analogue can be found, yet which achieves this effect by being merely literal itself.72 There is some reason to question whether this characterization is as conclusive as Ankersmit believes. It fails to take into account serious questions about the point of the over66. [I]n historical interpretation the narrative substance tends to take the place of the past as topic of discussion. . . . [N]arrative substances tend to act as a substitute or replacement for (part of) the past itself. (Reply to Professor Zagorin, 290). Ankersmit thinks that it is the disciplines goal to replace historical reality with historical interpretation: it must, therefore, be the disciplinary goal of historical writing to produce narrative substances that can, in the literal sense of the word, function as the substitutes for the past they attempt to replace (ibid., 291.). Accordingly, the critical question changes: As Gombrich has said, the crucial question to be asked about substitutes is not whether they give a good likeness but whether they can function as the original they replace. Obviously, the appeal to function will most often prove to be destructive of the common ground that is conditional for rational debate about realist accuracy (ibid., 294). 67. The Use of Language in the Writing of History, HT, 93. 68. Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History, HT, 65. 69. Reply to Professor Zagorin, 292. 70. Historiography and Postmodernism, HT, 171. Ankersmit means intensional in all the problematic rigor of that philosophical notion. Still, neither its mention nor his use of it seems particularly a propos. 71. Historical Representation, HT, 121. 72. Ibid.

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throw of representation in painting. The issue has to do with an expressive as opposed to mimetic theory of artistic truth. How all this relates to historical narratives is far more problematic than the analogy Ankersmit seeks to cash out. High modernists in painting insisted that their craft was about paint on canvas, and that the imaginary window in the painting (whether via traditional perspectival realism or indeed any form of representation) should be slammed shut so that only the surface (of paint on canvas) signied.73 Yet even as artists insisted upon the materiality of their media as the essential, elemental meaning of their practice, its self-referentiality via form, they also in many cases claimed that art possesses an expressive truth beyond materiality.74 The essential issue here, as Ankersmit recognizes, is that painting could well dispense with any gesture of representation to focus on the medium as the message, but the same is not quite the case with history. Conversely, Ankersmit claims that representational artists, in contrast to historians, always have available the gesture to a referent out there beyond their signiers both to justify their vision and to provoke the destabilization of their viewers conventional sight. On both counts, the limitations of Ankersmits analogy seem more compelling than its strengths. Above all, he elides crucial issues of reference in historical, as contrasted with painterly, representation. Striking about Ankersmits argument is that he wishes to supplementif not ultimately groundhis case about postmodernist theory of history by demonstrating a transformation in historical practice. Invoking Barthess idea of the notationthe seemingly inadvertent detail in a text through which it achieves its reality effectAnkersmit moves to parallel the development of recent historical practice to the theory of the development of representational painting.75 His idea is that landscape painting arose when artists shifted their attention from the foregrounded thematic to the background into which they had set it and, similarly, that historians, in moving to social history and then to the new cultural history or history of mentalities, have taken up the neglected background and abandoned the thematic meaning foregrounded by their earlier concerns. For Ankersmit, postmodernism in historical practice arose when historical writing reached a stage where the boundary between reconstruction (of the past) and invention (in the present) is overstepped and the contours of the historical object are dissolved.76 This is what Ankersmit professes to discern in the practice of the new cultural history, or the history of mentalities, as he terms it. These books

73. The most decisive moment of this high-modernist breakthrough was Cubism, and it is somewhat disappointing that Ankersmit does not deal with the rigorous projectspractical and theoreticalof Cubism in his characterization of painting and the art object of high modernism. 74. This is above all the thrust of the major movements of high modernism in painting that followed upon and harvested the achievements of analytic Cubismsynthetic Cubism, Constructivism, De Stijl, Suprematism, and Surrealism. Ankersmit does not pursue his analogy seriously enough, or these developments would complicate his picture dramatically. 75. Ankersmit, The Reality Effect in the Writing of History, HT, 152-153. 76. Ibid., 156.

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are not about the past, but about the boundary between the past and historical representation of it. They form a curious mixture of theory and history.77 Ankersmit sees this as a dispensation of diachronicity and explanation in favor of a marginalizing of the historicity of the past.78 This journey past newer and newer categories of notations is a movement toward us.79 Ironically, this carries undigestible fragments like bits of debris from the past forward into the present. What remains are these chunks of the past, these raw stories about apparently quite irrelevant historical occurrences that leave most contemporary historians just as bafed [as viewers of Duchamps ready mades] . . .80 Ankersmit is adamant that such microstorie are not representative of their time. He argues: We could not derive Menocchios opinions from the outillage mental of his time (if we could, Ginzburgs book would be anecdotal); nor do the microstorie help us to understand or to explain it.81 Rather, The effect of these microstorie is thus to make historiography representative only of itself; they possess a self-referential capacity very similar to the means of expression used by the relevant modern painters.82 The uncanny independence of the objects discussed in the history of mentalities does not serve to objectify the past, but, on the contrary, to undo (histori[ci]st and positivist) objectication; it suggests the mysterious existence of a realm lying between ourselves and the reied past of the histori[ci]st and the positivist.83 He concludes: past reality disintegrates into a myriad of self-sufcient fragments. Postmodernism functions within the matrix of the detail. . . . 84 But Ankersmits interpretation is, I think, unfaithful to his own precept of learning what is meaningful from historical practice, and not dictating standards to it, for he does not harken to what Carlo Ginzburg and Natalie Zemon Davis say about their practice. While they are not naive about the anxiety occasioned by the historicization of the historical subject, they unequivocally insist upon the utility of microstorie in help[ing] us to understand or to explain the past in which these stories arise. The point is precisely to demonstrate that our previous conception of outillage mental was unduly constrictive, so that a proper outillage mental will incorporate such possibilities and in that measure be truer to the historical actuality.85 What is essential is Ginzburgs insistence on the referentiality
77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., 157. 79. Ibid., 152. 80. Historical Representation, HT, 122. 81. Ibid., 123. 82. Ibid. 83. Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 233. 84. Ibid., HT, 193. This is very similar to what literary new historicists are doing with anecdote and texts. Here is where the new philosophy of history and literary new historicism converge upon the practice of the new cultural history. Yet I would hold out that the new cultural history remains a historical practice in precisely the way necessary to continue to distinguish it from both these relations. See The New Cultural History, ed. L. Hunt (Berkeley, 1989). 85. See C. Ginzburgs defense of his historical procedure: Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian, Critical Inquiry 18 (1991), 79-98, and Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore, 1989). And see Natalie Zemon Daviss careful and persuasive explication of her method in On the Lame, American Historical Review 93 (1988), 572-603.

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of empirical history: no text can be understood without a reference to extratextual realities.86 Writing of the aims of microstorie as exemplied in the work of Natalie Davis, Ginzburg states unequivocally: The specic aim of this kind of historical research should be, I think, the reconstruction of the relationship (about which we know so little) between individual lives and the contexts in which they unfold.87 If Ankersmit is wrong in his assessment of the new historical practice, as I believe he is, what does this betoken for his thesis about the new historical theory? I think here, too, hyperbole has run away with him, despite his best intentions. Chris Lorenz gets this exactly right, and invokes Carlo Ginzburg as his star witness: The acknowledgment that the relationship between language and reality is not transparent . . . does not lead to the favorite conclusion of postmodernists that language is opaque and not capable of corresponding to and referring to reality, but to the much more realistic conclusion that reference and correspondence must be interpreted as relative and internal to specic conceptual frameworksas Carlo Ginzburg hinted in his critique of postmodernism in history [as inverted positivism].88 While it is certainly the case that textuality always transmutes its referent, it does not follow that it annihilates it. The idea of opacity is hyperbolic.
Instead of dealing with the evidence as an open window, contemporary skeptics regard it as a wall, which by denition precludes any access to reality. This extreme antipositivistic attitude, which considers all referential assumptions as a theoretical naivet, turns out to be a sort of inverted positivism. Theoretical naivet and theoretical sophistication share a common, rather simplistic assumption: they both take for granted the relationship between evidence and reality.89

There remains a referentiality about which historical practice seeks to be lucid. While it is proper to dispute a notion of transparency and perhaps even the idea of a lens as opposed to a model or map, neither models nor maps make sense without reference. Their autonomy is at best whimsical. It may well be that we might admire a map as a work of art, but we would be woefully inept to think it primarily or exhaustively one. Not only is Ankersmits theory of postmodernist history problematic, so also is his characterization of hermeneutical history. Ankersmit moves too fast and blurs some crucial distinctions in his treatment of hermeneutical historicism as naive. He goes too far when he argues: [H]istorical theory, as exemplied by hermeneutic theory, presents us with the amazing spectacle of a theory founding a purportedly scientic discipline while denying this science its experiential basis.90 In his discussion, Ankersmit imputes to historical hermeneutics all too
86. Ginzburg, Checking the Evidence, 84. 87. Ibid., 90. 88. C. Lorenz, Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality: A Plea for Internal Realism, History and Theory 33 (1994), 309 and note. 89. C. Ginzburg, Checking the Evidence, 83. 90. Ankersmit, Introduction, HT, 21.

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much of that Romantic mystique of Verstehen for which it has so long been chastised. Invoking an altogether literal sense of Collingwoods re-enactment together with the earliest Romantic version of hermeneutics (Schleiermacher), Ankersmit contends: This histori[ci]st experience of the past aims at an identifying Verstehen, as a reliving of the past, an immersion in the past; for, the histori[ci]st historical experience is to have, once again, the same experiences that do belong to the past itself.91 And again: First, an account is given of how the historical agent experienced the historical Umwelt in which he lived. The second step is a philosophical analysis of how the historian may actually copy the historical agents experience of his past world.92 Ankersmit emphasizes that copying of experience rather than experience (of the past) itself was what hermeneuticists were mainly interested in.93 But much of this is off-key. What the hermeneutical historicist is after is giving an account, as Ankersmit notes. Copying as a historicist understands it is not reliving but understanding: that is, after all, the root meaning of Verstehen. We are talking of a cognitive undertaking here, not a mystical one. (This is not to deny imagination in the process, but it is to insist that this is imagination harnessed to interpretation, not unleashed to fantasy.94) As Ankersmit amplies his objection, his own disposition toward mystication becomes all too evident. There are grave problems with what he intends by experience (of the past) itself. Just because historicist hermeneutics tries to reconstruct the experience of historical gures does not signify that the experiential basis of the historian is denied. The issue is: what is the experiential basis? An empirical-minded historian (and hermeneutics is empirical) will refer to texts, to artifacts, to archaeological remains, to the presence of sources which the historian must construe as evidence of the past. Hermeneutics is quite straightforward about that and about its epistemological quandaries (the hermeneutic circle); it is therefore misguided to write of a hidden agenda that undermines its project. Yet Ankersmit imputes this to historicism: Admittedly, the historian may base his knowledge of the past on an experience of what the past has left ussuch as documents, archaeological ndings, works of art, and so onbut these are the sources of historical knowledge of the past, and not the past itself.95 He does not lend clarity to this idea of the past itself, however. He writes: history is often shown or interpreted in terms of what has no demonstrable counterpart in the actual past itself.96 The notion of demonstrable counterpart has all too much the ring of logical empiricismthe search for some discretely observable phenomenon about it.97 A historians (colligative) concepts have demonstrable reference to
91. Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 200. 92. Introduction, HT, 20. 93. Ibid.. 94. On the relation of interpretation to imagination, drawing heavily on Kant, see R. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kants Critique of Judgment (Chicago, 1991). 95. Ankersmit, Introduction, HT, 19. 96. Ibid., 13. 97. To illustrate, consider Willard Quines behaviorist hunt for observation sentences. See Ontological Relativity, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York, 1969), 26-68.

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the past insofar as they make sense of it. Organization, to repeat a point, is knowledge. We become more and more mystied as to what Ankersmit means by the past itself. Certainly Ankersmit has not cashed out what the historians own experience of the past is to mean in this argument. A historicist would insist that this only arises in and through an encounter with sources and their reconstructive ascription to events in the real past. Ankersmit has something else in mind, something, indeed, quite distinct from the historicity that Gadamer invokes in his critique of traditional hermeneutics. Narrative coherence may guarantee the easiest access to the past but it obscures the authenticity of our experience of it. What has been appropriated and mastered narratively is no longer accessible to historical experience.98 Ankersmit here invokes as authentic a notion of immediate historical experience which is quite problematic, the nostalgic episode. It is the momentary dizzying experience of sudden obliteration of the rift between present and past, an experience in which the past for a fractional moment reveals itself as it is, or was. But this as it is is not the histor[ci]ists wie es eigentlich gewesen, but the past invested with difference . . . 99 This nostalgic episode gives us the unity of the past and the present; for, the experience of difference requires the simultaneous presence . . . of both past and present. . . . However, they are both present only in their difference. . . . The reality experienced in nostalgia is difference itself.100 Ankersmit suspects that what he describes is likely to possess for a conventional historian an air of mystique and almost religious revelation.101 He is not wrong. I wish to hold up against this strange misrepresentation of hermeneutical historicism one passage from Ankersmit which seems to offer a more accurate sense of what historians are actually doing: The historian has to nd a hitherto unknown pattern in the medley of relatively familiar things human beings did, wrote, or thought in the past.102 Crucial here is the phrase nd a . . . pattern. Find, not make. And patternGestaltwhich implies some measure of coherence. Here, at last, we get closer to the mtier dhistorien. Ankersmit notes in connection with this crucial passage: Representation is above all a question of demarcating contours, of indicating where one object or entity ends and another begins. Representation deals with the contrast between the foreground and the background, between what is important and what is irrelevant.103 That is, indeed, the historicist project. Histori[ci]st historical writing is a science of demarcations and of the distinction between foreground (the important) and background (the unimportant). Distinction and difference are for the histori[ci]st, above all, distinction and difference within the past itself.104 Louis
98. Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 210. 99. Ibid., 209. 100. Ibid., 201. 101. Ibid., 207. 102. Historical Representation, HT, 118. 103. Ibid., 117. 104. Historism and Postmodernism, HT, 202.

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Mink has argued effectively that what traditional historicism understood by historical ideaan individuated concept, or in Minks elaboration of W. H. Walshs language, a congurational comprehensionis a heuristic device, a model, but no less serviceable as an empirical reconstruction of the past.105 This incorporates both the conventionalism or constructivism upon which Ankersmit rightly insists and the referentiality and claim to validity that he wishes to abandon. Rice University

105. L. Mink, Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument, in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. R. H. Canary and H. Kozicki (Madison, Wisc., 1978), 129149.