History and Theory 63, no. 2 (June 2024), 186–218 © 2024 The Authors. History and Theory published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Wesleyan University. ISSN: 0018-2656 DOI: 10.1111/hith.12341 ARTICLE THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY: OUTLINE OF A THEORY OF INTENTIONALITY—THING BY THING LISA REGAZZONI 1 ABSTRACT This article addresses the issue of historical knowledge in relation to material evidence. More specifically, it asks, What objects capture the historian’s attention and what knowledge is gained from those objects? What does the historian’s gaze select as “things of history” and thus as removed from a world of object assemblages and fluid matter? Is it the case that only artifacts deliberately produced or modified by humans (regardless of the purpose) count as “things of history”? Or do physical entities produced by unintended human and nonhuman factors also display temporal endurance or alteration occurring over time and resonate with humans? Are “things of history” only entities endowed with shape, or do formless materials qualify too? In this article, I outline a theory of intentionality in relation to material items for two main reasons. First, it allows for a “critique of material evidence,” which is still missing in the historical discipline. Second, it enables us to address any remaining epistemological, ethical, or political issues, biases, or contradictions associated with the multifaceted research on material culture that affect the way we do history. Keywords: historical critique, intentionality, interdisciplinarity, material evidence, mnemonic thing, phenomenology, temporality, thing of history N’arrive-t-il pas quelquefois qu’un éclat de silex fasse hésiter la préhistoire entre l’homme et le hasard?2 According to Paul Valéry, Socrates decided to become a philosopher when he found a paltry object on a beach, the boundary between land and sea. In the midst of what the sea had rejected, “the enigmatic bits of drift; the hideous limbs of dislocated ships, black as charcoal, and locking as though charred by the salt waters; carrion horribly pecked and washed sleek by the waves; elastic weeds torn 1. The first draft of this article was discussed at the Wesleyan University Seminar on the Theory and Practice of History in September 2022. For their generous comments and precious advice, I would like to thank Shahzad Bashir, Elizabeth Boyle, Helge Jordheim, Ethan Kleinberg, Valeria López Fadul, Gabrielle Piedad Ponce-Hegenauer, Michael S. Roth, David Gary Shaw, Jesse Torgerson, Stephanie Weiner, and Courtney Weiss Smith. 2. Paul Valéry, L’homme et la coquille (Angoulême: Éditions Marguerite Waknine, 2017), 12: “Doesn’t it sometimes happen that a piece of flint makes prehistory hesitate between man and chance?” Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. 187 by the tempests from the transparent pasture grounds of Proteus’ flocks; collapsed monsters, of cold, deathly hues,”3 Socrates came upon “a white thing of the most pure whiteness; polished and hard and smooth and light.”4 Its singular shape made him wonder if “this singular object were the work of life, or of art, or rather of time—and so a freak of nature.”5 In other words, he wondered if it was the product of a living body that had, blindly and unwittingly, labored with its own substance to forge its armor (as the mollusk forges its own shell) or the fruit of the unconscious and eternal toiling of the sea waves, the product of mechanical crashes inflicted on a fragment of rock (such as a pebble), or if it was indeed an artifact made by a human being obedient to an idea and a precise purpose (as in the case of a sculpture). The nature of this object, this “matter for doubt,”6 was a question that remained unanswered. Many of these ambiguous objects are scattered throughout Valéry’s writings. Among them are all kinds of shells and, as mentioned in this article’s epigraph, that “piece of flint” that the archaeologist struggles to discern as either a humanmade artifact or a product of chance and time. Valéry claims that everything philosophers deal with takes place “between the glance that falls on an object and the knowledge that results.”7 In the scene described above, however, not all objects deposited on the seashore become objects of knowledge. It was only the smooth white object that caught the philosopher’s eye. Hence, this article’s first question is: What objects are captured by the philosopher’s gaze and become philosophical matter? Valéry’s dialogue is a vivid illustration of the question I take as a starting point to address the issue of historical knowledge in relation to material evidence. This question prompts several other questions: What objects hold the historian’s attention and what knowledge is gained from those objects? What does the historian’s gaze select as “things of history” and thus as removed from a world of object assemblages and “active” or “vibrant matter”?8 Do only artifacts deliberately produced or modified by humans (regardless of the purpose) count as things of history? Or do physical entities produced by unintended human and nonhuman 3. Paul Valéry, Eupalinos, or The Architect, in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, vol. 4, Dialogues, transl. William McCausland Stewart (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), 113. 4. Ibid., 114. 5. Ibid., 116. 6. Ibid., 114. 7. Ibid., 88. It is no coincidence that Maurice Merleau-Ponty recognizes Valéry among the exponents of the phenomenological “movement” precisely because of this form of attention (and étonnement) directed at the statu nascendi of knowledge and the production of meaning. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), xvi. For a more recent framing of Valéry in the phenomenology of attention, see Bernhard Waldenfels, Phänomenologie der Aufmerksamkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004). For Waldenfels, too, the original question of philosophy is “that something appears in experience, that precisely this and that emerges and not something else, and that it appears in a particular context” (ibid., 16). 8. See Peter N. Miller, “Introduction: Conserving Active Matter and the Historian,” in Conserving Active Matter: Cultural Histories of the Material World, ed. Peter N. Miller and Soon Kai Poh (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2022), 17–47; Ivan Gaskell and A. W. Eaton, “Introduction: Active Matter—Some Initial Philosophical Considerations,” in Miller and Poh, Conserving Active Matter, 51–64; and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LISA REGAZZONI THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY factors also display temporal duration or transformation occurring over time and “resonate with communities of humans”9 ? Are things of history only entities endowed with shape or do formless materials qualify too? In other words, we need to understand how historical questioning can convert objects or assemblages of objects or materials into evidence of the past. This extends beyond artifacts produced wittingly to convey historical or memorial content and those that, having been preserved or displayed in historical museums and collections, seem naturally predestined for this type of questioning. What are the “liminal objects” beyond which historical questioning ceases, since it is incapable of providing answers or even hypotheses of any significance? Ultimately, it is a matter of interrogating the nature of history at the shifting limits of its thinkability. As I attempted to show in an earlier article published in History and Theory,10 questions referring to the nature of historical evidence are rooted in the early modern age. The transformation of historiography, practiced increasingly as a retrospective inquiry that moves from a historical question formulated in the present, was accompanied by skepticism toward historical accounts and representations handed down to the present. The most powerful epistemological consequence of this transformation was the emergence of a new category of evidence that I call “unintended evidence.” Johann Gustav Droysen referred to this as Überreste (remains)11 —that is, unintended witnesses of the past. Almost a hundred years later, Marc Bloch called this type of evidence “témoins malgré eux” (witnesses despite themselves).12 This unintended evidence consists of material or immaterial “media” that are acknowledged as unwitting and unintended bearers of information about the past. The new epistemic value of the unintentionality of testimony set historians (and antiquarians) free from the dictates of sources and narratives, which were likewise handed down on the authority of historiographical tradition. It enabled them to instead regard the present as a repository of potentially infinite evidence waiting to be identified as such. Lithic tools and everyday objects and iconographic items, dialects and local idioms, costumes, “superstitious” practices, and even pastry forms were “discovered” and questioned as witnesses of the cultural history of certain ethnic groups (in this case, the Gallic people). The different shapes of Greek and Latin characters were seen for the first time as clues to the dating of manuscripts and their geographical origins. Monuments intentionally erected to the perennial memory of events or public figures, for instance, were now being examined as unintended and indirect witnesses of other historical areas 9. See Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter’s definition of “material culture” in “Introduction: Why History and Material Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture, ed. Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 2. 10. Lisa Regazzoni, “Unintentional Monuments, or the Materializing of an Open Past,” History and Theory 61, no. 2 (2022), 242–68. 11. Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik, vol. 1, Rekonstruktion der ersten vollständigen Fassung der Vorlesungen (1857), Grundriß der Historik in der ersten handschriftlichen (1857/1858) und in der letzten gedruckten Fassung (1882), ed. Peter Leyh (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977), 77–78. 12. Marc Bloch, “Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien” [1949], in L’Histoire, la Guerre, la Résistance, ed. Annette Becker and Étienne Bloch (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 892. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 188 189 of interest, such as the history of metalwork techniques, artistic styles, or customs. In the article mentioned above, intentionality and unintentionality became a pivotal heuristic category, one that enabled me to conceptually grasp both the emergence of new evidence and the theoretical problem underlying historical critique—namely, a critical analysis of sources and historical representations. The category of intentionality (and unintentionality)—although it remains implicit and no historian is prepared to admit it—continues, in my view, to play a key role in how we construct history, how we think about history, and how we inquire into history. In the present article, I continue my reflection on the category of intentionality. This time, however, I confine the focus of observation to material entities as objects produced or adapted by human beings to remember events, deeds, or personages, for example, and as material entities identified as historical evidence. I do so in order to reflect, from an unprecedented perspective, on how historicity is thought and constructed and on the eternal question of what history actually is.13 There are two main reasons for the decision to outline a theory of intentionality in relation to material items. First, it allows for a “critique of material evidence,” which is still missing in the historical discipline.14 Second, it enables us to address any remaining epistemological, ethical, or political issues, biases, or contradictions associated with the multifaceted research on material culture that affect the way we do history. In the following three sections, I will outline a “critique of intentionality,” in the sense both of an in-depth examination of this category and of its revision. With the help of several things or thing assemblages from my Theory-Oriented Object Collection (TOOC), I will analyze the different forms of intentionality and, at the same time, enlarge the meaning of intentionality from a phenomenological perspective. The intentionality category refers to a state or quality of directedness (being directed), one that assumes two meanings: on the one hand, the conventional meaning of having either the intention to do something or a conscious purpose and, on the other hand, the phenomenological meaning that simply denotes any “feature of the mind by which mental states are directed at, or are about or of, or refer to, or aim at, states of affairs in the world.”15 In this sense, the intended production of mnemonic or commemorative marks and the act of recognizing or singling out an entity in the present as evidence of some past both constitute forms 13. The theory of intentionality outlined below can be applied (with appropriate modification) to any form of entity—for example, written, visual, acoustic, or gestural. 14. This is not to say that the historical discipline has not worked on any approaches to material sources. As yet, however, no theoretical-methodological tools can be validly applied to all material entities—from objects that are highly intentional and rich in meaning, such as monuments and museum things, to unintended, meaningless, and sometimes even invisible traces and remnants that can only be constituted and interrogated as evidence through visualizing techniques and the use of apparatuses. I draw attention here to the book Jörg van Norden recently published on a very similar issue—that is, whether and to what extent material remains can produce historical knowledge—but following different paths and coming to conclusions dissimilar to those presented here; see Verlust der Vergangenheit: Historische Erkenntnis und Materialität zwischen Wiedererkennen und Befremden (Frankfurt: Wochenschau, 2022). 15. John R. Searle, Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 64. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LISA REGAZZONI THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY of intentionality. As I aim to show, physical entities always become historical evidence through the intentional relationship of historians with such entities. Adherence to this phenomenological understanding of intentionality leads de facto to the conclusion that all entities, regardless of whether they were deliberately or unwittingly produced for historical or commemorative purposes, become intentional the moment they are deemed “evidence.” Hence, there is no unintentional evidence. In the final section, I will compare this suggested phenomenological approach to several theories associated with things and material culture in order to discuss the epistemological, axiological, and political implications of a material approach to the past. More precisely, it is a matter of understanding whether the true emancipatory power of historiography and possible deliverance from previous interpretations and narratives is deposited in things (ontological perspective) or in the possibility of “redirecting” the historical gaze to the same or other things based on the historical question posed by the present (epistemological perspective). In conclusion, I will summarize the reasons why a theory of intentionality and its various forms is, in my view, both indispensable and advantageous to any handling of evidence, especially material evidence. I. FUTURE-ORIENTED MNEMONIC INTENTIONALITY The first form of intentionality I identify is “mnemonic intentionality.”16 This term refers to artifacts17 that have been produced, prepared, or assembled explicitly to convey a mark or representation of events, deeds, personages, or something else from a recent or more distant past for the purpose of preserving their memory. Any artifact or assemblage of artifacts that is designed in a given present for mnemonic or commemorative purposes establishes a directional correlation between the perception, experience, or interpretation of the past in question, its representation in the present, and the future to which it entrusts this representation. First, the most obvious expressions of this intentionality are the monuments that populate public spaces and museums. They represent an offer of meaning provided by the present for the future, and they do so with the intention of at least enduring over time for a given community or collectivity, regardless of whether this community is “imagined” or by whom.18 Examples of this form of 16. Here, I use the adjective “mnemonic” in its double meaning of “assisting or intended to assist memory” and “of or relating to memory” (Merriam-Webster, s.v. “mnemonic (adj.),” accessed 21 December 2023, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mnemonic). This terminological choice enables me to consider every form of intentionality related to mnemonic operations: commemoration, remembering, memorizing, monumentalizing, and so on. 17. I adopt Markus Hilgert’s definition of the term: “The term ‘artifact’ here generally refers to a culturally modified object, any product or phenomenon created by direct human or technical influence, including fixed installations such as buildings” (“‘Text-Anthropologie’: Die Erforschung von Materialität und Präsenz des Geschriebenen als hermeneutische Strategie,” Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft zu Berlin 142 [2010], 87n2). 18. Reinhart Koselleck, “War Memorials: Identity Formations of the Survivors” [1979], in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, transl. Todd Samuel Presner and 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 190 191 Figure 1. Nikolai Tomski, head of the Lenin Monument, granite, 1.7 meters tall, 1970, Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Spandau. Photo by Lisa Regazzoni. mnemonic intentionality range from the granite head of the monument dedicated to Lenin—which is today exhibited in the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum at the Spandau Citadel (Figure 1)—to negative memorials erected to admonish future generations against forgetting, as in the numerous monuments referring to the Holocaust, such as plaques that recall the deportation and murder of 11,134 Jewish citizens of Frankfurt (Figure 2) and other tragedies of the twentieth century, to the miniature bust of John F. Kennedy (Figure 3) that is sold in the National Archives Museum shop in Washington, DC, to all historical souvenirs.19 None of these cases carry a guarantee that the future will wholly embrace the meaning offered by the present. On the contrary, although monuments promise to convey a certain commemorative content for eternity, their offers of meaning are liable to revision and historical critique. These meanings may also be rejected, modified, or even destroyed, as reinterpretation and iconoclastic episodes from antiquity to the present day have demonstrated.20 Others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 285–326; Reinhart Koselleck, introduction to Der politische Totenkult: Kriegerdenkmäler in der Moderne, ed. Reinhart Koselleck and Michael Jeismann (Munich: Fink, 1994), 9–20. 19. Souvenirs (as, indeed, all artifacts) clearly have more than a remembering function; among other functions, they have an economic one. It is not the aim of this analysis to list possible artifact functions. Instead, it focuses on the function of the artifact in relation to the transmission and construction of a memory of the past, of history, and of historical consciousness. On the souvenir as a specific artifact genre, see Günter Oesterle, “Souvenir und Andenken,” in Der Souvenir: Erinnerung in Dingen von der Reliquie zum Andenken, ed. Museum für Angewandte Kunst (Cologne: Wienand, 2006), 16–45. 20. These are some of the most recent publications on the broad thematic spectrum of iconoclasm: Wendy Bellion, Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019); Bertrand Tillier, La disgrâce des statues: Essai sur les conflits de mémoire, de la Révolution française à Black Lives Matter (Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2022); Lisa Parola, Giù i monumenti? Una questione aperta (Turin: Einaudi, 2022); and Moira Pérez, “Is There a Place for Monuments in the ‘New Historical Condition?,’” Geschichtstheorie am Werk, last updated 3 April 2023, https://gtw.hypotheses.org/7020. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LISA REGAZZONI THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY Figure 2. Detail of the Neuer Börneplatz memorial in Frankfurt, 1996. Photo by Lisa Regazzoni. The Lenin Monument head mentioned above is an excellent example of this. Its material life has been marked by numerous intentional acts of reinterpretation. The monument was erected in East Berlin in 1970 to mark the centenary of Lenin’s birth. The initial intention, at least according to Walter Ulbricht, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party and Chairman of the Council of State of the GDR, was to proclaim and pass on to the future “that the working people are working and fighting for the triumph of socialism and the overcoming of capitalism on German soil!”21 Following the reunification of Germany, the Lenin Monument was dismantled into more than one hundred blocks and buried in Müggelheim Forest (Berlin) in 1992. The head was first exhumed in 2015 and displayed in the permanent exhibition titled Unveiled: Berlin and Its Monuments at the Spandau Citadel’s museum. The head is exhibited on its side, the position it had in the gravel pit in Müggelheim Forest. In this new museum assemblage, Lenin’s head from the original monument fulfills the function of a thing of history, which is the topic of the next section.22 The exhibition seeks to trace part of the “history of Berlin’s monuments” and “allow visitors to gain 21. “Lenin-Denkmal,” in Enthüllt: Berlin und seine Denkmäler, ed. Andrea Theissen (Berlin: Zitadelle, 2017), 270. See also “Abbau politischer Denkmäler,” in Enthüllt: Berlin und seine Denkmäler—Dokumentation der Begleitausstellung in der alten Kaserne, ed. Spandau District Office of Berlin, Department of Culture (Berlin: Zitadelle, 2017), 206–7. 22. Taking the example of Trajan’s Column in Rome, Droysen discusses the dual function of monuments as representations (Quellen) and as remains (Überreste), depending on the question posed (Historik, 1:71). A similar distinction is provided by archaeologist Gavin Lucas, whose work was unfamiliar to me but, fortunately, was pointed out by Caspar Meyer, whom I wish to thank warmly. In his book Understanding the Archaeological Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Lucas also moves from Droysen to problematize the nature of archaeological records. He rightly highlights how the distinction between “accidental” and “intentional” records, which, in Droysen, referred 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 192 193 Figure 3. Miniature bust of John F. Kennedy, bronze finished polystone, 16 × 6.5 × 6.5 cm (TOOC, inv. no. 035). Photo courtesy of Achim Küst. insights into the politics of monuments from the 18th century to the present day.”23 The resting position of the head, its visible fractures, and its protruding metal pins (an insertion for transportation purposes) are preserved and visualized here as “traces” of Berlin’s monument history (Figure 4). It should be mentioned at this point that the locutionary “success” of the utterance of a given monument depends on the reception conditions and their variability. Second, mnemonic intentionality is not confined to the monuments that abound in public spaces. It can be extended to include artifacts that were not originally created for the purpose of remembering but that have since been removed from the cycle of use to be invested with memorial significance and embedded in display and preservation settings. This is probably true for almost all artifacts detached from their original use and now preserved in collections—that is, public and private historical and cultural museums in the broadest sense. Artifacts of this kind must be “prepared” if they are to become bearers of memorial content.24 In other words, they must be placed in an assemblage of objects with inscriptions that fix to all evidence regardless of whether it was material or textual, was transformed in the course of the twentieth century into the distinction between texts and things, with things taking on the positive attributes of reliability and objectivity that Droysen recognized for unintentional remains (ibid., 25–26). 23. Andrea Theissen, “Denkmäler in Berlin: Enthüllt—abgebaut—vergraben. Und dann?,” in Enthüllt: Berlin und seine Denkmäler, 11. 24. This aspect is rightly emphasized by Gudrun M. König, who refers to objects exhibited and stored in cultural museums and collections as “cultural-historical preparations” (kulturhistorische Präparate); see “Sammlungen und das kulturhistorische Präparat,” in Objektepistemologien: Zur Vermes- 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LISA REGAZZONI THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY Figure 4. Nikolai Tomski, head of the Lenin Monument, granite, 1.7 meters tall, 1970, Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Spandau. Photo by Lisa Regazzoni. their offer of meaning and located in settings that ensure both their accessibility (museum structures) and their preservation (everything from climate-controlled showcases to preventive restoration measures). The prepared artifacts in an assemblage thus convey the mnemonic intention of representing and preserving a selected image of the past. Conversely, the protection and conservation devices in place are patent evidence that we are looking at mnemonic intentionality and its future-oriented directionality. Third, mnemonic intentionality may also be embedded in artifacts that were not intended for public consumption but that have been maintained in private settings to preserve private memories. A case in point is the cardboard box found in 2009 in a Chippendale-style cupboard in a house in the province of Bergamo in northern Italy.25 A few words in capital letters written in red marker in the form of an inscription explain its mnemonic intention. The box inscribed with the words REMINISCENZE—SOAVI—DI VITA (REMINISCENCES—GENTLE—OF LIFE) contained material carriers of a meaningful relationship and family moments rescued from oblivion (Figures 5 and 6). The author of this assemblage signed his name, Batti (a nickname for the Italian given name Giovanni Battista), in the lower right-hand corner of the box. Inside sung eines transdisziplinären Forschungsraums, ed. Markus Hilgert, Kerstin P. Hofmann, and Henrike Simon (Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2018), 89–105. 25. An extraordinary example of commemorative assemblage, “the black box,” is provided by Laurent Olivier in his book The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory, transl. Arthur Greenspan (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2011), 4–13. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 194 Figure 6. The box with cotton and silk textiles (TOOC, inv. no. 015). Photo by Lisa Regazzoni. Figure 5. The inscribed lid of the box, cardboard (TOOC, inv. no. 015). Photo by Lisa Regazzoni. LISA REGAZZONI 195 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY Figure 7. Nightdress from the cardboard box. Photos courtesy of Achim Küst. the box were folded textiles dating from the 1940s: a nightdress set with ladies’ knickers, a petticoat, a baptismal gown, two bonnets, two ribbons sewn together (one pink and one light blue), and a cotton baby carrier with handmade cotton lace (Figures 7–14). This selection of items removed from everyday use was washed, ironed, and stored in a box to be passed on to the future. The assemblage stands for family events Batti considered highly significant and that had occurred in the short time span of “event history”: a wedding night and the two days on which the christening of the couple’s son and daughter took place. To create this assemblage, these textile items were rescued from the cycle of use, from being thrown out or recycled as rags, and subsequently processed into a private memorial assemblage. Washed, ironed, and carefully folded, they were placed in a recycled, inscribed box and stored. Surprisingly, there was no trace of a mothball smell or other odor that might have indicated some preventive measure against the dreaded domestic nuisance. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 196 Figure 9. Petticoat from the cardboard box. Photos courtesy of Boaz Paz. Figure 8. Knickers from the cardboard box. Photos courtesy of Achim Küst. LISA REGAZZONI 197 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY Figure 10. Baptismal gown from the cardboard box. Photos courtesy of Boaz Paz. If these objects had been transferred to a museum of local folklore (or cultural history), they would have taken on a different, public, and, in a sense, broader mnemonic significance, given the display devices and inscriptions in place. They would be preserved for future generations as evidence of rites of passage such as wedding nights or christenings in the Catholic tradition, witnesses to the past of a historic collective made up of anonymous individuals and an entire geographical region. Displayed in showcases and preserved in museum spaces, they would function as metonyms26 of larger spatial and temporal segments, extending to northern Italy and spanning multiple generations. It follows that determining the metonymic meaning of things and stating what past or what spatial dimension they represent takes place in the relational construction and consideration of the sum total of elements in a memorial thing assemblage. From this perspective, every artifact or artifact assemblage created, assembled, or invested with an offer of meaning (in the sense of a commemorative futureoriented direction) can be imbued with mnemonic value and become a “thing of memory.” In other words, it becomes a “monument” in the broad sense: from the 26. On metonymy, see Eelco Runia, “Presence,” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006), 1–29. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 198 199 Figure 11. Baby carrier from the cardboard box. Photos courtesy of Boaz Paz. most obvious monuments erected on public ground to private monuments such as the box with Batti’s reminiscences, or a dried flower preserved in the yellowed pages of a book as a material metonymy of a missing person or some far-off day that the author of the thing of memory wishes to remember, or even the miniature bust of John F. Kennedy, bought perhaps not in memory of the thirty-fifth president of the United States but as a keepsake from a visit to Washington, DC.27 That is to say, we are in the presence of “mnemonic things” when objects or ensembles of objects are marked with an inscription (mostly written) and placed in devices or settings aimed at preservation. These range from the most sophisticated, such as legislation on cultural heritage management or the safety distance imposed on viewers of artifacts and climate-controlled display cases, to “do-it-yourself” mechanisms, such as storing a cardboard box in a cupboard, using mothballs as a preservation tactic, or using a book to press a flower. The inscription and the conservation method are also indicative of the intention to fix the meaning and prevent the “mnemonic thing” from material alteration. Consequently, a “mnemonic thing”—although real—never corresponds to a single entity, to a thing in itself. Its commemorative or memorial value is the result of a particular setting—that is, the assemblage of objects and inscriptions, storage and/or display devices, and the system of dynamic relationships these elements establish. In this respect, such things are always relational. 27. Francesco Orlando, Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination: Ruins, Relics, Rarities, Rubbish, Uninhabited Places, and Hidden Treasures, transl. Gabriel Pihas and Daniel Seidel, in collaboration with Alessandra Grego (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 9. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LISA REGAZZONI THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY Figure 12. Baptismal bonnet from the cardboard box. Photos courtesy of Boaz Paz. The first task of scholars confronted with mnemonic things is therefore to analyze the multiple meanings attributed to them in the various settings. In the historical critique of such artifacts, the idea of intentionality again plays a key role. As in the case of historical representations (or, in modern terms, historical narratives), the task of critique in the context of mnemonic things is to discern the more or less conscious intentions underlying the mnemonic production or commemorative investment of the artifacts. Droysen called it Anakrisis, a “critique of rightness” (Kritik des Richtigen).28 This form of critique emerged as the mainstay of historical methods in the early modern age in response to the suspicion of partiality harbored against transmitted representations of the past and narrative accounts—that is, historical tradition. Even now, it still reflects this crisis of tradition, of which it was, in a sense, the offspring. For it is based on the assumption that any form of representation or account is a perception and interpretation of the past rather than the past itself, which is gone. Whether or not postmodernists like it, this distinction lies at the heart of historical critique. It is the conceptual distinction that discerns between events or facts and their representation. Applied to mnemonic things, this type of critique raises questions about whether the statue of Lenin is a realistic reproduction of the historically given Russian politician’s somatic features and to what extent these features are idealized,29 whether the names and dates of birth of deported Jews and the place names of concentration camps are listed correctly at the Neuer Börneplatz memorial site in Frankfurt am 28. Droysen, Historik, 1:138–45. 29. On this question, see Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), esp. 135–36. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 200 201 Figure 13. Baptismal bonnet from the cardboard box. Photos courtesy of Boaz Paz. Figure 14. Ribbons from the cardboard box. Photos courtesy of Boaz Paz. Main, whether the miniature bust of John F. Kennedy is a more or less accurate portrayal of the former president and whether his clothes are anachronistic, or, again, whether the items of clothing Batti monumentalizes were actually worn at the family events they are meant to recall. Analyzing “rightness” is merely a preliminary stage of historical critique, the purpose of which is to judge the narratives 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LISA REGAZZONI THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY and representations written with the precise intention of conveying the memory of something, or simply the nexus of meaning contained in this more or less correct information. Critical judgment is, on the one hand, linked—at least since the early modern age—to distrust and skepticism with respect to historical representations deemed partisan. On the other hand, this distinction between past and representation allowed historians to understand historical narrations, monuments, and evidence not of the represented past but of the present representing this past, as I will explain in the next section. Hence, critical judgment means acknowledging the meaning that the present intends to give to the recent or distant past. Despite the problematic nature and questionability of the distinction between fact (past) and representation (historical account), this analytical distinction continues nolens volens to fulfill a constitutive heuristic function in historical research and critique. The fact that this distinction is still at least implicit in thinking about material heritage is precisely why we can articulate a critique of the Confederate statues in the United States. Without this distinction, there can be no critique. The questions historians ask about these mnemonic things are part of what the French historiographic tradition calls histoire des représentations as a component of histoire des mentalités.30 It asks such questions as: How did monuments construct the monarchy or the nation?31 How did Frankfurt am Main (and, more generally, the Frankfurt or German community) want to commemorate the victims of the Shoah and warn against the repetition of history, or how did Batti perceive and want to epitomize his life and that of his family? Again, without a distinction between “fact” and “representation,” albeit merely an analytical one, none of these questions can be asked.32 As we have seen, the remembering message mediated through purposeful testimonies can be adapted, ignored, or rejected. At the same time, these testimonies can be consciously reconsidered as evidence of other past events or phenomena. It is this endeavor to pose new and unexpected historical questions to intentional witnesses that is the real achievement of historians (and scholars working on history), at least in Europe as of the early modern period.33 Here it is not a matter of the mnemonic intentionality of those who produce testimonies but of the historical question intentionally directed at monuments, which—“despite themselves”—are interrogated as sources of other histories. This new form of directionality toward things will be analyzed in the following section on historical intentionality. 30. Roger Chartier, “Le monde comme representation,” in Au bord de la falaise: L’histoire entre certitudes et inquiétude (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), 67–86. 31. Arlette Auduc, Quand les monuments construisaient la nation: Le service des monuments historiques de 1830 à 1940 (Paris: Comité d’histoire du ministère de la culture, 2008). 32. This aspect is admirably stressed by Antoon De Baets in his comment on Lisa Regazzoni, “Stones and Other Stuff: A Matter of Concern to Theory of History,” One More Thing . . . (blog), History and Theory, July 2022, https://historyandtheory.org/omt/2022-regazzoni. 33. See Lisa Regazzoni, Geschichtsdinge: Gallische Vergangenheit und französische Geschichtsforschung im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). The English translation is to be published by Routledge in 2024. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 202 203 II. PAST-ORIENTED HISTORICAL INTENTIONALITY The second form of intentionality I distinguish—“historical intentionality”— involves a reversal of perspective and a different interrelation between present, past, and future. It no longer refers to the memorializing intent pursued by human beings of shaping or “preparing” certain artifacts for the future. Instead, historical intentionality denotes the “act-character of consciousness”34 and refers to things (and potentially all entities) as the material basis for historical inference and knowledge. It indicates the evidential function of things and is the intentional, directed inquiry proper to historians, who direct their questions at things or material assemblages regardless of their use value and, as Bloch put it, “despite themselves.” By choosing specific entities and investing them with historical significance, scholars in this field endow these entities with meanings that may not have been intended originally by their makers. In this sense, they transform physical elements into “historical things” or into unpremeditated testimonies and direct evidence, all of which could contain substantial historical information, depending on the specific research question about the past. The ability of historians to derive unintended information about the past from mnemonic things or any physical entity is, in my view (and as I mentioned earlier), the most significant epistemological achievement of European scholars in the early modern age and perhaps the most original achievement of scholars devoted to historical research. What constitutes the real epistemological specificity of historical inquiry is precisely this ability (and willingness) to break free from the intended traditional interpretations and representations, to ask of them new and unexpected historical questions, and to assign the value of historical evidence, for example, to everyday objects, to rubbish,35 to organic materials such as DNA,36 or to microplastics deposited in soil and water.37 I will return to the emancipatory potential of this revolution in the concluding section. Let us first return to Batti’s cardboard box. The assemblage itself fulfills the function of a historical thing when it is interrogated as the bearer of unwittingly transmitted information about the past. Strictly speaking, if the entire assemblage comprised of cardboard, textiles, and the inscription were to be interrogated as a “primary source,” it would be seen not as evidence of individual experience or the remembrance of a wedding night and two christenings but rather as evidence of a commemorative and conservation purpose and of practices of realizing that purpose from preparation of the evidence to conservation techniques and possible display strategies. From a temporal perspective, the relevant period for this 34. David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 14. 35. See Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2017). On rubbish as a historical source, see Ulrich Veit, “Abfall als historische Quelle: Zeugenschaft in der Archäologie,” Parapluie 22 (Winter 2005/2006), https://parapluie.de/ archiv/zeugenschaft/archaeologie/. 36. Patrick J. Geary, Herausforderungen und Gefahren der Integration von Genomdaten in die Erforschung der frühmittelalterlichen Geschichte (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2020). 37. Soraya Boudia et al., “Residues: Rethinking Chemical Environments,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 4 (2018), 165–78. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LISA REGAZZONI THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY primary source would extend from the instant the memorial intention arose to the packing of the assemblage. From a spatial point of view, the relevant geographical context would be the village, the rooms in the house, the cupboard in which the box was stored, and possibly the shops where Batti procured the materials needed to create this memorial thing. The practices it would bear witness to are washing clothes, either by hand or in a washing machine (and, if so, generation, agitator, semi-automatic, or automatic), ironing and the type of iron used (a simple steam iron or an electric one), folding, reutilization of a cardboard box, and inscription design. Their visible remnants or evidence might be the absence of stains, traces of detergent scent and ironing creases (symmetrical or orthogonal), signs of use on the cardboard box, and the hand-written inscription in red marker. Furthermore, this practice of preserving a family’s material memories could be situated in a longer tradition of creating “objets souvenirs”38 (keepsakes) to mark family events such as baptism, communion, marriage, or death, objects that were to be passed on to the next generation. According to Jean-Pierre Legendre and Laurent Olivier, this tradition was rooted in the nineteenth century and had fallen victim to the “presentist” and consumer-oriented attitude to objects.39 Is Batti’s assemblage evidence of a historical, dead practice? Considered in these terms, the entire assemblage becomes a thing of history. In other words, Batti’s keepsakes become unintended evidence of preparation and preservation practices that Batti himself did not consciously plan to convey. The very removal of traces of body odor and possibly human secretion (blood, sweat) or organic material (skin cells, hair) through washing deprives this assemblage of traces of experience and qualifies it as an object of conservation.40 That said, historical intentionality may also choose to dissect the remembering assemblage and consider only certain items as evidence of a particular past and useful for historical inference. Historians interested in rites of passage and religious practices, for instance, will examine the nightdress, the baptismal gown, the bonnets, and the baby carrier. They will give scant attention to the petticoat, however, and ignore the cardboard box altogether, unless, of course, it provides clues to the provenance of the linen. Those interested in textile production in postwar northern Italy, on the other hand, will, for the same reasons, exclude the box from their research and focus on the textile products. If they then wish to write the social history of women in Italian society in the post-WWII period from material sources, what better object of study than underwear (and, in this case, the petticoat and the nightdress with the underwear that goes with it)? Unless they focus on the history of individuals, historians would clearly have to collect and enlarge the corpus of material evidence and compare several similar items (petticoats and nightdresses, for example) and their persistence and/or transformation in space and time. Disassembling Batti’s memorial ensemble would 38. Manuel Charpy, “L’ordre des choses: Sur quelques traits de la culture matérielle bourgeoise parisienne, 1830–1914,” Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 34 (2007), 110. 39. Jean-Pierre Legendre and Laurent Olivier, “‘Let’s Get Rid of That Old Stuff!’: Family Heritage Objects in France at the Age of Presentism,” in Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism, ed. Marek Tamm and Laurent Olivier (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 165. 40. See Conserving Active Matter, edited by Miller and Poh. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 204 205 mean reassembling it in a new corpus of material evidence. Consequently, this type of material evidence acquires a metonymic value with respect to the past in a twofold sense. It is a generally accepted view that the past to which material elements testify is, in fact, broader than the past in terms of their concrete use. As we saw earlier, the objects Batti preserved could be used to testify to the rites of passage of members of his family as well as to Catholic rites of passage in Italy in general. On the other hand, as soon as such things become the object of historical interrogation, they morph into evidence of one or a few of all possible pasts. The historical inference from these things is simultaneously reductive and enhancing.41 With reference to the critical method of the historical discipline, material evidence of this kind poses a number of supplementary challenges in comparison to mnemonic things. In addition to a critique of the representations, these artifacts require critical examination in terms of their “authenticity.” Even in this context, although it remains implicit, the category of intentionality plays a major role. First of all, source critique traditionally involves analyzing historical material with a view to a postulated authenticity. In the case of material sources, it asks whether the things under review are (to some extent) perhaps an intentional act of forgery. This might concern the age of the object (date of production), its geographical origin and provenance, the nature of the material used, or some other aspects. Strictly speaking, verifying the authenticity and thus the reliability of historical material does not fall within the purview of the historical discipline. In fact, since historians are not specifically trained to address these kinds of concerns,42 they are obliged to rely on the verdict of other disciplinary authorities (including, as the case may be, archaeologists, ethnologists, art historians, conservators, paleoanthropologists, geologists, material researchers, and chemists) or institutional authorities (collections, museums, or research laboratories). The second historical critique procedure—that is, the analysis of whatever manipulation or alteration the object has undergone over time, of traces of use inscribed on it, or of the patina and dust deposited on it43 —is also outside the disciplinary competence of historians. The latter take note of the procedure from reading accounts, from the testimony of authorities on the subject, or from other documents (such as photographs of the objects at different stages, catalog descriptions) rather than by directly analyzing the material. Again, lacking other disciplinary skills or tools, the historian may simply note “mesoscopic” alterations—that is, those of medium size and perceptible by human “‘eyeball’ vision.”44 With respect to the analysis of materials, historians are therefore contingent on other historical sciences such as archaeology, art history, ethnography, or 41. See Achim Landwehr’s “Chronoreferenzen,” in Diesseits der Geschichte: Für eine andere Historiographie (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020), 239–65. 42. Written sources are a different matter. Here, the auxiliary science of paleography and diplomatic provides valuable guidance. The study of this science, however, is gradually disappearing from history curricula at universities. 43. There are numerous examples of patina produced by forgers to simulate the antiquity of objects. 44. See Don Ihde’s characterization of the approach to material culture in the early modern period whereby artifacts were “‘eyeball’ and macroculturally analyzed” (Material Hermeneutics: Reversing the Linguistic Turn [London: Routledge, 2022], 11). 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LISA REGAZZONI THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY paleontology, disciplines that, in turn, frequently rely on methods and tools borrowed from the natural and material sciences. Assuming they intend to work with objects and materials as sources of historical inferences, historians are reliant on other historical sciences and disciplinary expertise from the outset of the critique procedure—namely, verification of the authenticity of the material concerned. Similar to the category of rightness, the category of authenticity is not an absolute attributed a priori to an object. It must first be defined contextually in line with the “life phase,” the temporality or duration, under review. In defiance of the naivety of absolute relativism, this task is analytically vital if one wants to take into account the transformation of the material composition of objects, the alteration of their shape, the sedimentation of external physical elements, and their damage, adaptation, or optimization. Every transformation presupposes the existence of a previous state. We define the previous state we refer to (one of an infinite number of possible states) as “authentic,” regardless of whether its “authenticity” as past is restorable or even determinable with certainty. Consequently, this analytical concept, which responds to the pragmatics of research, is also relative and relational. It follows from these reflections that the very notion of a material historical source and its corresponding critique leads to dissolution of the boundaries of our conception of history and historical research. Decoding historical information from material sources is not a task that this discipline can perform alone. That would be the case if all things subsisting in the present, regardless of their function or use value, were potentially susceptible to consideration as things of history. If only one knew how to question them, Droysen noted as early as the midnineteenth century.45 Indeed, he observed that “there is still a tremendous amount that has not yet been seen, that is merely waiting to be noticed, acknowledged, properly questioned, interrogated as a witness of the past.”46 But what things catch historians’ attention on their “coastline,” and what do historians see from time to time as elementary particles of history? For that matter, what exactly is a historical question? III. PRESENT-ORIENTED HISTORICO-THEORETICAL INTENTIONALITY Although material entities that subsist in the present are the products of endless visible or invisible transformations occurring over time through human and nonhuman action, they are not per se things of history. They can only be seen as potentially in a position to assume an evidential function and become things of history. It is first and foremost the observational craft of historians (or scholars working historically) that enables them to isolate a material entity or “shape” through perception (notably, sight, touch, and smell) and to award it the status of a metonymic trace of a specific past state of affairs to which it is called to bear 45. The idea that anything can be evidence if properly interrogated is also central to Peter N. Miller’s book History and Its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture since 1500 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017). Paula Findlen emphasizes this idea in her review of the book: “Objects of History: The Past Materialized,” History and Theory 59, no. 2 (2020), 270–82. 46. Droysen, Historik, 1:68. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 206 207 witness. This mental (and practical) ability to remove an existing entity from its surrounding context and (materially) place it in another nexus of meaning and relevance exempts it from the question of the object’s being from the outset. Such an entity is seen here as being for interrogating subjects. The historian’s gaze not only selects a contoured object or a shape; it also fixes it in time, thereby subtracting it from the “agential” nature and “intra-activity”47 proper to matter. From a semantic point of view, once an entity is perceived as a “trace” of the past, historians have already established a cognitive relationship to it, which, in phenomenological terms, is intentional. In this sense, historians have the ability (by means of perception) to select any existing entity, assemblage of entities, or material fragment, to rescue it from the flow of time, and to assign it the status of a trace48 of a particular past to which it bears witness. For this reason, “traces,” “remains,” “ruins,” “sources,” “residues,” “rubble,” and even “survivals” conceptually reveal the existence of an observing subject capable of relating their presence to an absent past. All of these concepts are relational and epistemic and do not per se designate ontological realities. This is because they presuppose a correlating perceptual act that establishes a relationship between the present entity and a previous state— that is, a whole, of which the said present entity appears to be the metonymical witness. This does not mean that the conscious act of intending an entity actually “creates” that entity or that its qualities are exclusively the product of a subjective “semiotic proliferation that endows humans, nonhumans (i.e., objects in circulation) . . . with certain properties.”49 On the contrary, it means that the historical significance of material entities cannot be inferred from an empirical analysis of the qualities inherent in that entity. Against this background, toward which physical entities or elementary material particles do historians direct their intentional gaze and when does historical reasoning begin? Is it possible to trace material evidence back to the zero point of historicity?50 These are questions pertaining to the third form of intentionality, “historicotheoretical intentionality,” which refers to the particular ability of the mind to focus on (or engage with) objects of doubt on the edge of history rather than on things that have already been assigned an evidential function. “Historicotheoretical things” such as the ambiguous objects described by Valéry are 47. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs 28, no. 3 (2003), 803–31; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 48. See, in this regard, the outline of trace theory formulated from the empirical examination of waste particles and anthropogenic remains in the environment in Boudia et al., “Residues.” See also Adrian Currie’s definition of “traces” in Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 64–73. 49. Bruno Latour, “Do Scientific Objects Have a History? Pasteur and Whitehead in a Bath of Lactic Acid,” transl. Lydia Davis, Common Knowledge 5, no. 1 (1996), 79–80. 50. At the “Das Bild als Beziehungsmodell” conference organized by Bettina Brandt and Britta Hochkirchen and held on 29 and 30 April 2021, Peter Geimer asked me if I was looking for the zero degree of meaning; I owe this expression to him. This early attempt to identify the different forms of intentionality was published in Lisa Regazzoni, “Den Vergangenheiten auf der Spur: Abriss einer Theorie der Intentionalität—Den Dingen entlang,” Geschichtstheorie am Werk, last updated 18 January 2023, https://gtw.hypotheses.org/3946. See also Peter Geimer, “Über Reste,” in Dingwelten: Das Museum als Erkenntnisort, ed. Anke te Heesen and Petra Lutz (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005), 118. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LISA REGAZZONI THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY “liminal” entities, thing assemblages, or materials that raise questions. When historicity begins is the key concern here, one that calls for negotiation or contention. Let us return to the example of Batti’s memorial thing. In what sense could it become an object of historico-theoretical intentionality? Faced with this assemblage, the theorist of history would mostly linger on the unintended traces that seem alien to or even hinder the commemorative purpose, traces that conjure up doubts, begging the question of whether they belong to the horizon of history at all. These “things” are, for instance, the reddish-brown stains on the white bow of one of the two bonnets. What should be done with these remains, which are the result of chemical processes that occur—or endure—over a period of time and that are not determined by humans, human agents, or intentional action? Are we encountering traces here that lie beyond history as a human-related, meaningful representation of the past? These stains, which a professional conservator would remove a priori so as to restore the anthropogenic memorial thing to its original state, testify to a change that was neither intended for posterity nor brought about deliberately. They are traces that are two degrees away from witting human commemoration, for they are not part of a purposely created monument—that is, not part of the representation of a particular past. Nor are they remains wittingly used by historians to extract information about human practices in the past—this in contrast to the observed cleanliness and folds of the linen and the packaging and labeling that testify to those very practices. So, do these traces stand for something else that is in some way related to human pasts? And how can the historical discipline—whose method is essentially based on the analysis and critique of written sources—understand these material traces? This calls for analytical methods proper to the study of materials, primarily chemistry and physics. But what happens to the discipline of history and the historical understanding when the discourse on material traces is not purely metaphorical and history has to collaborate with the natural sciences? With these questions in mind, I turned to the Boaz Paz Laboratory for Archaeometry in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. An initial random analysis of the stains on the ribbon of the bow conducted at the Paz Laboratory using nondestructive portable x-ray fluorescence analysis (Thermo Fisher NITON XLt3) found an increase in iron content of approximately 100 ppm and an increase in chlorine content of 1000 ppm compared to the stainless silk matrix (Figure 15). The higher chlorine content in conjunction with higher iron levels suggests the stains could be the result of contamination from exposure to water or rust. Drops of water may have come into contact with the fabric and triggered an oxidation process. Were the areas moistened while ironing not completely dry when the bonnet was placed in the box? Was the box temporarily stored in a damp place? Questions such as these remain unanswered for the time being. Laboratories usually carry out this type of analysis in the context of commissions related to conservation and restoration so that unintended harmful changes to things can be undone or neutralized. In the case of the bonnet, this would mean removing traces 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 208 209 Figure 15. Image of the stain tissue with 3D-Keyence microscopy, 1:20. Photo courtesy of Boaz Paz. of time rather than of people—the term “time” serving here as a metaphorical collective singular for a larger number of inorganic agents and microchemical reactions that occurred without the participation of living beings. The concept of “stains” resembles the concept of traces. It is relational and implies causality. When I look at stains, I obviously see what is perceptible to the senses—that is, reddish-brown shapes on a white background—but in a phenomenological sense, I “see” causality. I see that something happened, that a foreign element has come into contact with the textile and produced a color change, and I see this even though I was not present at the moment of staining. So, I see one or more absent “actants” (water, rust, Batti, or all three) that I am currently unable to identify.51 It would be an exciting twist if the lab were to confirm another hypothesis— namely, that the stains were in fact caused by drops of perfume. Batti could have sprayed perfume onto the textiles to preserve olfactory memories. The Paz Laboratory is now testing this new hypothesis. If the hypothesis were to be confirmed, the stains would be viewed by the historian as the undesired “ruins” of a remembering intention. Consequently, if interrogated with the appropriate techniques and apparatuses, the stains would re-enter the domain of history. Among the several “objects of doubt” at the threshold of history conserved in my TOOC is a pebble, the purest Valéry thing in the entire collection (Figure 16). I found the pebble on the Sirolo Beach of the Two Sisters in The Marches (Italy) in July 1982 while looking for stones and pebbles of a particular shape. Its striking round shape, at least to the naked eye, captured my attention, and I 51. This, by the way, is Edmund Husserl’s definition of a “thing,” modified first by Martin Heidegger and subsequently by Bruno Latour: Thing—Husserl wrote—“is in a certain sense the bearer of the causality” (Edmund Husserl, Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 16, Ding und Raum: Vorlesungen 1907, ed. Ulrich Claesges [The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973], 344). For instance, when we see that the thrown stone breaks the window, we “see” not only the perceivable object but also the heaviness of the stone causing the glass to break—that is, we “see” this result even before the window is broken (namely, at the moment we pick up the stone to throw it). 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LISA REGAZZONI THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY Figure 16. Pebble from Sirolo Beach of the Two Sisters (Italy), 10.5 × 22 mm (TOOC, inv. no. 001). Photo courtesy of Achim Küst. kept it for years as a good luck charm and a summer souvenir. It lay forgotten in a jewelry box and accompanied me on all my moves. In 2019, it became an object of new attention and part of my collection of things that serve as evidence in matters of theory. It bears the inventory number 001 because it epitomizes the primary philosophical question asked by Valéry’s Socrates—that is, whether the object found on the beach is considered a natural or an anthropic product, whether it is seen as an artifact, and if so, what historical significance it warrants. This is yet another puzzle to be solved. The criterion commonly adopted to answer this question is still that of “authorship,” as formulated at the beginning of this article—in other words, whether the shape of the object is a product of nature or was created by humans for a specific purpose. Was the shape of the pebble the result of mechanical impacts and the eternal toiling of sea waves? Or was it an artifact made by humans over a short time span compared to nature’s long-term scales, as the perfect round shape might suggest? The results of the analysis conducted by Boaz Paz using a high-resolution 3D microscope do not show conclusive evidence of an anthropogenic shaping of the stone. No processing traces were visible, not even with high magnification and depth of field (Figures 17 and 18). Thus formulated, this kind of question is still attached to the old criterion of shape rather than matter, as expressed in the considerable astonishment at the roundness of the pebble. Let it be remarked here, en passant, that this kind of question has been found on the epistemological horizon that saw the emergence of the prehistory and archaeology disciplines and continues to play a prominent role in the historical disciplines.52 Put in these terms, the question of “authorship” is resolved in favor of nature. The pebble is undoubtedly the product of landslides 52. In the mid-nineteenth century, prehistory and prehistoric archaeology were heavily preoccupied with the question of whether the object—in terms of scientific theory—was a proprium of the humanities or the natural sciences, whether it was an “artifact” or a “natural fact.” Distinguishing 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 210 211 Figure 17. High-resolution 3D microscope (Keyence VHX 1000) with microscopic image of the limestone, 2022. Photo courtesy of Boaz Paz. Figure 18. Microscopic image of the limestone (edge), 2022. Photo courtesy of Boaz Paz. and the erosion of Mount Conero, whose debris was then slowly worked by the mechanical force of waves and currents. By virtue of the material turn, however, the question of the actants that contributed to the material composition of the pebble can be answered differently. Hence, Paz’s analyses focused not simply on the mineralogical texture of the pebble, a limestone of calcium carbonate (CaCO3), but also on the chemical composition of its surface. Scrutiny of the red “spots” on the limestone revealed increased concentrations of iron and organic admixtures (Figure 19). The results between natural debris generated by the force of nature, without human—or intended—action, and stone artifacts (such as boulder implements or hand axes) was notably constitutive of this new discipline, in contrast to geology, which emerged almost simultaneously. In that same century, the ability to recognize traces of human labor on stones found outside of burial sites came at the cost of many erroneous attributions. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LISA REGAZZONI THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY Figure 19. Microscopic image of the limestone’s “red stains,” 2022. Photo courtesy of Boaz Paz. of the x-ray fluorescence analysis indicate inclusions of mineral iron compounds. Furthermore, the RAMAN (vibrational spectroscopy) examination of the “spots” revealed the presence of (organic) hetero-compounds of high molecular weight, suggesting the presence of bitumen, a common admixture in limestone. Once again, stains or spots attract our attention because they appear to have nothing to do with the state of the object postulated as earlier or even “original.” Once analyzed with the techniques mentioned above, they reveal new and multiple histories that cross over from geology to biology and are intertwined with human history. During my conversations with Boaz Paz, a new question emerged: Could the bitumen found on the surface of the pebble include anthropogenic tar-like impurities and thus be not completely natural? There is, in fact, an analytical chemistry method that can answer this question.53 Should the answer be in the affirmative, these “compounds” and “admixtures” would make the pebble a hybrid thing—neither a pure nature-fact (Naturfakt) nor a pure arti-fact (Artefakt) but a “co-constructed”54 thing by nature and human beings. This argument could enable us to conclude, with geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, that some of the elements produced by humans in significant quantities—such as plutonium—adhere to the surface of all pebbles on all beaches all over the world.55 53. As Boaz Paz explained to me, tar is obtained from the pyrolysis of hard coal and contains benzo[a]pyrene, which in turn is a typical pyrolysis product. The presence of benzo[a]pyrene can be determined by coupled gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The small sample of material available for investigation, however, calls for a focused measurement of specific areas of the pebble. 54. Adrian Currie, “Of Records and Ruins: Metaphors about the Deep Past,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 17, no. 1 (2023), 167. Currie himself borrowed the expression from Florence M. Hetzler and her reflections about time and ruin in “Causality: Ruin Time and Ruins,” Leonardo 21, no. 1 (1988), 51–55. 55. Jan Zalasiewicz, The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 212 213 The attention to stains and spots leads to a new interweaving of earth and human history, making the original question of whether it is a product of nature or art seem obsolete. Bruno Latour pointed this out: “And if, in Hawaii, you come across rocks made partly of lava and partly of a new substance, plastic, how are you going to draw the line between man and nature? . . . The distinction between the social sciences and the natural sciences is blurred. Neither nature nor society can enter intact into the Anthropocene, waiting to be peaceably ‘reconciled.’”56 It should be added here that the dividing line between the natural sciences and the humanities or social sciences, including history, is also erased. And all of this from stains. My Theory-Oriented Object Collection houses numerous “objects of doubt” that may well become things of history or memory—that is, contingent on the kind of attention they receive. They include material assemblages such as ceramic fragments wrapped in clumps of earth and iron slags mixed with sand and other materials. Stains on textiles or pebbles, the ceramic fragment, and the slag are merely some of the collected materials that initially show ambiguity. Depending on the questions asked of them and the instruments or technologies used to examine them, they may or may not serve as historical evidence. In order to become a historical thing, objects must be relatable to humans, either because humans contributed to their creation, transformation, or emergence or because they have been affected by humans. If, however, the material nature of things is taken seriously, historical questioning is no longer the prerogative of historians. Here, the constant dialogue between Boaz Paz and me is key when it comes to negotiating the questions to be asked and the analyses to be conducted. This clearly affects both the modus operandi and the construction of the object of study. Furthermore, experts and practicians from materials science such as Boaz Paz are not only aware of the limits and possibilities of the methods and techniques available to materials science today; they also possess the hermeneutic skills without which the images and results of using scientific instruments in the course of analysis would remain inaccessible.57 As soon as history theorists start wondering if they are still connected to the research field of “history” and to “history” as a meaningful narrative, they upgrade these fragments, slags, and stains from oxidation or organic compounds and bitumen to evidence of one basic question in theory of history: What is historical evidence? Or, at the very least, what even qualifies as history? The phenomenological approach enables this important reversal of perspective. Indeed, in no way does it depart from the existence of history per se as the onceand-for-all history of human affairs. Rather, at the heart of this proposal lies the relational positioning of the present with the past and the future, the relationship to objects as things of history. Similarly, physical entities are not regarded here 56. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, transl. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 120. 57. On the hermeneutic agency of “postmodern imagining technologies” and scientific instruments, see Ihde, Material Hermeneutics. See also Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s works on experimental systems and, in particular, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LISA REGAZZONI THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY as intrinsic evidence of human thought, action, or presence. The fact that they carry metonymic meaning reveals that they have become things of history through historical questioning and observation. It is precisely this scrutiny and historical interrogation that awards objects and materials an evidential function. But just as things cannot provide the answer to every historical question we ask in the hope of enlightenment, material entities confront us with the fundamental issue of what a historical question is, when past is made into history, and what information is historically significant for a given community. The advantage of the phenomenological approach and corresponding category of intentionality is being able to observe the process and the intersubjective (interdisciplinary) spaces of negotiating and/or contending the historical question and, thus, to sustain the ambiguity and uncertainty of the answer. This approach sees history beginning at the relational moment when an entity or assemblage of entities is considered to be about a particular past—that inevitably affects the future—and consequently becomes a trace or metonymy of this past. My understanding therefore departs from the classical definition of history, which always sees it “où l’homme a passé, là où il a laissé quelque faible empreinte de sa vie et de son intelligence.”58 History is not where humans have left traces; history begins where humans make things into traces of the past. How and why a shift in perspective contains the seed of emancipation will be shown in the concluding section. IV. DOES REDEMPTION COME FROM MATERIAL EVIDENCE? A CRITIQUE OF THE STATUS OF “THINGS” IN CURRENT THEORETICAL REFLECTION Today, scholars in the humanities have vast expectations of things and material culture. The positive bias toward material evidence and the call to “return to things” is articulated on several levels. On the ontological level, this invocation translates to the affirmation of a reality external to humans that resists their attempt to reduce material evidence to a mere construction or interpretation of the human mind. Programmatically, this philosophical position—known as nuovo realismo (new realism)59 —pursues more or less explicitly the political objective of defending a reality that is “irreversible” and at the same time supports the struggle against media populism, the denial of facts, and the delegitimization of science. It also pursues the ethical aim of overcoming modern anthropocentric narcissism and the “provincialization” of the human in a reality that is increasingly acknowledged as populated by the nonhuman and in which all of these actants are interrelated.60 Verbal blows to the pedestal bearing (Western) human beings have the tendency to demolish the hierarchical relationship that identifies them as the sole protagonists and to render visible the role of an infinite number of actors around them. 58. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, “Une leçon d’ouverture et quelques fragments inédits de Fustel de Coulanges,” Revue de synthèse historique 2 (1901), 245. 59. Maurizio Ferraris, Manifesto del nuovo realismo (Bari: Laterza, 2014). 60. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 36–38; Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 214 215 The aim of this anthropological marginalization is to shift the gaze from the white European male colonizer to the “other,” be it the colonized, the woman, “nonhumans” such as animals, the environment around us, the climate, or, indeed, things and the material world.61 All of this is likewise reflected on the epistemic level. In fact, the supporters of new realism preach the abandonment of hermeneutics and postmodern constructivism in favor of a presentist and “perceptive” or “sensitive” approach to reality.62 Indeed, things as evidence of the past are enveloped in a positive bias dating back to the early modern age. Seen as nontendentious and unintended witnesses, as more direct and more difficult to falsify, they enjoy greater credibility and reliability than written sources. Things facilitate getting closer to the facts.63 With the watchword “return to things,” this new ontology and its ethical and political impetus is burrowing its way into theoretical reflection on history, questioning the object but also the research methodology. The call to shift our gaze to “the material presence of the past,” to the “presence of things,” has a deliberate polemical objective: to transcend semiotics, discourse theory, and the theory of representation in order to make room for the materiality so often neglected by history, which is fixed on “textuality and content.”64 Things and material traces thus take on a double meaning in this discussion. On the one hand, they represent the methodological “other,” the “subordinate” to written sources, an “other” that historical research has so far marginalized, forgotten, and neglected in favor of the traditional notion of evidence, which is mainly written.65 On the other hand, things and material traces represent the thematic “other” in this context, invoked to divert attention from anthropocentric historiography, which sees human beings as the exclusive actors in history and their deeds, thoughts, and behaviors as the only object of historical research. With her own programmatic approach to things and her advocacy for a “nonanthropocentric history” or “post-human history,” Ewa Domańska admirably shows how these analytically distinct levels are inextricably linked. By deanthropologizing historiography, Domańska is intent on overcoming history as “‘the science of people in time’ (Marc Bloch),” which is considered too narrow vis-à-vis the awareness that humankind is merely “one among many organic and non-organic beings existing on the earth.”66 This new conception of history has, in turn, a key function when it comes to implementing an inclusive and 61. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, transl. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 69. 62. For examples from different disciplinary fields and national academic traditions, see scholarship by Maurizio Ferraris, Karen Barad, Quentin Meillassoux, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. 63. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004), 231. 64. Ewa Domańska, “The Material Presence of the Past,” History and Theory 45, no. 2 (2006), 337. See also Ewa Domańska’s “Posthumanist History” (and Dominick LaCapra’s comment on it and Domańska’s response to LaCapra’s comment) in Debating New Approaches to History, ed. Marek Tamm and Peter Burke (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 327–52. 65. Gaskell and Carter, “Introduction,” 4–6; Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra, eds., Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018). 66. Domańska, “The Material Presence of the Past,” 337, 338. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LISA REGAZZONI THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY environmentalist democracy that, following Graham, Domańska calls an “objectoriented democracy.”67 In these theoretical and programmatic writings, however, things and material as medial vehicles of the past are rarely described or analyzed, or even “presented.” Instead, they are called upon to “act” in the service of a political struggle that remains human, all too human. In other words, things and physical elements are already part of an intentionality that is political rather than epistemological in nature. In this context, driven by a clear emancipatory intent, the expectation of redemption is placed in things—that is, redemption from the sins of hermeneutics and, notably, European or Western historiography. Consequently, those with a moral and political agenda of a just, postcolonial, and ideally non-anthropocentric, posthuman, or posthumanist historiography that disempowers the white man, Europeans, and humanity, respectively, will tend to seek a solution or, indeed, redemption by virtue of things. Again, this is made possible by the aforementioned presuppositions that things do not lie, that they are neither biased nor opaque, that they present rather than represent the past.68 While I share the ethical and political afflatus that inspires such theories, I cannot refrain from considering them incomplete, if not misleading, when applied to historical research.69 This is because they were formulated to answer philosophical questions of a different nature: on the one hand, the question of knowledge of the material world (traditionally referred to as the “object”), which is deemed present reality and not a metonymy of absent pasts; on the other hand, there is the ethical question of how to improve justice and equality on earth. Here, the appeal to things and matter seeks to relativize the meaning of human involvement in and responsibility for events and the state of things. The result is the disempowerment of human beings. Whether it is Bruno Latour’s pistol, Harman Graham’s chair, Jane Bennett’s omega-3 fatty acids, Maurizio Ferraris’s slippers, or Karen Barad’s matter, these objects, called upon to exemplify the knowability of the material world, simultaneously fulfill an ethical and a political function. Precisely because these authors take everyday objects or simple materials as examples, these theories reproduce the positive prejudice that such objects are innocent, neutral, and somehow endowed with agency and therefore have no deliberate intentions. But what place do monuments have as intended and partial representations of the past in these theories? Are monuments (such as Confederate statues that transport a highly parochial version of the American Civil War) not things too? Hence, a critique of the evidential value of material entities cannot be separated from a theory of intentionality and its various forms. To conclude, a theoretical 67. Ibid., 337. 68. On the early modern roots of this positive prejudice, see Regazzoni, Geschichtsdinge and Regazzoni, “Unintentional Monuments.” 69. This is why Domańska, in line with her chosen approach, questions European epistemological reason and recognizes the validity and legitimacy of (new) animism: “(New) animism—as proposed here—is an approach that treats all things as persons . . . capable of making changes in the environment (and equipped with nonintentional agency) and are capable of some sort of communication and perception. . . . Thus, all things might be considered as being potentially alive” (“Is This Stone Alive? Prefiguring the Future Role of Archaeology,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 51, no. 1–2 [2018], 32). 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 216 217 approach of this kind has several benefits. First of all, it allows (at least a priori) for consideration of any physical entity and not merely everyday objects or physical matter. Memorials and souvenirs, baptismal gowns, shards, and stains—all of them can be objects of the historian’s intentional gaze (in the phenomenological sense) and become objects of historical questioning. Second, systemization of the different forms of intentionality (memorial, historical, and historico-theoretical) is a critical tool with which to analyze the testimonial content of physical entities, be they marble statues or pebbles found on a beach (in analogy to the critique of sources and written narratives). Third, the distinction between intended and unintended testimonies is the sine qua non for rewriting history. Indeed, this distinction paves the way for future generations of historians to rethink historiographical tradition and the legacy we have inherited as sources of information other than those intended by the producers. At the same time, it legitimizes them to recognize the possible evidential value in any present physical entity, provided it is properly interrogated. Forged by countless micro-conflicts and negotiations but also by numerous scholars in (early) modernity, whose work often led unconsciously to unforeseen consequences not anticipated from the outset as the explicit goal, it is this freedom that allows for emancipation from inherited interpretations (and the dictate of tradition) and, more importantly, from what tradition and earlier generations defined as sources. It likewise allows for breaking down that self-referentiality that Michel de Certeau accused European historiography of, a self-referentiality based almost exclusively on (mostly written) sources self-produced by Europeans.70 The shifting perception of history and the pluralizing of its conceptions requires scholars working historically to consider “chaque trace à l’égal d’un document” (each trace as a document).71 Although material sources per se cannot liberate us from historiographical self-referentiality, they can prompt us to redefine and negotiate the evidential corpus at the outset of each new research effort. That this freedom is relative rather than absolute is indisputable. Indeed, the production of mnemonic and commemorative things and the recognition of things of history is conditioned by history itself. In both cases, by producing representations of the past and identifying new things of history, scholars inherit traditions, historical questions, cognitive endeavors, and the research practices and findings of the communities involved, scientific or otherwise. Scholars are constantly called upon to negotiate and, perhaps, to criticize and reject the “state of the art.” As David Carr put it, The engagement of the individual in the project thus presupposes his prior situation in the community and the existence of a tradition of inquiry in that community. In taking up the traditional project the individual takes over its questions, goals, concepts, and methods. . . . 70. Michel de Certeau, “L’opération historique,” in Faire de l’historie, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), esp. 39–40. 71. François-Xavier Fauvelle, Le rhinocéros d’or: Histoires du Moyen Âge africain (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 18. 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License LISA REGAZZONI THE UNCERTAIN STUFF OF HISTORY This regression involves not only providing new, corrected answers to old questions but, just as often, attacking the old questions and posing new ones in their place.72 It follows that, although tradition preforms our historical sensibility, it is modified by posing new questions.73 And yet the intentional act of turning historical attention to unintended witnesses has transformed the past into future-oriented open territory.74 A heuristic view of what we consider to be evidence of the past sees the latter constantly expanding. It is at the edge of this expanding universe that history theorists assume their mobile point of observation. Their role is not so much to provide answers but to formulate questions. ACKNOWLEDGMENT Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. Bielefeld University 72. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 106. Husserl addressed this as he grappled with the problem of explaining historicity and intersubjectivity. 73. On phenomenology as “an investigative science, an essential component of which is experiment,” see Don Ihde, Experimental Phenomenology, 2nd ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 4. 74. A similar reflection on future orientation was already formulated by Charles S. Peirce: “History would not have the character of a true science if it were not permissible to hope that further evidences may be forthcoming in the future by which the hypotheses of the critics may be tested” (Pierce, quoted in Tullio Viola, Peirce on the Uses of History [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020], 208). 14682303, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.12341, Wiley Online Library on [29/05/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 218