Antonis Liakos
From the Poetics of History to History as Practice
Abstract: The massive dimensions which history has acquired
means that historical theorists have to change approach and to
place the mass perceptions of history at the centre of their
attention.
In most theoretical debates on historical theory, history has been treated as a
discipline and intellectual practice regarding its ability to represent the past.
Yet, the memory boom and history wars of recent decades have directed our
attention to the public dimensions of historical practice. Although history was
always something more than a discipline limited to a small community of
specialists, this external dimension hardly was recognized. The theory of
history was oriented towards the epistemology of historical research or
towards the historical rhetoric. The public dimensions of history were either
neglected or considered to be additional to the main tasks of history. The
dichotomy between the uses and misuses of history dominated the field, and
public historians were ghettoized in museums and lay historical activities. But
the massive dimensions which history has acquired means that historical
theorists have to change approach and to place the mass perceptions of
history at the centre of their attention – not only as an additional and
particular dimension of historical knowledge and not only from the point of
view of cognition. This practice of history should be seen also from the point
of view of the feelings and the passions that history creates. In other words,
when treated as an object of the theory of history, history should be seen not
as a cognitive process, as it used to be, but as a social and cultural practice.
This assertion raises the more general problem of How to deal with the past in
contemporary societies? and shifts our attention from the question of What
happened in the past? to the question of What’s happening in the present regarding
the past? This change marks a shift from theorizing history to theorizing
historical culture.
Since the last quarter of the 20th century, history became a battleground regarding the
traumatic events of the past, mainly those of the last century. The past became the
apple of discord between historians, governments, law makers and the Media.
Memory wars and memory laws are reproducing each other and this spiral is
spreading from one to the other country. Although history and politics were always
entangled in different forms and roles, today
memory laws,
history wars,
transitional justice, and the creating of an international framework of norms
regarding the teaching of
history at the school, are raising for historians new
epistemological problems and moral dilemmas regarding not only the legacies of
division and conflict but mainly those pasts still creating suffering and related with
historical traumas. This is a pressing question, because historians are constraint not
only to research the past, but to shift their attention from the question “What happen
in the past?”, to the question of “What’s happening in our present regarding its past?”
This question, which is the subject of this issue, marks a shift from history, as enquiry
of the traces of the past, to the historical culture which regards the way the past lives
in the present and is related to our lives, decisions and future orientations .
Laws attempting to regulate the ways we talk about the past constitute a new
field of controversy between historians, law makers, European and national
parliaments. The initial legislative intervention regarding the denial of the holocaust
was followed soon by new laws condemning North Atlantic slavery, colonial crimes,
the communist repression in Central Eastern Europe, and specific crimes in national
historiographies. Pierre Nora, in his article “History, Memory and the Law in France
(1990-2010)” recognizes that governments and legislative bodies have the right to
orientate the collective memory but disputes strongly the legal sanctions in topics
concerning the representation of the past. He argues that the subjection of the
historical events to legal qualification, renders any further discussion impossible at the
risk of sanctions and paralyses research. In his words, “It is up to the politicians to
commemorate, to pay homage and to organise compensation, it is up to them to
honour the victims. It is up to the historians to do the rest, to establish the facts and to
propose interpretations of these facts, restricted by neither constraint nor taboo.” Is it
true? Does this differentiation of roles correspond any more to the new realities?
One of the main problems in the public use of history and the memory wars is the
conceptualization of genocides and crimes against humanity. How to think such
events? What to investigate, and how to talk on the mass killing of human beings and
the destruction of their lives? What concepts and literary devices to use for describing
their experience? Mass destructions and genocides are something happened in the
20th century, or historians are able and sensitive to see and explore them now,
because their mentality and the way of doing history has been changed during the
present time due to the changing political agendas since the Nuremberg trials?
The framework of the present debate on mass destruction is the United Nations
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in 1948. This law released a
moral dimension in thinking and writing about the past. Did the involvement of
morality in the historical work, constrain the freedom of historians to judge and
explain, one of the pillars of their professionalism, at least since the 19th century
historicism? The requested neutrality and objectivity of historical scholarship has, in
fact, been replaced by open sympathy and the sense of respect for the victims, which
went along with open public revulsion of such acts, captured by the popular
expression, never again! Historians couldn’t any more behave as distant and
indifferent observers, without taking in consideration the moral ethic and implications
of their writings. But does this preoccupation hinder the autonomy of historical
thinking and prescribes historical interpretations and representations by the force of
law or by political pressure? To this question responds Jörn Rüsen in his article
“Using history: the struggle about traumatic experiences of the past in historical
culture”. For Rüsen, although there is “a clear distinction between political and
judicial intentions and norms on the one hand and the principles of proper historical
thinking”, there are intersections between politics and law, on the one hand, and
historical thinking on the other. Rüsen reads these intersection in the sense of three
successive generations in Germany, where historians shared the way the public
opinion put the problems and its perspective on the past. His conclusion is that
historical research doesn’t come in contradiction with the universal principles of
morality. It’s the trap of moralistic ethnocentrism which compromises historical
integrity to political intentions.
By institutionalizing the memory of crimes against humanity, the world order
established after the Second World War defended a certain way of remembering the
past and proclaimed it as a moral value that needs to be respected, even by coercion.
In the following years, the expansion of the definition of what constitutes a
“genocide” and the drive for recognition of them led to an effort by various nations or
ethnic groups to seek revenge for the injustices they have experienced in the past.
The term “genocide”, besides the demand of justice, is a sign of recognition for the
crimes committed, because it acquired performative power. It validates in public
memory the suffering of community, and produces a demand for respect in home and
abroad. Nominated genocides, the past sufferings are acquiring the status of a cultural
distinction and becomes moral sources in politics and international relations.
As a consequence the official recognition of certain traumas and the
institutionalization of their memory becomes a way of dealing with the past under
certain rules. At the same time, the institutionalization of memory becomes highly
selective, and not all memories are considered worthy of safeguarding.
Memorialization of the past in the public domain depends on power relations in the
present, and there are horrendous crimes against humanity that are still unrecognised
and unpunished because the victims do not have the power to bring their cases before
the global public, or the perpetrators are still in command. But respect should be
defended, and defended by law. The penalization of the denial of genocide is another
major theme.
Memory laws, and in some cases criminal law, is now the custodian of memory.
Intervention of the law in the remembering of the past means that historians and
historical institutions can’t perform anymore their traditional role as the guardians of
memory. Because the relationship with the past is much more diffused and, through
the new media, has acquired dimensions impossible to be controlled by the academic
institutions. The claim to history became an uncontrollable force affecting not only
the learned elites but also the masses. History is read as literature. The borders
between the reception of history, historical novel and fiction are getting demolished.
In contemporary historical culture, the traumatic stands for the sublime, and
victimhood for the heroic. The past is regarded as symptomatology of unrelated
symptoms and is connected with justice and moral demands. Finally, the new
eponymous heroes of the past are not the illustrious men but the evil persons. Under
these circumstances, historians tend to adopt in their historical narrative a moral
narrative”.
Τhe changes in the ways we remember, initiated in the post-war period, was the
result of synergies which have to do with the experiences of wars and
mass
sufferings but also with the aspiration to get out and reconstruct a peaceful future
verbalising and dealing with the past, as much as it is possible. Through these shifts,
history is hardly conceived any more as a social science explaining the course of
society. It is transformed into a discipline focussed on our relations with the past,
including feelings, respect, acknowledge and justice. History was called to meet needs
as healing, respect, reconciliation, moral reconstruction of societies, in an
environment where representation of the past was passing from the printed world to
the virtual world. New needs and new environments are outpacing the traditional role
of history, as it has been conceived and elaborated in the communities of scholars
based on the pursuit of a detached and purposeless knowledge. This shift brought
history into the realm of historical culture, where historians are not any more the
privileged definers of the present’s relationship with the past. As a consequence, to
understand the new roles of historical communities we should move beyond the
normative concept of uses and abuses of history and see history not as a window to
the past, asking “what happened in the past?” but as a window into the house we live
in now, asking “how the past operates in the present?”. We should not cease to be
interested in the past, but we should also be interested in history as a cultural feature
of our societies now. Not how history should be conducted, but how is in fact
performing. This inversion of our outlook does not imply indifference or an
acceptance of irresponsible uses of the past, or for the manipulation of history and
historical consciousness. On the contrary it helps historians to understand better the
complexity and the multiple dimensions of the environment in which we now work.
History becomes an arena where social or ethnic groups demand their emancipation
from the past stigmas and claim their participation to the shaping of the future. At the
same ground, newly emerging elites establish their own hegemony undermining the
authority of older ones.
But what about the rigor of historical inquiry? Does historians, at least
historians based on the tradition of European and American scholarly tradition of the
last decades, have a distinct role in the historical culture and in the uses of the past?
Seen in long perspectives and, from a cultural point of view, the articles included in
the 12 issues of historein make obvious how history becomes a political culture of
back-projected accountability, and also part of a broader story of verbalizing and
rationalizing differences stemming from wars, civil wars, dictatorships and traumatic
experiences. This international or global ideological context has gained increasing
importance in shaping historical narratives and in setting an agenda for the future of
historical theory.
Paper in the Conference The Future of the Theory and Philosophy of History, Ghent 10‐13 July 2013
www.inth.ugent.be
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Fátima Sá
ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL)
Tomás Mantecón
Universidad de Cantabria
Maria Grever
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Fabien Montcher
Saint Louis University
