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A possible (common-sense)defence of (my) history: Aresponse to Keith JenkinsAlexander Lyon MacfiePublished online: 20 Aug 2009.

To cite this article: Alexander Lyon Macfie (2009) A possible (common-sense) defence of(my) history: A response to Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory andPractice, 13:3, 345-355, DOI: 10.1080/13642520903091092

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A possible (common-sense) defence of (my) history: A response to

Keith Jenkins

Alexander Lyon Macfie*

In this article, by way of a critique of the arguments advanced by KeithJenkins in his article, ‘‘‘Nobody does it better’’: Radical history andHayden White’, I attempt a (common-sense) defence of conventional(closed, empirical/epistemologically striving) history, as traditionallypractised. Where Jenkins suggests a number of necessary conditions forthe production of a radical (non-)history, I suggest a number ofnecessary conditions for the possibility of a conventional history; andwhere Jenkins lists a number of reasons why the conditions of possibilityof a conventional history cannot ever be met, I list a number of reasonswhy they can be met. My conclusion is that history, seen mainly as asubject involved with the recovery of meaning from dead text, ispossible; although the possibility of a recovery of meaning from deadtext will inevitably be limited by the constraints imposed by the use oflanguage.

Keywords: reality; language; mind; referent; meaning; truth

In his article, ‘‘‘Nobody does it better’’: Radical history and HaydenWhite’ (2008), Keith Jenkins, the noted philosopher of history, mounts adevastating assault on conventional, academic history. The article wasoriginally written as a contribution to a special issue of the journalRethinking History, published in 2008, to celebrate Hayden White’s eightiethbirthday. It also appeared, in a slightly different version, in RefiguringHayden White, a festschrift for Hayden White, edited by Frank Ankersmit,Ewa Domanska and Hans Kellner, published by Stanford University Press,in the same year.1 According to Jenkins, this article summarises the outcomeof almost 30 years of sceptical thought about history. Is it possible, armedonly with the inadequate accoutrements of common sense, to mount aneffective challenge to the assault mounted by Jenkins? Probably not.Nevertheless, as a conventional, academic historian, of the sort referred toby Jenkins, as empirical, objectivist and documentist, I feel obliged to try.

*Email: alexandermacfie@btinternet.com

Rethinking HistoryVol. 13, No. 3, September 2009, 345–355

ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online

� 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13642520903091092

http://www.informaworld.com

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The following is my defence of conventional history, shaped primarily by thearguments used by Jenkins in his powerful and at times incandescent text.

The Jenkins version

Jenkins’s article is divided into two parts: a first part, concerned withJenkins’s attempt to elucidate the necessary conditions of possibility for theproduction of a radical history (which ‘from the point of view of the‘‘present situation’’’ for Jenkins means an insignificant history, in effect anon-history); and a second, very much shorter part, concerned withJenkins’s debt to Hayden White, the American philosopher of history,whose work, Metahistory (1973), provided the essential starting point for allhis later thinking about the subject. In the first – philosophically by far themost important – part of his paper, Jenkins identifies certain ontologicalpresuppositions which, acting as axioms, will in his view serve asfoundations for his version of a (non-)history. Then, on the foundation ofthose ontological presuppositions, he erects (dialectically, as he puts it) asuperstructure. As his thesis, he first shows that the conditions of possibilityof a closed empirical/epistemologically striving non-radical history (ordin-ary, academic history) cannot ever be met. Second, he argues as hisantithesis that for radical historians the limits and difficulties that make non-radical history impossible are not seen as problems but as opportunities.Third, he suggests as his synthesis that radical historians can exploit theopportunities offered by the failure of conventional history to write historiesthat celebrate uncertainty, openness and newness. In the second part of hisarticle – in effect an addendum – Jenkins explains briefly the great debt heowes, as a philosopher of history, to Hayden White.

Ontological presuppositions

Jenkins’s necessary conditions of possibility for the production of a radical(non-)history, which he also refers to as ‘ontological presuppositions . . .acting as axioms’, he tabulates, (‘somewhat skeletally; impressionistically’)thus:

(1) The world (matter, stuff, activity, the universe, etc.) exists ‘out there’,and has existed in the past and will continue to exist in the future. Assuch it is not the product of my current mental state. Nor can I inany sense ‘know’ it, as it transcends whatever attempts I, as amember of a social formation, might make to reduce it to myexperiences, vocabularies, lexicons, abstractions, etc. All that I canknow is the world as I have intuited/represented/created/constitutedit, radically contingent (that is to say, forever irreducible to definitemeanings). In other words, while the world is out there, meanings

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and truths are not, since meanings and truths are in sentences andsentences are not ‘out’ there. There is, therefore, an ontologicalbreak between the actuality of the world and so-called ‘reality’, suchreality being created/constituted by our human discourses which are‘about’ the world but do not necessarily correspond to that to whichthey ‘refer’.

(2) We can never have access to the actualities of ‘stuff’, plain and pure.Such ‘worlds’ as we have access to are just that, ours, and thusinescapably human. Other species may have their own species-bound‘readings’, but they are inaccessible to us. Nor can we access anykind of neutral actuality/reality that would enable us to adjudicatebetween them.

(3) It is, therefore, we who make our actuality ‘real’. Whatever efforts wemight make to capture the objects thus ‘subjectified’ by our gaze, weare always bound to fail. There will always remain an ungraspableexcess (a sublime) that thwarts (‘for all we know’) our every effort tosomehow understand/delimit/represent/historicize it. In any casethere is no a-priori certainty that language functions accordingto principles that are those, or are like those, of the phenomenalworld.

(4) Finally, since there is no one-to-one natural correspondence betweenword and world, no literal entailment of signifier to signifier andthence to the putative signified, and thence to the putativereferent (putative since the referent is now collapsed back intorepresentation – into signals), then to get the actuality of the worldinto a ‘language’ it never asked to be put in is (as Derrida suggests)always to engage in an act of unavoidable violence – one whichinvolves (axiomatically) an expression of political power. As forabsolutes and universals (such as History, Justice, Law and Ethics),while the originary violence of the sign enables us to think of these as(quasi-)transcendental (mythical) gestures, we can only access themat the level of the empirical, where they are constantly subject tochange. What this means is that we will never be able to discoverwhat History/history ‘really is’ – that will remain a secret like thename and face of God. Nor will History/history ever be able to fulfilits putative aim – the truthful reconstruction of the past. That willremain an impossible ‘myth’.

The impossibility of conventional truth

Having thus established the ontological presuppositions (axioms), on thefoundations of which, he suggests, a possible ‘radical history’ might beerected, Jenkins then goes on to create his superstructure. In the first part ofthis – the only part of Jenkins’s dialectical argument with which I am here

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concerned (I do not believe in the possibility of a ‘radical history’ erected on thepresumption of the impossibility of conventional history) – he sets out, again ina more or less tabular form, the reasons why the conditions of possibility of aclosed, empirical/epistemologically striving non-radical history cannot ever bemet. These reasons, briefly summarized, are as follows:

(1) that history suffers from the problematicising contamination of thehistorian as an author;

(2) that history lacks a stable referent;(3) that history (as historiography) is not capable of ‘true’ meaning. All

it is capable of is ‘interpretative difference’;(4) that history is essentially rhetorical, and is, therefore, the type of

phenomenon that Aristotle refers to as illusio (inferential acts of theimagination that are fictive, fabricated, made up);

(5) that history is, therefore, essentially fictive and of an aesthetic kind;and

(6) that ‘no one set of events figure forth apodictically the kind ofmeanings with which stories provide them’ and that in history ‘themeaning, form and coherence of events, whether real or imaginaryones, is a function of their narrativism . . .’.

My ontological presuppositions

In my common-sense response to Jenkins’s dismantling of the structure ofconventional history, I intend to follow the format devised by Jenkins in hisarticle, first, by attempting to establish a number of ‘ontologicalpresuppositions’ on which, acting as axioms, I will be enabled to build myown version of history; and second, by endeavouring to show that thereasons Jenkins adduces for the ineffectiveness of a closed, empirical/epistemologically striving history are for the most part not convincing. Inthis way I hope to be able to show that the Humpty Dumpty of history, asJenkins refers to it, can be put together again from the bits and pieces leftover following its fall.

(1) I accept Jenkins’s primary assumption, that the world (matter, stuff,actuality, the universe, etc.) exists out there, and that it is not theproduct of my mental state. Nor can I in any sense ‘know’ it, as ittranscends whatever attempts I, as a member of a social formation,might make to reduce it to my experiences, vocabularies, lexicons,etc.;

(2) also that the world has existed in the past and will continue to exist inthe future (the great mystery of time); and

(3) that all that I/we can know is the world as I/we have intuited/represented/created/constituted it. As Jenkins remarks in his article,

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it is we who make our actuality ‘real’ by endowing attributes to stuffthat thus realizes ‘it’.

(4) What this means is that the world, as we perceive it, is the product ofmind (or consciousness, the second of the great mysteries of things,possibly the first), as is meaning, truth and language. As Jenkins putsit, such worlds as we have access to are just that, ours, and thusinescapably human.

(5) As human beings we enjoy an intimate (profound, direct, close)relationship with mind and all that that entails; although we have nomore access to ‘mind’ in the past than we have to Jenkins’s world ‘outthere’ (matter, stuff, actuality). All that we can access from the past –which we assume to have existed, in much the same way that weassume that the present exists for us – are the remains and traces ofthe past as they survive in the present, namely books, documents,records, letters, paintings, drawings, buildings and such like, all in oneway or another the products of a past ‘human’ mind. In particular, asmembers of a particular language community (or a number oflanguage communities – the individual is not necessarily restricted toone), we enjoy an intimate (profound, direct) relationship with theproducts of that language in so far as the mind embodied in thoseproducts can be resurrected (recovered) by us, by way of reading. Ifwe cannot read (and presumably speak) the language of our languagecommunity, the one in which the remains are interred (buried, hidden,concealed, secreted), then we cannot resurrect them. Even if we can,we may not be able to resurrect the whole meaning, as it wasunderstood at the time of its interment (composition). However,experience shows nevertheless that we can recover quite a lot.

(6) It may well be that there is no a-priori certainty that languagefunctions according to principles that are those, or are like those, ofthe phenomenal world; but it is likely that language, as the product ofmind, can relate quite effectively to the other products of mind. In anycase, even if language relates only to itself, it is still capable ofcommunicating meaning. As Jenkins remarks, meanings and truthsare in sentences and sentences are not ‘out there’ but in language.Indeed, it is principally by means of the survival of language, inbooks, documents, texts, letters and so on, that we are able to write‘history’.

The possibility of conventional history

Having thus attempted a reinterpretation of the consequences, for history,of Jenkins’s ‘ontological presuppositions’, or axioms, as he calls them, Iintend now to consider some of the reasons Jenkins gives for theimpossibility of a closed, empirical/epistemologically striving non-radical

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history, and to suggest that, for the most part, they are invalid. Again I willfollow the format laid down by Jenkins in his article.

(1) What Jenkins means when he states that history suffers from thecontamination of the historian/author is that, whereas in pictorialrepresentation the represented (i.e. the landscape) precedes the re-presentation (the painting), in historical representation the repre-sentation (the history) precedes the represented (the past). In otherwords, it is the historian who creates the past, which he thendescribes; and historians, as we all know, come in all shapes andsizes, driven by ambition, jealousy, institutionalization, and so on.History, in short, is a contaminated discourse that cannot ever bepurified.It may well be that the historian is ‘contaminated’ in some of the

ways that Jenkins describes, most significantly by the fact that helives in the present, which inevitably shapes his thinking about thepast; and that, in writing his history, he does sometimes create/imagine/invent a past that he then describes. But at a more basiclevel – I would suggest – it is not so much the historian who (most ofthe time) creates the ‘past’ as the language community of which he isa part. In a general sense, therefore, it can be said that the ‘past’ –defined here as both a temporal phenomenon and as the worldintuited/represented/created/constituted by people in the past –precedes the historian’s representation of it. Quite how a languagecommunity creates a ‘past’ – if it does actually create a ‘past’: not alllanguage communities necessarily do – remains a mystery. All thatone can say is that nearly all language communities have a concept ofsome kind of a/the (remembered) past, variously construed, and thatthat concept of a/the (remembered) past is almost always importantin shaping the language community’s view of the present and thefuture.

(2) It is Jenkins’s contention that the historian lacks a stable referent.This, he argues, is because the past no longer exists; and even if itdid, it would be far too complicated to become a fixed object ofenquiry. As Jenkins says, there is never a solid, ‘real’ past that acts asthe common/neutral past for everyone – any more than there is acommon/neutral time for the past to exist ‘in’. Nor, he goes on, canthe historian’s referent be the traces of the past, the (always alreadyhistoricised) archive, as widely construed as one wishes. This isbecause although the historian refers to the archive, and to thedocuments and facts therein, he still does not find his referent there.Therefore, what can the referent be? For Jenkins the answer issimple. The historian’s referent is ‘nothing’ but the product of hisimagination, a ‘past’ inferred from the sources, very much shaped by

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his existential condition. In this way he works up the material hevariously has into an object capable of analysis, research andargument. On this basis he then infers a past – either simple orcomplex – which now fits his data, his position and his inferences. Inother words, he creates/imagines/invents a referent (the past). Hethen writes about it as if it actually existed.Once again it would have to be admitted that historians might well

do what Jenkins suggests they do, namely imagine (infer) a past thatthey then describe. Again, at a more basic level, it can be argued – Iwould argue – that historians (in our language community at least)find a past present in two places: first, in the popular imaginationwhere stories about the past are preserved as ‘history’ (i.e. ‘whatactually happened’ in the past); and second, in meaning resurrected(recovered) from text, where similar stories are preserved. Thesestories, it can be argued, and the histories based on them, do notneed a referent (although one may exist in our language communityin the form of ‘history’).It is, it may be noted, the stories that survive in text and the

popular imagination that (again in our language community)provide the historian with the subject matter of his history. Theidea of the past may, as Jenkins asserts, be far too complicated tobecome a fixed object of enquiry, but the historian does not, for themost part, deal with the ‘past’, whatever that might be. What he doesis select a subject from the assortment of subjects preserved, either inthe popular imagination or in text, deemed by the people (thelanguage community to which he belongs) as worthy of attention.The historian, in other words (most of the time), does not so muchinvent the subject matter of his history as find it.

(3) It is Jenkins’s contention that history (as historiography) is notcapable of ‘true’ meaning (description). All it is capable of isinterpretative difference. This is because the referent historydescribes is only the product of inference. It does not existobjectively. Moreover, historians going to, say, the same archiveand working on even the same traces/sources can and do inferdifferent ‘pasts’. ‘The past’, in other words, can be read and ‘made tomean’ ‘any way you like’. Truth simply does not come into it. As forall the kinds of thing inferred by the historian (structures, processes,movements, explanations, meaning and such like), they were neveractually there in the first place, at least not in the way Nelson’sFlagship Victory once was. This historicised past is, therefore, a pastwhich no one ever experienced while it was in the process of takingshape, that no one ever observed, and which exists now only in theminds of, and in the texts created by, historians and those acting as ifthey were historians.

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Jenkins’s contention, that history (as historiography) is notcapable of true meaning (description), but only of interpretativedifference, once again I would contest. It may well be, as Jenkinsremarks, that no one ever experienced the ‘past’. All that one canexperience, one supposes, is the present (whatever that might be).However, the meaning the historian resurrects (recovers) from deadtexts, often embodied in the form of the original words, can bereproduced to a greater or lesser extent in a historian’s discourse. Assuch, therefore, it can be said that the historian’s copy/reproduction/representation of that meaning is true – true here meaning precise inits resemblance. Certainly – it can be argued – it is the business of thehistorian to interpret the meaning found in dead texts, and thatactivity will necessarily generate a great deal of ‘interpretativedifference’. However, any such interpretative difference will ofnecessity (in our language community at least) be limited by theneed for coherence, logic and consistency. As for all the kinds ofthing supposedly inferred by the historian (structures, processes andso on), why should they not be inferred by the historian? Inferringsuch things is what we, as members of our language community,normally do.It is, it may be noted, the fact that the historian is capable of

discovering a kind of truth, by copying the words found in a book,document, record or some such, that he/she is right to draw attentionto this fact, by referencing the original of such copies in his/herfootnotes. It is mainly this precise referencing system thatdistinguishes history – an account of meaning found for the mostpart in dead text – from fiction – a freewheeling account of meaningof various kinds found in the world in general.

(4) In the fourth of his arguments, Jenkins makes a number of assertionsabout history: the most important of which are probably that, as arhetorical method, lacking both a definitive object of enquiry and adefinitive (universal) method of enquiry, history can never be ascience – a subject with a definitive object of enquiry and a definitive(universal) method of enquiry; and that as a result history willremain ‘interminably open, always waiting the next interlocutor toarrive’. What I find is that history enjoys a definitive object ofenquiry, namely the meaning contained in dead texts (widelyconstrued here to include anything that can be ‘read’, mainly wordson paper); that it enjoys a definitive method of enquiry, namelyreading (and possibly interpretation); and that it can produce reliableknowledge of a kind, essentially in the form of a tautology. However,as part of the world of meaning, contained in text and the humanmind, the interpretation of that knowledge will remain forever open.Does that make history a science? As Jenkins defines a science – a

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subject with a definitive object of enquiry and a definitive (universal)method of enquiry – it seems that it does. Although the fact that ineach particular instance reading and interpretation are, short oftranslation – a major obstacle to understanding – confined to a singlelanguage community at a particular moment in its developmentmight suggest otherwise.One way or another, it is evident (to me) that if history is seen as

being essentially concerned with the resurrection (recovery) ofmeaning contained in dead text, then it should be seen to include,within the compass of its discipline, philology – the study oflanguage, especially in its historical and comparative aspects –hermeneutics – the interpretation of Scripture and literary text –archaeology – the analysis of physical remains – numismatics – thestudy of old coins and medals – genealogy – the study andinvestigation of lines of descent – historiography – the study ofhistory writing – biography – the study of individual human agency,and even perhaps (Freudian) psychology – the study of unacknow-ledged drives and impulses. None of these subjects can be studiedwithout an initial recovery of past meaning.

(5) What Jenkins means by the assertion that history is fictive and of anaesthetic kind (illusio) is that it is fabricated, made up, the product ofrhetorical devices and stylistic figures – in other words the product oflanguage. This I accept. My point is that the raw material of history,the meaning resurrected (recovered) from dead text, is also alreadyfabricated, made up, the product of rhetorical devices and stylisticfigures. There is in effect a significant continuity (most of the time)between the raw material of history – the sources – and the historyfabricated, in a variety of ways, by the historian, from that rawmaterial. The raw material of history, in other words, is the productnot of some kind of reality out there, but of consciousness, aconsciousness that finds expression mainly in the form of language.The historian, like everyone else, swims in a sea of language. He doesnot ever expect to touch dry land.In his article Jenkins rightly remarks more than once that history,

whatever else it might be, is not an empirically based subject;although he admits that empirical/epistemological elements can anddo (once things have been ‘put under a description’) sometimesoperate at the level of the singular statement. Rather, a history(discourse) with a story to tell at the level of a narratio is ‘always amanifestation of the ‘‘found’’ (the sources, etc.) and the imagined(the inferences)’.

(6) In his sixth and final section, Jenkins enthusiastically embracesHayden White’s assertion that ‘no given set of events figure forthapodictically the kind of meanings with which stories provide them’;

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and that ‘the meaning, form, or coherence of events, whether real orimaginary ones, is a function of their narrativism’. What, I think,Jenkins and Hayden White mean by this is that history, a rhetorical(literary) construct, differs substantially from what it pretends todescribe. My contention, again, is that human consciousness almostalways operates by making sense of things, giving them meaning,form and coherence, and telling stories about them in language. As ahuman being, therefore, I inhabit a world of meaning, form andcoherence, a world that finds its principal expression in language. Itis this meaning, form and coherence that I detect (recognise, identify)when I, as a historian, resurrect (recover) meaning from dead text.What I construct/imagine/represent/create/ reconstitute in myhistory is very much what I find constructed/imagined/represented/created/reconstituted there. It is inevitable that I will employ the sortof tropes, emplotments and arguments (ideological and other) thatare normally used there. It would be very odd indeed if I did not.

Conclusion

Jenkins’s whole argument, that the conventional academic historian fails inhis supposed intention of writing a ‘truthful reconstruction of the past’,depends heavily, it seems to me, on his belief that what actually exists issome kind of actuality (stuff, matter, the world or such like) and that thehuman mind is incapable of accessing that actuality ‘plain’. In particular thehuman mind is incapable of accessing the actuality of the past.Consequently the historian is bound to fail if he attempts in any way toreconstruct the ‘past’ in a definitive epistemologically assured way,particularly if, from the remains of the past, he first infers a ‘past’ whichhe then attempts to describe. My suggestion is that what I/we know, in ourlanguage community at least, is that the human mind constantly creates aworld and that it is the remains of that created world that survive thepassage of time, usually in the form of books, documents, records, letters,paintings and such like. From these books, documents, records and so on,the historian can, if he wishes, resurrect meaning, a meaning which he canthen analyse, discuss and elaborate in such a way as to write ‘history’,reasonably secure in the knowledge that the meaning he resurrects from thepast, the product of mind (human consciousness) is understandable now inmuch the same way that it was understandable then. This is particularly so ifthe meaning is contained in language, which most of it normally is; though ithas to be admitted that the language of a given language community willinevitably change over time, leading to a significant loss of meaning. Thehistorian, in short, does not attempt to reconstruct the ‘past’, defined assome sort of actuality (‘thing in itself’), but tries, as best he can (most of thetime) to understand meaning resurrected from dead texts, in much the same

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way that he attempts to understand meaning resurrected from dead textsevery day in a newspaper, magazine or document. Such is my response toJenkins’ article, and to the meaning contained therein, written (interred,buried, stored, hidden) in the past, resurrected (recovered) by me in thepresent, now the past, and then, in due course, understood, misunderstood,summarised, analysed, interpreted and misinterpreted, again by me, in alanguage (English) that, as members of a language community, is to aconsiderable extent common to us both.

Notes on contributor

Alexander Lyon Macfie has written widely on the Straits Question, the EasternQuestion, the modern history of the Middle East, and other related subjects. Hispublications include The Eastern question (2nd ed. 1996), The Straits question (1993),Ataturk (1994), The end of the Ottoman Empire (1998), Orientalism: A reader (2000),Orientalism (2002), Eastern influences on Western philosophy: A reader (2003) andThe philosophy of history (2006).

Note

1. Keith Jenkins, ‘Nobody does it better’: Radical history and Hayden White.Rethinking History 12, no. 1, 2008. Also published in a revised version in FrankAnkersmit, Ewa Domanska and Hans Kellner, eds. 2008. Refiguring HaydenWhite. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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