”Historein- A Review of the Past & Other Stories”

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Volume 2 / Athens 2000

Hayden White, "The Ironic Poetics of late Modernity"

Interview to Angelica Koufou & Margarita Miliori

Hayden White came to Athens in December 1999 and gave a lecture of "History as Expectation

and Fulfillment" as part of a series of lectures and debates taking place in the context of the

exhibition "The Greek Historical Book from the Restoration of Democracy to the Present", a project

undertaken by the members of HISTOREIN in collaboration with the National Book Centre. During

this time, we had the opportunity to have an illuminating discussion with him concerning his

innovative and influential contribution to historical thinking.

Angelica Koufou: You are considered as one of the major exponents of

the Iinguistic turn. What is your personal view on its significance for the

reorientation of historicaI thinking during the Iast decades?

Hayden White: In the first pIace I don't think it is correctly called the

linguistic turn, because a semiotic or a structuralist approach to the study of

cuIturaI and sociaI phenomena is more interested in discourse than in

Iinguistics. Linguistics studies Ianguage phenomena only at the IeveI of the

sentence, but discourse works at the IeveI of a number of sentences.

Foucault, in reviving the notion of a discipline like History or Economics as

a discourse was asking about the ways in which discursivity creates,

projects a worId that can be then turned into an object of study. Take for

exampIe "the economic phenomenon". In one sense no one knows what an"economic phenomenon" might be, but discourse is what attempts to define

things Iike that. Now, I think that peopIe characterized the so called

Iinguistic turn in these terms because they thought that we, people Iike me,

were trying to argue a Iinguistic determinism... Heidegger and people of

that ilk had argued that the limits of one's world are the limits of one's

language... But language and discourse are not the same thing. Discourse

is a highly sophisticated, self-conscious use of language at a level more

general than the sentence, and I think it had a very important impact upon

the study of the human and social sciences. Because to consider these not

as sciences, not even as disciplines, but as discourses allows you to

understand why alternative interpretations of the same phenomena are

possible. And this is what aIlows for one seeing that in the human andsocial sciences, indeed even in the natural sciences in large part, what you

study is a product of the way you describe reality in discourse.

A.K.: So can we use a different name for the turn? Can we call it

philosophical or metaphorical?

H.W.: Call it the discursive turn. Discourse was the object of study of

rhetoric. Louis Mink, the philosopher, suggests that my work has

contributed to something called the rhetorical turn. But that gives a false

impression because it suggests that what one is doing is going back to a

pre-modern conception of rhetoric; and we are not doing that. So you can

call it the discursive turn; because what you do is treat these disciplines as

discourses which create their own object of study by processes that we

recognise as being grounded in language, but as being more rhetorical

than, say, grammatical, in their articulation or elaboration.

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Historein: A Review of the Past & Other Stories http://www.historein.gr/vol2_interview.htm

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A.K.: Your work appears to me as a synthesis of a semiotically oriented

theory of meaning and of an Anglosaxonic philosophical tradition. Do you

agree with this view?

H.W.: I suppose so, although I've always been more interested in German

and Italian philosophy than British... But, I have an analytical interest much

more than a synthetic interest... So, I never believed the Germans. That's

why I was always attracted to Vico. Vico had an idea of the way in which

you can create truth out of falsehood. You can have a mistaken notion of something, but the very fact that it is a notion gives you a basis on which to

correct it. He talks about the way in which there is something called creative

error: you make a guess of the way some aspect of the world is and on the

basis of that guess you can enter into the world and then begin testing the

idea of that world and create a truth out of it.

A.K.: What I was referring to by Anglosaxonic philosophical tradition was

this branch of the American analytical philosophers like Arthur Danto, Louis

Mink, Morton White...

H.W.: I like the way they write, because they are clear, and I try to write

clearly rather than be precious. I mean I believe that there can be clear

exposition of ideas. I would never try to write like Derrida for example, or

even Foucault for that matter.Margarita Miliori: Nobody would understand it except for the people who

are already prepared to believe it. You can't preach with it you mean...

H.W.: Exactly. I think it creates mystification and in that respect I like that

tradition of English philosophy that insists on plain speech for talking about

very complicated issues. But also, you know, Arthur Danto and I went to

school together, at the University, and we were both taught by the same

teacher, who got us interested in the Philosophy of History.

A.K.: In what way did the debates which took place in History and Theory

concerning the double nature of History affect the development of the

discursive turn in the United States?

H.W.: Well, that probably connects with your asking me about people like

Morton White and Arthur Danto. The British analytical philosophers raisedthe question about whether in history story-telling could be regarded as a

cognitively legitimate form of explanation. The question is important, but

only if one does not have ?ery simple minded notion of story-telling, such

as that based upon the fable. And we all know that narrative is a very

complex problem. That's why I turned to the French narratologists to talk

about those kinds of issues. Everyone from Barthes to Genette, Greimas

especially, even Propp and the Russian formalists seem to me to be much

more insightful. British philosophy always tends to get back to very simple

models, when they talk about such things as, for example, an ethical

decision. The late Iris Murdoch once wrote that when the British

philosophize, they will take very simple problems such as: "I promised my

friend that I would go to play tennis with him; and then someone else calledme and I decided I wanted to go with this other person; and I was put in a

dilemma". She went onto say that the kind of dilemmas that interested her

were not "do you go and play tennis and make your friend feel bad or not'"

but rather "if you are serious about life, do you join the Communist Party or

the Catholic Church?" The same thing was true of Analytical Philosophers'

notions of story-telling. I mean, we tell stories desperately, in order to stay

alive, as Scheherazade says; if she can keep the Sultan's interest she

doesn't get her head cut off. And this is what happens in courts of law.

There have been studies on the effects of narrative in law courts, when

someone accused of a crime is defending themselves. It turns out that

juries recognise a good story as against a bad one, I mean an effective

story.M.M.: A story that makes sense.


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H.W.: So there is a lot of work that has been done on narrative, in

psychotherapy, in legal discourse and in fields such as Anthropology. This

makes narrative much more complicated than the British analytical

philosophers, Morton White and people like that, could even have

conceived of .

M.M.: Let's talk about the challenges historians face when reading your

work in terms of their concepts of truth. You are not only suggesting that

there isn't a formal distinction between fiction and history, but also that thisis something that reflects deeper similarities in their respective systems of

meaning production. Now, this has an impact ?n our concepts of historical

truth. How would you define this impact?

H.W.: In the first place not all historians want to write narratives. Some

historians are structuralist and they are interested in a description of a kind

of a steady state, or of structures. Sometimes they get their effects by

describing a social structure or a formation at one time and then leap ahead

a century and say "here is what it looked like a century later"- and they don't

try to narrativize the transition.

M.M.: They still have characters though. This unit, this structure they

describe, it becomes the hero of a potential narrative.

H.W.: That's right. That was just by way of preface. I really believe that ahistorical account of anything has to feature narrative. If you don't have a

narrative component I don't think it can qualify as a history, although it can

qualify as sociology and many other things... So narrative is very important.

Then the question arises concerning what notions of narrativity is the

historian bringing to bear upon his work. And then another question arises:

Are stories in the world or are they only in language? Louis Mink and I, he

was a close friend before he died, we argued that there are no stories in

real life. People may try to live their lives as if they were stories, but a story

is something that exists only in language or in visual representations. And

when you take a set of events and decide to say that its truth is revealed in

a story, I think there is an important moment of transition that many

historians are not aware of, because they think that if they just tell the factsthey will fall into a story form. You see, narrative appears to be a natural

way of speaking about the world. The story appears to be in the events.

Does this answer your question?

M.M.: Yes, more or less... However, if people live their lives trying to

interpret experiences, and if narrativity is pre-written, pre-textual, then it

already bridges experience with writing, doesn't it? It is already a basis for

referentiality.

H.W.: That is the argument of Ricoeur and David Carr and people like that,

i.e. that cultural encodation leads people to make sense of their lives by

trying to live them as if they were stories. Now, the question is where do

they get the notion of story? They must get it from fairy tales and fables and

things of this sort. But this is the Don Quixote problem! Don Quixote istrying to live in the chivalric tales. This is Bovarysme, Madame Bovary is

trying to live her life as if it were a novel. And it doesn't work. This is the

conviction of Cervantes and Flaubert. It doesn't work that way. And anyone

who tries to live their life as if they were recapitulating a story is going to get

into trouble. And a historian, for example, who tries to represent reality as if

it had the kind of coherence that the well-found, rounded story does, is

really lapsing into some kind of fictivism, fictionalism. I think that it is the

kind of thing that Walter Benjamin criticized, when he said we must get

away from the notion that we live in an epic, away from the model of the

epic in talking about History... Because the epic is not concerned with the

victims of social events. You know there are no poor people in Homer -

except the one Thersites. There are only heroes and beautiful goddesses.M.M: Well, you can have narratives with anti-heroes


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H.W.: You don't have anti-narrative however in the classic. That comes with

the novel. And that is what modernism does. Modernism de-narrativizes the

novel. You can't say that Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is a narrative, I

mean it doesn't have narrative form.

A.K.: Mostly in The Content of the Form you seriously questioned

narrative as a form of historical representation which imitates reality, thus

sharing with post-structuralism a distrust to major narratives, Enlightenment

politics e.t.c. And yet, you have always defended the cognitive role of narrative...

H.W.: The theoretical issue here has to do with whether narrative is a mode

of language use or whether it is a "genre" . You have narrative in many

different genres, so this suggests that it is a mode of organising reality, or

visions of reality that can appear in many different genres. For me, Levi

Strauss and structuralism teach this: There is no such thing as a form that

is not also a content. Every form, let's say the genre of the pastoral, or the

genre of the tragic drama, can be fiIIed with different contents. But you

mustn't confuse those contents with the contents of the genre itself, which

is already a kind of system of meaning-making. The genre provides you

with formulas for making meaning, and in your description of the characters

that are going to be in your story you can form them in such a way as tomake the story a tragic story, a comic story or whatever. But the point is that

the notion of the comic or of the tragic is already in the genre: The tragic

tale, the tragic form is already a cognitive content about the meaning of the

world. In the movies about the newspaper people they always say "Go and

find the story, go and get the story". No, you have to make the story, a story

has to be made. And you make it out of the materials, out of the facts. I

always teII my students that the events are not the facts and the facts are

not the meaning. That is to say, there are events; you can constitute them

as facts; then you ask what is the meaning of the facts; and that is when

you begin the work of emplotting and making stories.

A.K.: I see. However, it is stiII not absolutely clear to me what is your

theoretical position towards the post-structuralist critique of narrative as anideological instrument related to the model of the nineteenth century realist

novel. Narrative, according to Barthes, is part of what he caIIed a "myth'" a

buttress of the alienating fetishism of the real. I believe that in The Content

of Form you are much more aligned to this critique, whereas in Figural

Realism you are much more accepting towards narrative...

H.W.: WeII, yes, look, the structuralists, Braudel and the Annales group, felt

that narrative is itself ideological, that it's not a matter of a left socialist

realist novel, or a modernist novel, but that the whole problem is narrativity

(and that is where Barthes got the idea). They used against narrative the

same argument that Brecht used against the classic theatre, i.e. the epic

theatre: that the traditional theatre gives you a totaIIy false picture of the

world just in the process of creating these beautiful creatures and puttingthem in these scenes of high drama, or tragedy or what have you. They

mystify the world, they enchant the world rather than reveal it. Brecht's own

theatre was meant to draw attention to the ways in which it was creating

iIIusion, it tried to be a critique of iIIusion making. To be quite honest with

you, my opinion on that matter has sort of vaciIIated, so you are quite right

to pick that up. I think that modernist writing differs from pre-modernist

writing by virtue of the fact that when it teIIs a story it draws attention to the

fact that it's teIIing a story; it doesn't treat the story as something that is

natural, something that is in things; it draws attention to the artificiality, and

that seems to me to de-ideologize story-teIIing, or narrative. I don't think

there are stories in reality and I think that people who try to live as if they

are living in novels are in trouble; on the other hand people seem to neednarrative coherence, so you have to ask what is the basis of this need, you


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have to be open to it. It's like... Marx said religion is the opiate of the

masses, but then you have to ask why do people want this opiate?

M.M.: So ultimately you have to decide if people can live without narrative,

if it is possible to give up narrativity...

H.W.: But also, who am I to decide that? I mean... "You should not be

religious?"... Are you going to say that to someone whose life has been

given meaning by religion, and also has become a very nice person rather

than a mass-murderer because they believe in God?M.M.: Further than that, would you also say that The Content of Form of

the narrative, or rather the "referent" of its form, is the relationship between

past and present? I mean is that the hidden meaning of the "allegory" of the

narrative text?

H.W.: Of earliness and lateness, of temporality in other words... But you

can't say that cosmic time is organized narrativistically. And you can't even

say that in respect to earthly time... In fact we don't experience time; we

experience the change of the seasons, we experience aging, and narrativity

can give some sort of formal coherence to that experience. But this is

fabulizing rather than fictionalizing. The fable is a form somewhere

in-between fiction and fact.

M.M.: You have almost answered a question I meant to ask concerningPaul Ricoeur. I have always thought that your thought and the thought of

Ricoeur shared a significant amount of common ground. Yet, in Figural

Realism you appear to be opposed, even hostile to his views. What is

exactly the problem with Ricoeur's "metaphysics"? I mean, what is the

difference between your conception of narrative and his conception of an

"allegory of temporality"?

H.W.: He has a theory of the metaphysics of time, which I don't have. As I

said, I don't think we experience time, we experience various cultural

constructions of temporality. We don't experience temporality in watching a

clock, or even in watching the sun passing behind the hills during different

times of the day. What we see are changing patterns of relationships

between phenomena we are familiar with. These changing patterns we cancall temporal; but we are only interested in them in so far as they represent

processes of growth and degeneration...

M.M.: Then "growth" would be defined as one moment, and another

moment, and our imposition upon their relationship...

H.W.: Yes, but I wouldn't call it "temporality".

M.M.: You call it, "synecdoche"!

H.W.: No, I call it aging! You are only interested in time in so far as it is

having effects. Do you say that you age because time is passing? No, you

say that you age because there are bodily processes.

M.M.: Yes, but since I am the same person now that I have aged, as I was

before...

H.W.: Well, how do you know you are the same person? According to theChristian conception of conversion, you may look the same but you may be

a completely different pshyche. On the other hand, when you look at a

picture of yourself as a baby, it is not the same body...

M.M.: So, the existence of time is a matter of faith...

H.W.: Well, I wouldn't go that far because I don't have a metaphysics of

time... on the other hand there are different ways of thinking about how you

control temporality. For example, all these efforts to extend the life span by

genetic engineering, to find the aging gene, these are all efforts to save the

body, not to save time. You can't save time. Capitalism believes that time is

money. But time is not money; money is money.

M.M.: I wonder if your effort to keep the whole discussion about narrative

away from any sort of "metaphysics of temporality'" and to ground it firmlyon the level of language stems from a desire to keep this discussion open


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to social and ethical concerns, especially of a political sort.

H.W.: Well, I would say on the level of discourse rather than on the level of

language, because the study of language scientifically concentrates on

what Saussure called langue, rather than parole. Parole is where the notion

of discourse comes in, and this has to do with the experiences of different

cultures in the organization of both notions of meaning and experience. But

also, the point here is this: It is not Time that destroyed the Roman Empire,

although that is a poetic conceit. There were people doing so... but you canmetaphysicalize that process, I mean the shock of the decline of the Roman

Empire. Why does something so noble, which lasted so long, why does it

finally go under? And then you begin to melodramatize, it becomes the stuff

of an opera. But I don't think it is tragic that the Roman Empire declined and

fell, and it wasn't as if all the Romans died out and the Christians, the

middle-ages people came along... no, there were continuations in the lines

of descent of the people...

M.M.: So, to go back to Ricoeur, would you say that Ricoeur's conception of

history and of human experience in general is tragic, while yours is ironic?

H.W.: His is certainly tragic; and mine is ironic. On the other hand, he

comes out of Heidegger and he is concerned with the fact that we equate

the experience of time with death. You cannot escape death; therefore youcan't escape time; and philosophy is learning how to die well, it is learning

how to meet death, either courageously or with resignation... I have a

friend, an older woman, who says she is not worried about dying, she says

nature will take care of that. People who think they can avoid death should

join the Christian Church, because it promises them life atter death. I am

with Pascal on that. If it makes them bear the suffering of this world more

easily, then it's OK with me. Freud even took that view.

A.K.: Continuing from narrative to tropology, I would like to be devil's

advocate. In your earlier work, especially in Tropics of Discourse,

tropology appears to be not only a theory of discourse but also a theory of

consciousness, on the basis that "consciousness is apprehendable in

discourse". However in Figural Realism you suggest that "Tropology is atheory of discourse not of mind of consciousness'" and that "tropology has

much to say about discourse but nothing about perception". I remember a

passage from Tropics where the difference between Michelet and

Tocqueville "resides in the tropological mode which each brought to his

apprehension of the facts as they appeared in the documents". Can we talk

about a "cognitive rhetoric" as Stephen Bann has suggested?

H.W.: Yes, I think you can. You were talking about my relationship to

Ricoeur. Well, there are two things that Ricoeur claims he learned from me.

One was the notion of emplotment. The other was the theory of tropology,

which he sees as the only alternative to trying to set up a logic for talking

about the differences between different levels of temporal experience. A

tropology is necessary for talking about those aspects of reality that can't betalked about except in logical contradiction. By any sort of Western, critical

rational thinking, if someone asserts the positive and the negative of the

same predication, this is considered a contradiction, an inconsistency, a

failing. In rhetoric a contradiction can be called a paradox, and a paradox is

treated as a thing of beauty, not as a failure. So, tropology talks about the

way we try to live our lives and make sense of the world; lives which are

contradictory existentially and, therefore, are going to be described in

contradiction cognitively. Tropology is a way of thinking about paralogical

discourse - and even Aristotle recognizes this in the Rhetoric. The

enthymeme is the basic unit of the rhetorical performance and it is treated

as error or as incomplete syllogism by the logicians... But in rhetoric it is

treated as a necessary device for persuasion. Now modern rhetorics is notinterested in rhetoric as persuasion. It is interested in rhetoric as a theory of


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language use, and a theory of the way in which by language you impose

meaning on the world, and upon yourself etc. So, if tropology is the basis of

composition (dispositio,inventio), then you need a theory of the tropes, the

figures of speech, in order to talk about how meaning can be imposed even

in the face of what appears to be logical contradiction in what you say about

the world. Hegel's dialecticallogic was meant to take account of the fact that

you can't say, without existential inconsistency, "I love you; I hate you".

There seems to be a contradiction. But only in logic; not in Iife. A.K.: In this tropological schema you have introduced, is the replacement

of logic with rhetoric connected with the liberation from what you call "the

burden of history'" through the rhetorical - discursive selection of a

tradition?

H.W.: I don't know, I suppose so, I am not sure. Could you amplify a bit

more on the question?

A.K.: Well, is it Iighter for people to manage through rhetoric, to choose

their past?

H.W.: I see what you mean. Really, this is a kind of an existentialist idea,

that meaning is always imposed... there is no meaning in the world. There

is no meaning in this flower! There is no meaning in this table!

M.M.: Well, if you really believe this, isn't this already a sort of meaning?H.W.: No, what you are saying is that you can find meaning, and you can

do it in many different ways, for example by finding pattern - this is the most

primitive form... Astrology is based upon the idea that there are patterns in

the constellations. Wherever you see pattern, you can apprehend meaning.

Now, in a complex field of perception, the pattern isn't given. The

description can impose pattern upon it. The trope of ekphrasis, the genre of

the ekphrasis, descriptio provides a way of thinking about how you describe

the world in such a way as to make it apprehendable. You describe a world

and then that allows you to treat it as an object of analysis. But the

description has to precede the analysis, and the description has to be done

as figuration, unless you are using a purely quantitative language -

mathematics.M.M.: Yet, if the only thing you have to fall back on is these figures and if

these are linguistic figures, then how can you avoid ending up with some

sort of linguistic determinism?

H.W.: Because the world of figuration is very rich. It offers infinite

possibilities of combination, of techniques of description. And it is constantly

being expanded, it is not a limited array; it features invention. So I don't see

it as limiting. Theories of tropology try to reduce the tropes to two, four,

sixteen, but I believe what is important is the richness of our capacities for

figuration... You see it is like Freud's problem of why do you fall in love with

this woman rather than with all women.

M.M.: Choice?

H.W.: No, it is not a choice. You don't choose to fall in love!... Unless youare a very conniving woman...I've known girls who have actually said "I

think I'm going to have a love affair, I think I'll fall in love this summer"- this

seems to me very calculating. But, I'm talking about passionate attachment,

and Freud raises the question: There are five women in my circle equally

beautiful by any criteria you would say, quantitative or qualitative- they can

fall into stereotypes perhaps of beauty and so forth, but I fall in love with

this one. Why? It has something to do with the relationship between

passion, the emotions and figuration: I see in this woman something I don't

see in the others, and this something is a projection perhaps of infantile

fixations, who knows what? But the result is that I apprehend the world as

figures and stereotypes... I saw a crowd of people outside my hotel this

morning, and thought "this is a demonstration, I will go and see what'shappening". Because you told me there was going to be a demonstration...


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It turns out they are just a bunch of students, waiting for the bus! I had

already projected it on to them. And of course, when I found out it was not a

demonstration, then I thought "the truth is...". That is the reality effect. I

think it is Proust who says that the truth effect has to do not only with

perceiving something as it really is, but also with getting rid of an error.

M.M.: So, you need an error in order to construct a truth.

A.K.: Shall we bring the discussion back to the question of irony? Although

you acknowledge yourself as an ironist, and although the whole conceptionof tropology is ironic, unlike other critics, you avoid recognizing irony as a

master trope. Is it because you want to maintain a synchronical view of

tropology escaping the danger of creating a closed determinist discourse?

This is actually Kellner's view, but I agree with him.

H.W.: Yes I would say so, this is very well put. I haven't thought of putting it

that way. Vico has the idea that irony is merely one of a number in a cycle,

that irony always collapses in upon itself. Vico has the idea that irony is not

a priviledged trope, but many modernists of course believe that irony is the

basis...

A.K.: Hans Kellner, Stephen Bann...

H.W.: Oh, everyone. Ever since Romantic irony was discovered literature is

seen as being launched from within an ironic perception. Because ironyseems to be the most self-critical of all the tropes, inherently self-critical,

inherently dialectic. And it may well be. But in point of fact the organism, the

human organism, resists irony. The passions are not ironic. Irony is too

inteIIectualist. It is necessary as a component, to be sure, to liberate us

from our own iIIusions; but it can't serve the needs of the human organism,

and this is what we have won our knowledge for.

M.M.: What then about the particular consequences of an ironic perception

for history as a kind of knowledge? With Metahistory the historian's

discipline reaches its ironic moment, since the historian becomes aware of

the problems involved in his own particular language... In fact, anyone who

tries to incorporate this sort of thinking into their work and stiII remain an

historian faces these problems.H.W.: Yes, and there is a lot of autobiographical element involved here in so

far as I began as a sociaI scientist doing history. I was inspired by Max

Weber and my work in medieval history was meant to apply Weberian

concepts to problems of church leadership. But what I discovered was that I

was naive in thinking that any given set of concepts could give one a kind of

firm, definitive grasp of this past reality. EspeciaIIy because it was past, and

therefore no longer observable. Secondly because of the problems of

evidence. But also thirdly because of the fact that we go to the past out of

motives of desire and need, if we go to it at aII. Many young people don't

see any interest in that. Some theorists beIieve the same. But it is one thing

to say I am not going to do history, and it is another thing to say I wiII not go

to the past. You can not avoid being interested in the past.M.M.: Another probIem here concerns the relationship between an ironic

perspective on history and praxis, especiaIIy political praxis. How can we

stiII act - rather than just think- from within an ironic perspective in history?

H.W.: Again, this is existentialist. You regard especiaIIy politics as an acte

gratuit, gratuitous action. I think that this is consistent with this late stage of

modernization in which politics has been revealed to be nothing but an

epiphenomenon of economic forces, capitalist modes of production and so

forth. It is not as if politics or the political state has succeeded in being able

to set any restrictions on the deveIopment of capitalism. In the cases where

they tried they failed. So politics becomes now nothing but spectacle in my

view. It's not true in every state of course -there are real political issues- but

(in) politics understood as community making; everyone knows now thatsociaI forces are more comprehensive, they are more global. Economic


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factors determine the possibilities of making communities, not some

poIitical vision.

M.M.: Maybe we are not looking at the appropriate level of political unit, but

things are stiII happening because people are doing them, to say that it's

merely economic factors...

H.W.: I think you can be ironic inteIIectuaIIy and stiII believe in sociaI

construction, stiII believe in the effort to create communities. It is only the

epic conception of politics that sees irony as making it impossible to dopoIitics. It is Iike you have to be some Gandhi, or Stalin, or Lenin in order to

do politics. I don't think we need that kind of passion. PoIitics can no longer

be conceived as it was empiricaIIy in Athens, where the state or the

community is made by great leaders, strategoi, generals and statesmen.

Therefore irony is healthy, it is the equivalent of skepticism and it is

absolutely necessary for seeing through the ideological. I think irony is

humanizing, it should make people more humane, but there is a kind of

malicious irony of course that destroys.

M.M.: Sarcasm.

H.W.: Yes. And that is not what I am talking about. Irony is a kind of

seIf-consciousness as I understand it. I don't think it's against politics as

community making. I think it's a good antidote to the wrong kind of politics. Idon't know how many fascists or nazis were ironic. I suspect not many.

M.M.: Thinking of nazism... Throughout your work there is an obvious

concern to relate what may be called a crisis of historical representation

with the kind of events that are peculiar to our own, twentieth century

historical experience. These events you describe as "modernist events'"

What is a "modernist event" and what are the limits that it poses on

representation?

H.W.: I think that these events are of a different scope, range and intensity

from anything that was imaginable before the second industrial revolution -

the invention of electricity, of the steam engine. It has to do with the fact that

the number of people who have died of violent deaths, who have been put

to death by their own governments, is over ninety million this century. Andthis is a very difficult fact to grasp. The Great Leap Forwards, the CuItural

Revolution: thirty million Chinese killed. Stalinism... But these are just

poIitical crimes. The destruction of the environment, warfare with atomic

weapons, new kinds of diseases caused by industrialization, new illnesses.

All these are what I call modernist events because they don't lend

themselves to either analysis, or explanation by the inherited conventions of

narrativization.

M.M.: There is no plot to emplot them in.

H.W.: Yes there is no plot because it is very difficult to attribute agency. Plot

requires agency, narrative requires agency and this has been so since

Aristotle defined tragedy as mimesis of an action, of a praxis, pragmata. By

pragmata Aristotle meant the actions of great men. I don't think we havetime for heroism anymore. So first we get rid of traditionaI kinds of narrative

that are going to try to grasp the events. That is what I meant by a

modernist event. But it seems to me that modernism, in Iiterature, in writing,

in film, even in painting and architecture, responds to these new kinds of

events in a way that an older realist tradition couldn't.

A.K.: Yes... In your recent work you seek for a solution to the problem of

historical representation by opting for a modernist anti-narrative transition in

historiography, similar to the transition from Iiterary realism to literary

modernism. Do you believe that this modernist writing is a form of

representation appropriate to traumatic historical experiences, to

"anomalous" events?

H.W.: Yes, I think so. When you take the traditional realist novel, Balzac, or Oickens, the kinds of problems that he is dealing wjth may be painful and


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may arouse our sympathy, and we may be able to identify with the people.

But for example it is very difficult, it is virtually impossible for me to identify

with these pilots that were flying these flights over Kossovo at fifteen

thousand feet in order to drop these electronic bombs - they seem like

aliens to me. The CIA, they seem like monsters to me. I can't identify them

with the traditional spy of the nineteenth or early twentieth century, or

James Bond, or someone like that. They seem utterly inhuman, alien. The

same thing is true for people like Stalin, or Mao for that matter, Hitler...These people do not fall within the categories that I recognize as defining

the human.

M.M.: That may have been their appeal.

H.W.: It may very weII be, but you see modernist art can deal with the

monstrosity in the normal. One of the things people say about both Hitler

and Stalin is that they were very banal men. But you get tremendous evil in

the most banal people... How can you deal with that? Someone like Virginia

Wolf can do it, showing among other things the inadequacy of ordinary,

everyday language to represent those kinds of people, those kinds of

events. So I think that what is often taken as experimental writing, is

experiments in order to find modes of expression that wiII aIIow language to

fix our attention on utterIy new phenomena. Now, a historian must believethat new phenomena occur in every present. This is what makes a present

different from a past. Why would you not also believe it possible that, at

some points, new phenomena appear that are utterly unexpected? For

example, when I see these experiments in genetic engineering - there is a

whole new kind of monstrosity being born; or the penitentiary system

throughout the world - we have over two miIIion people in prison in the

United States. Two miIIion people locked up! And 60 or 70% are black,

coloured...

A.K: Does this lead to the complete abandonment of narrative and

tropology?

H.W.: WeII, of conventional narrative, yes. There is a misunderstanding

possibly about narrative. A friend of mine, a historian, said, "weII you saidthat Burckhardt doesn't give us a narrative. But he is narrating aII the time!"

I said, "yes, but he is not organizing the history of Europe in a narrative

form, he doesn't narrativize it." Narrare means to speak and to know in

Latin. But to narrativize is to organize phenomena aIong a temporal

diachronic line and by their organization to suggest a meaning.

M.M.: In your essay on the modernist event in Figural Realism I was also

very impressed with the idea of the documentary breaking down the event

to the point that it makes no sense anymore. It reminded me of the idea of

the ideal chronicler of Arthur Danto. It made me think that the problems with

which a few theorists of history had been dealing with have become reaIIy

visible today and that this makes it more urgent to re-access what is going

on with history.H.W.: I cited the documentary because it used to be thought that if you

could get down to the microscopic depiction of events, you could see what

they aII added up to. What documentary film shows you is that if you slow it

down, if you freeze a frame, if you do a close-up, this destroys meaning, it

doesn't enhance meaning. What happened in this case of Rodney King is

they showed the jury this film of his beating so many times that they

couldn't register it anymore. And that is very interesting isn't it, that

repetition up to a certain point gives the effect of traducing meaning,

whereas if you keep on doing it, it loses aII meaning. And the document is

absolutely crucial of course to historians. History is based upon

documentary record.

M.M.: But also on retrospective vision which is not there in the videodocumentary.


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H.W.: Also retrospective vision, that's true, but you have to do it by way of

the documents, you get to the past by way of the documents.

A.K.: Do you consider literary and cultural modernism, especially high

modernism, as a part of the critique to modernity and if this is so, couldn't

literary modernism be seen as a part, or a forerunner of postmodernism?

H.W.: I understand postmodernism in two senses. One, in the sense that

Habermas and people like that use it, as an attack upon the program of

modernization. But I am concerned with post-modernism as a culturalphenomenon, as something that does critique the modernist project, but at

the same time criticizes the earlier generation of modernist writers, artists

and so forth. Frederic Jameson, who writes best on this, increasingly

suggests that we use not postmodernism but late modernism, to show the

continuities between a modernist such as Brecht, and a post-modernist

such as David Mammet in the theatre, or a modernist such as Gertrude

Stein and a post-modernist such as Woody Allen. So he is suggesting that

there are continuities, and that the relationship of post-modernism to

modernism is a dialectical one, that it is a negative reaction to earlier forms

of modernism. He makes the distinction by saying that the difference

between modernism and post-modernism is the difference between parody

and pastiche. That is interesting because it suggests that postmodemism,in the arts, in literature, etc is much more improvisational, much more

bricolage, much less programmatic, much less anxious than the great

modernists were about the past. Ezra Pound, Joyce, T.S Elliot were

concerned about the loss of tradition. They thought they were living in a

time when they could no longer have the resources of tradition at hand, so

they had to re-invent. Postmodernists don't care.

M.M.: That would be similar to the difference between suffering from the

lack of God, and accepting there is no God.

H.W.: That's right. It's Iike suffering from the lack of God, and then another

generation grows up who doesn't care.

M.M.: But then that goes back to the romantics really.

H.W.: Well, yes but I think that romanticist modernism is quite different fromits enlightenment, rationalist version; after all, romanticism is already a

reaction to the enlightenment.

M.M.: So romanticism is like a figura that finds its fulfillment in the

modernist and post-modernist critique of modernity...

H.W.: Yes. But I think it is very good of you to say it is like someone is

suffering from the lack of God, and then another generation grows up who

doesn't care. There is no experience of angst in postmodernism.

A.K: WouId you see postmodernism as a study of how we historicize

modernity, as a way of how History is embedded in relations of power, and

if so, do you think that the discursive turn constitutes one of the

components of postmodernism?

H.W.: Yes. And a good question to ask here is, "Is postmodernismpost-discursive?" I think it is. And I think it can be seen in the interest that

post-modernists have in discontinuous forms, in the fragment, which it

shares with modernism, but, as ?I say, it doesn't have angst. 'All we have is

fragments. So what?" It's like that building over there - just throw together

anything...

M.M.: It's Iike a pile, rather than a building, it's like debris...

H.W.: Yes, debris is a good way of thinking about it. And incidentaIIy, a

proposito from history, there is a kind of postmodernist archaeology being

practiced now, and art restoration and museum organization are quite

different, from even the great modernist enterprise. Many postmodernist

artists are against the museum, they are against the gaIIery space. They

want their work to be in an informaI space. A.K.: That reminds me of Stephen Bann writing about the "ironic museum".


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H.W.: Yes, that's right. There are a number already founded! There is one

caIIed the museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. It looks like a

museum, but everything is a fake. This is part of the postmodernist

ideology, you can't make a distinction between the original and the fake

anymore. The fake has as much artistic integrity as the originaI, or the

reproduction. You can have a aesthetics or a reproduction, an aesthetics

which is centered upon photographic reproduction of the work of art. Now

that's aII different from literary modernism, which stiII has a notion of authenticity. Postmodernism doesn't have that.

A.K.: Jameson and Eagleton reproach postmodernism for this.

H.W.: That's right, these are aII old fashioned guys, old fashioned Marxists.

I mean, Marxism believes in authenticity too, doesn't it?

A.K.: Eagleton says that postmodernism took the form of modernism and

emptied it of its content...

H.W.: WeII, because there is no politics.

A.K.: In your article on Jameson, you argue that politics conceived in its

19th century parliamentary incarnations is valid no more.

H.W.: You see, Jameson does not believe that, he thinks that poIitics is stiII

possible. He has to believe that because he has to beIieve that we can stir

or guide society towards the RevoIution. I don't agree with him. I am tooironic to believe in Revolution.

A.K.: You mention him often in your work... in acknowIedgements and

elsewhere.

H.W.: Yes, Jameson is a close friend. Oh, I enjoy it. I learn from Jameson. I

think he is one of the most briIIiant writers, critics. Very difficult to

comprehend, very difficult style, but he is certaintiy one of the most

energetic and inventive cultural historians. I mean he writes on everything.

On film, the third-world film, he has written a book on Brecht that just came

out last year, before that he had a book on Adorno, he just works

continuously and he is much more original than Eagleton in my view.

A.K.: His book on postmodernism, as the cultural logic of late capitalism

has recently been translated in Greek.H.W.: Oh, that's the leading book. Anyone who works on postmodernism

has to deal with that book, and he has many interesting things to say about

post-modernism, in anything from museums, design, postmodernist

economics, postmodernist Marxism.

A.K.: Especially Marxists around the New Left Review are very scornful

with regard to what they call post-Marxism.

H.W.: But both Eagleton and Jameson, they are the ones that represent the

remainder of Marxist criticism in the English speaking world. Jameson is

keeping it alive just by himself in America.

M.M.: He is a hero!

H.W.: Yes, he is really a kind of epic intellectual because he lives the

intellectual life. And that means he does nothing but think these days. A.K.: Let's think of the political dimensions of the academic debates on

postmodernism. Patrick Joyce says that the radical assault of

postmodernism towards logo-centric history provoked a reaction of the

conservative academic community and Gertrude Himmelfarb has accused

you of "producing an anarchic view of history". Do you think that the distrust

towards its plans is due to political reasons?

H.W.: Of course, because it is true. Postmodernism does have a kind of

anarchist strain, so what? Anarchism is against the state. I am against the

state. I think that nowadays more problems are caused by the state than

are solved by the state in world politics, so I am inclined to be sympathetic

to any anarchist. But of course people like Gertrude Himmelfarb, she is the

spokesperson for the right wing, for the conservatives, in the United Statesand she doesn't like it. And no Marxist would like it, even though Marxism is


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supposed to be against the state too.

A.K.: Patrick Joyce says that it seems there is a coalition between the New

Right and the Old New Left.

H.W.: I think this is true. But this is exactly like what happened in the thirties

when there was a coalition between the Right and the Stalinists against the

liberals. Liberal politics, liberal ideology seems to promote a kind of anarchy

of the market place, so you get Stalinists and conservatives ganging up on

the liberals. I think that is true. But was Patrick Joyce defending thepostmodernists?

A.K.: Yes. And he also speaks about a version of postmodernism "tamed"

and appropriated by the system. Multiculturalism, for example, as a

component of it may become harmless and sanitized, a part of the ruling

system.

H.W.: I understand, but this happens in what Adorno calls the culture

industry, with every movement. It gets very quickly processed. This is what

electronic reproduction can do. Anything new on the social or cultural

horizon, or on the political horizon for that matter, very quickly becomes a

basis for designer jeans - clothing. Benetton, for example, is the perfect

example of political leftism and high-fashion marketing. So I don't know how

any political movement, or intellectual movement, or culturaI movementcould protect itseIf from that. I think that what it has to do is expropriate the

media. But that is difficult because the media is not like you can get on a

street corner and give a speech. Taking over a television station takes a lot

of money.

M.M.: Ah, that's what you mean by taking over. Because I kept thinking

what is the difference between what you were saying and what is

happening with Benetton... It is a matter of who controIs the process, I

guess.

H.W.: Yes. Joyce thinks what happens with postmodernism is that it

becomes commodified, and then they seII it. But so is true of Marxism, so is

true of liberaIism.

A.K.: He stiII beIieves that there is a very wild side which we must exploit.H.W.: WeII, I think he is right, everything from Andy Warhol on…You know

modernism is always a favorite of politics of the left, even though the left,

the Stalinist left rejected modernism.

A.K.: Thinking about "tamed" movements.. Richard Rorty in his recent

work, Achieving our Country: Leftist thought in 20th Century America

argues that multiculturalism disoriented the inteIIectuals from sociaI and

political issues. Does he speak about "tamed" multiculturalism, is his

argument in this book a turn towards the traditional left? I can't see where it

points too

H.W.: WeII, that book by Rorty is about how the left has Iost its direction,

and how it failed because people in the United States thought the left was

unpatriotic, thought it was anti-American. Then he taIks aboutmulticuIturalism as a sort of feel-good politics, a sort of politics that makes

you feel good if you have, say, a black friend, or an Albanian friend… But

he doesn't think that it has much poIiticaI clout. It is quite different from a

coalition of different interest groups. But Achieving our Country is a very

interesting text... Rorty's parents were very prominent communists and he

grew up in a kind of communist atmosphere through the fifties. He has

always been a Marxist. In the United States Marxism and pragmatism have

always been very close, that's what distinguishes us from the philosophical

Marxism of the European Continent. Rorty feels that the failure of the left

had to do with its internationalism, that it frightened people by suggesting

that the left would be international, cosmopolitan. He sees multiculturalism

as another version of this, he thinks that then you lose a sense of nationalidentity.


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A.K.: Does he suggest that the left should be patriotic? Because his

previous work in philosophy is much more interesting. He used to opt for

antirepresentationalism, for a "postmodernist bourgeois liberaIism" as he

caIIs it. Is his recent work something like a conservative turn?

H.W.: He says that it is pragmatic. He asks questions Iike what does the

Left have to do in order to rebuild itself. For example, he criticized the

women's movement for a simiIar kind of divisiveness. He argues that we

must Iook for soIidarity, and there is something to what he says... Hebelieves that many of these movements are self-aggrandizing, they don't

reaIIy demonstrate an interest in the community at large, but only for a

narrow range... But he also believes the United States has the possibiIity of

being a leader in the formation of the modernist communities because of its

weaIth. He says it couId afford a social state. And it could.

M.M.: WeII, before we close this discussion... You have talked a lot

yesterday in your lecture about WaIter Benjamin's writings. I meant to ask

you a question about Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History ,

and especially about the image of the Angel of History wanting to go back

and redeem the dead... But you seem more interested in other aspects of

Benjamin's work...

H.W.: I think that those Theses on the Philosophy of History are inflated.If you start trying to unpack a figure Iike the AngeI of History into its

concepts - start asking why the Angel is going backward rather than going

forward - then you allegorize, and what Benjamin is against is

allegorization. Allegorization is a sign of sickness and of "flight from...". But

since whatever we know about the past is a construction, this means that

you can remake the past. Yet you can't remake it by using the conventional

devices of historical analysis and representation, you can't remake it that

way. That's why he argues that you must feature images rather than stories,

that you must feature fragments rather than totalities, that you do not tell

stories but you comment; you can cite; you can make up a whole history of

nothing but quotations. And there are a number of other features that he

recommends about how you destroy the myth, or illusion of continuity. Hesays continuity is the real catastrophe, not the break. Discontinuous

history? Maybe some of the work of some of these micro-historians wouId

be an example... But what is crucial for him is the idea of the diaIectical

image. The dialectical image is a paradox. A paradoxical image would be

that of the free slave, or a manly woman - the dialectical image is a

contradiction in terms. This is what Iicenses someone like lesbian theorists

to re-think history, to re-think literature. Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler in my

country. These people in re-thinking gender they are reversing and inverting

all the common pIaces that lead to a telling of a story about history that

continues to promote the subordination of women to men.

M.M.: But it is Iike saying there is a continuum, Iike saying everything is

connected diaIectically, so if you change one thing, the whole thing goesupside down, which is quite deterministic as well...

H.W.: Not quite... Because Benjamin uses the idea of fulfillment also.

Fulfillment has to do with someone in the present choosing something in

the past and fulfilling it by that choice in the present.

M.M.: Fulfilling it by choosing it. The choice itself is the fuIfillment.

H.W.: That's right. Fulfillment is not something that is teIeological, that goes

on by itself...

M.M.: It is an inversion of teleology, really.

H.W.: It's a rev?ersaI.

M.M.: I actually find this figure-fulfillment relationship very useful for the

analysis of all sorts of discourses that invoIve historical reference, Iike

nationaIist discourse for exampIe.H.W.: You can say that nationaIist discourse in one sense is fictitious but in


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another sense it is real...

M.M.: It becomes reaI because people decide it is reaI... But this notion of

figuraI causation features very prominently in your recent work. It seems

that this figure-fuIfillment schema answers a Iong-standing intellectuaI

quest of yours concerning temporaIity, the relationship between past and

present... I mean, it allows for a kind of structure, but with choice.

H.W.: Yes that's right. Like Jameson, my formation was in existentialism. As

a young man I was compIeteIy swept into the Jean Paul Sartre worId andNietzsche.

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”Historein- A Review of the Past & Other Stories”

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