Gamera

No it wouldn't. If the sun didn't rise it meant the earth didn't spin, and if the earth didn't spin that day, the world would have ended under physical laws. Thus emperical evidence tells us the sun rose ten years ago. I don't need a text to tell me that.

In contrast, I need a text to tell me that Socrates existed. His existence is not a scientific datum subject to physical laws.
Archeology as to the historicity of persons is almost always a question of texts embedded in the archeology (i.e., numismatics, plaques, tombs with inscriptions, etc.). Without the textuality of archeology, it can't tell us about the historicity of persons.

Knownothingism is not a virtue. PM offers insight into what we mean by historicity, which naive historiography has traditionally overlooked. No modern history is undertaken with any credibility without PM as a backdrop.

All I can say is that if you think PM is an attempt to save Marxism (a modernist ideology that is the brunt of much PM writing), you haven't read any significant PM works. I suggest you start with Foucault's The Order of Things (or via: amazon.co.uk) and see what he says about Marxism.

Gamera

Ironically this is so.

Gamera

No gurugeorge, it's not. PM developed the major critique of modernist theories such as Freudianism and Marxism, with their grand narratives of history.

You seem to not understand the distinction between modernism and post-modernism.

Gamera

This would certainly come as a shock to Foucault. I can't think of a grander more ambitious narrative than the one historical Christianity made out of the gospel story. And if PM is anything, it is in the business in exposing the contradictions of grand narratives.

gstafleu

But aren't Dali's paintings a comment on the state of mind that results from modernism--as opposed to an attempt to invalidate it?

Gerard Stafleu

Clivedurdle

No, he took an idea from a 13th century monk, used hollywood film techniques and created another christ for the space age, in a long tradition of imagined christs - including the first one - and what is allegedly post modern and surreal is that it isn't, it is from an ancient tradition using a modern setting.

I need to introduce another Foucault, This one has a pendulum (or via: amazon.co.uk) and a bloke called Umberto Eco wrote about him!

DCHindley

Some while ago (Jan 27, 2001!) I made these comments on the evil Crosstalk2 list about historical methodology, based mainly on a book by Alun Munslow (_Deconstructing History_, Routledge, 1997), which might be OK to reproduce here.

Those who make heavy use of social models to construct a plausible story to explain data (such as Marx) Munslow labels "Constructionists." But to understand them, first we have to take a look at the standard bearers of modern historical investigation.

Munslow contrasts Constructionists to "Reconstructionists," that is, traditional historians, who are more concerned to lay out a "simple descriptive narrative of discreet and singular events" (pg 22). In its extreme form, conservative reconstructionists like G. R. Elton, believe that "the most valuable aspects of the historian's work is the 'rational, independent and impartial investigation' of the documents of the past" (pg 20, this quote from Munslow contains a quote from Elton's _Return to Essentials_, 1991). These more or less accept the "Western tradition of history-writing ... built on the correspondence theory of empiricism firmly rooted in the belief that truthful meaning can be directly inferred from the primary sources" (pg 20). This is, essentially, Modernism as manifested among historians.

The 20th century introduction of post-modern ideas concerning the relative nature of language and its impact on our interpretation of historical data has triggered a debate "over whether we can ever have a genuine knowledge of the real past" (pg 20). "Conservative reconstructionist historians are ill at ease with importing the discipline of philosophy ... into their practice" (pg 21) and hence reject the philosophy and methods of post-modern influenced historians. Elton, for instance, "rejects ... a range of ... theories derived from the social sciences which, he claims, tend 'to arrive at their results by setting up a theoretical model which they then profess to validate or disprove by an "experimental" application of factual detail' (pg 21)." In other words, he suspects that they set up theories and hypotheses in a way that analysis will invariably "validate" the preconceived notions of the historians.

To Munslow, constructionism (mentioned above) is "essentially a sub-species of reconstructionism" (pg 22). He notes that "[m]ost historians today feel that they cannot 'do' history without actively thinking about their role in the process of deriving historical knowledge ..." (pg 20). "The great complexity and variety of constructionism today results from the fact that most historians range themselves around the methodological point at which constructionism branches from reconstructionism" (pg 22).

To early constructionists such as Karl Marx, Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, "history can explain the past only when the evidence is placed within a pre-existing explanatory framework that allows for the calculation of general rules of human action. These general rules are revealed in patterns of behaviour, and singular events are seen as part of a discernible pattern" (pg 22). Still, "[a]s a result of the branching process, the close of the twentieth century has seen an ever-greater variety of ways in which reconstructionism (narrative single event history) and social theory constructionism can be combined" (pg 22-23). An example of this might be "cultural Marxism" as represented by the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, who is a self styled empiricist. Crossan, I note, makes heavy use of John H. Kautsky in the construction of his social model, an author heavily indebted to his grandfather, the Marxist historian Karl Kautsky.

Now if we say in our defense that "the historian saturated in the sources is well equipped to formulate hypotheses that can be verified through future siftings of the evidence" (and this probably describes a large number of biblical critics perception of their own approach) then we must temper that with the realization that this is also the approach of a "hard-headed Marxist" constructionist like Alex Callinicos (pg 108). The point I am trying to make is that we may think we are employing a sound methodology, but we are coming up with widely diverging social explanations for the same historical events. If this is the case then what are we to think of our supposed impartial objectivity? Deconstructionist historians have been attacking this problem from the other end. "Since the 1970s, cultural historians using psychological, cultural and anthropological models of cultural analysis have blurred and blended imperceptibly into the structuralist, post-structuralist and linguistic-inspired analysis of the poetics of culture using the textual metaphor" (pg 111).

Munslow says "[t]he constructionist notion of social theory providing facts that reproduce the reality of historical life is now revised to offer access to the *possible* rather than the *real* nature of society. This can be achieved at least as equally well by viewing society [and by extension the historical data about societies] as a text in which events are presented as a complex series of discursive representations, metaphors, symbols, icons, signs and rituals. It is not very much of an insight to say that emplotment [which is what deconstructionists say historians do with historical data, in effect creating a story out of it] is part of a mix of pre-figuration, social theory, ideological positioning and empirical investigation" (pg 111, emphasis in original).

In retrospect, I think that Marx falls into a group of like minded constructionist historians, not that liberal historians felt better about themselves (or whatever) by supporting his brand of constructionism (history mixed with social theory).

DCH

Gamera

As Hayden White points out in "The Content of the Form," narrative itself has content, a way of knowing. Thus since western historiography is narrative in form (it doesn't have to be but it took that road and that's what we now mean by "history"), it cames packaged with a certain form of knowing. In that sense, it is not empirical and never can be. The narrative itself determines the nature of the reality purportedly uncovered.

So when we discuss the historicity of Jesus or Socrates or any other historical person, we are always talking at least in part not about reality, but about a way of approaching a particular categoy of texts that make up history for us.

DCHindley

Could you cite the essay(s) in _The Content of the Form_ (1987) in which this sort of thing is stated by White? I've got a thing for Hayden White (as I'll hazard a guess you may already have known), but I never get the sense that he doesn't value or appreciate empirical evidence just because a narrative makes use of tropes, plots, and argumentative strategy to make it comprehensible, or because it also reflects the ideology of the author. Isn't this a little like not seeing the forest for the trees?

DCH

gurugeorge

Really? Not subject to biological and physical laws? Do you really want to say that?

It can tell us about what they ate, how they built their buildings, how they farmed, husbanded animals. That's quite a lot that's not textual, and indeed how we interpret texts, how we interpret how people thought in the past, can be strongly influenced by such mundane findings. (As Nietzsche predicted of the sciences of his then-future.)

I'm sure there are interesting insights. I used to enjoy reading Foucault, Lacan and Derrida, for instance, but really they are sui generis, not to be imitated, and certainly not to be imitated badly - in the manner of "chinese whispers", what they do degenerates in imitation, as it's taught in universities. The originals are pretty good, but umpteenth-hand copies are dreadful, truly dreadful.

Of course it's not an attempt to save Marxism, I agree that it acknowledges Marxism as a failure. It's an attempt to justify being able to carry on Marxist-style theorising as if it were just "business as usual". IMNSHO everything in Postmodernism takes its departure from the 1844 manuscripts (which are more like prophetic, poetic writings than science - quite inspiring in a way, but not much to do with fact, more to do with deep, tidal wishes). IIRC the birth of Postmodernism even coincides with the "rediscovery" of those documents.