Between Disciplinization and De-disciplinization: A Foucaultian White
Should we accept, as is, that differentiation between the main types of discourse, or between forms or genres, which sets science, literature, philosophy, religion, history, fiction, etc. against each other, turning each into some great historical individuality? We ourselves are not sure of the usage of these distinctions in our own discursive environment; let alone when it comes to analyzing sets of statements which, at the time of their initial formulation, were grouped, classified and typified along quite different lines.
—Michael Foucault, L'archéologie du savoir (1969)[1]
I．Introduction
In 1980, Hans Keller, a student of Hayden White, stated that “Polytropos seems an apt characterization of Hayden White, and polytropic of his book Metahistory (MH) (Keller 1980, 1). Then in an interview with Ewa Domanska, he pointed out that “for all of (his) fascination with Foucault, White was in no way part of the death of man, the death of the author, the death of the reader, this sort of postmodern world of subjects as simply colliding functions. He doesn’t want to live in that world. And this is why I related him back to Sartre, to existentialism, and above all to the question of choice” (Domanska 1998, 53). What he mentioned, here, is his own article—“A Bedrock of Order,” in which he defined White as an existential humanist, and discussed his linguistic humanism (Kellner 1980, esp. 17, 29). In helping us to figure out White’s inner world, I appreciate Kellner’s efforts, especially his existential humanist approach. However, I am still a little perplexed, now that Kellner admitted White’s characterization as “polytropos,” and his MH as “polytropic,” why White’s image was so simple, and just as an existential humanist in his article?
As far as I am concerned, his interpretation only touched one part of the elephant rather than the whole body. As a result, when he obtained some ideas from his approach, he also missed some other important ideas of White’s. Take White in the 1950s as an example, recent study tells us that, at that time, he was a totally Weberian medievalist (Paul 2008). Moreover, Megill’s study tells us that White himself is also a “rhetorical dialectician” (Megill 2008).[1] It seems that even scholars, like Kellner, who was educated by White, in emphasizing one point may still lose other key points that are key to help us to understand White’s work and ideas. Therefore, before we approach to him, and draw any conclusions on scholars from whom White indebted a lot and White’s arguments, we should firstly know what kind of scholar White is, rather than just focus our study on only one dimension. So what White’s thinking style? How coherent and incoherent is his historical thought? How does he change his points of view toward philosophy of history, and what causes his transformation of ideas? How can we effectively and wholly understand White? And how can we best approach to White’s inner world?
White’s MH, “by far the most important book in historical theory since Collingwood’s The Idea of History” published in the 20th century has been highly evaluated by Frank Ankersmit (Domanska, 1998, 83). His synthetic and illuminative ideas for an understanding of the writing of history have now been generally acknowledged, and the books—Tropics of History (1978), The Content of the Form (1987), and Figural Realism (1999)—that followed MH have also received wide attention. Meanwhile, his thoughts on philosophy of history have been examined from various perspectives in detail by scholars of various different stripes (Roberts 1987, 1995, 2002; Kellner 1989; Jacoby 1992; Domanska 1997; Harlan 1997; Paul 2006, 2008; Megill 2008). However, none scholars have paid special attention to White’s consideration on history as a discipline and how he indebted to Michel Foucault. While in fact, among the scholars who influenced White’s rethinking of philosophy of history and historical consciousness, Foucault is one of the most important one, who enlightened him a lot and attracted his interests persistently since late 1960s and early 1970s.
In MH, White directly stated that his rethinking on the 19th and contemporary historical consciousness which originated from Foucault’s discussion on history as a human science in The Order of Things (White 1975, Note1, 3, and 4, pp. 2-3). In 1973, the same year in which his MH had been published, he wrote an important essay on Foucault, which named “Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground,” and later collected in his Tropics of Discourse. Six years later, he wrote another paper which named “Foucault’s Discourse: The Historiography of Anti-Humanism,” which has been included in his The Content of the Form in 1987. As we all know, Foucault was well known, perhaps most for his Le Mots et Le choses (1966) and L'archéologie du savoir (1969). Although these two books had been translated into English separately in 1970 and 1972, at that time, most of American historians did not specifically pay attention to Foucault like White. Megill’s statistics tells us that “of 192 essays on Foucault in the period 1973-81, (only) 24 were by historians”. Although historians remained a small minority among those “receiving” Foucault’s work, White’s “Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground” was the first one which represented historians’ attention on Foucault (White 1973b; Megill 1987, 128).
When Foucault’s Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison was published in 1976, White reviewed it, in which he highly recommended it and deemed it was “a remarkable achievement, significant especially for intellectual history, and Surueiller et punir is an important addition to his growing corpus” (White, 1977, 606). Moreover, in order to answer the question how would one confirm or disconfirm such a hypothesis (new disciplinary institutions, such as prison, school, hospitals, insane asylums, military systems which disciplinize human body and spirits in Surueiller et punir), he answered that “there is no way to do so, because, as Foucault’s work always reminds us, what we mean by data and what shall serve as evidence are determined by the ends informing the discourse that one writes.” Here, I do not care White’s answer, what I am concerned is White’s usage of “Foucault’s work always remind us,” and from his evaluation, we can assume that White himself paid much attention on Foucault’s work, and was very familiar with his work.
As I mentioned above, in the 1950s White’s image was a totally Weberian medievalist (Paul 2008). However, from that time on, with the illumination of Foucault’s work, he turned himself from a Weberian scholar to a Foucaultian White. Therefore, in this paper, my concern is White’s image since late 1960s and early 1970s, and I will define him as a Foucaultian White from his arguments on disciplinization and de-disciplinization of history. In part one, I will locate what kind of scholar White is, and try to analyze how Bossenbrook cultivated his synthetic approach toward historical study; In part two and three, I will discuss to what degree Foucault influenced White’s consideration of history, how he assimilated Foucault’s ideas by analyzing his books and essays, and how this Foucaultian White thought of disciplinization and de-disciplinization; Finally, I will discuss why White, who indebted a lot to Foucault has not became a ‘real’ Foucault; and I will draw my conclusion that, although White was greatly influenced by Foucault as a post-structuralist, he never accepted Foucault’s radical ideas on “man is an invention of recent date,” “the death of author,” etc., that’s because he was a very conservative person who addicted to humanism and very, very nostalgic to the golden age of the 19th century, which prevented him from being a ‘real’ Foucault.
II． White and Historical Synthesis
In 1947-51, when White attended Detroit’s City College, Wayne University (now Wayne State University) as an undergraduate student, he came into the orbit of his “charismatic” teacher Bossenbrook who both introduced him to the cultural history of the West and gave him the beginnings of a solution to the burden of cultural problems which caused his new knowledge created (Megill, 2008). Moreover, under Bossenbrook’s influence, White himself became a man who had wide interests and who preferred historical synthesis to other forms of historical writing.
Who was Willam J. Bossenbrook? And how did he influence the young White? Perhaps most of us do not know who he was, even if we can find some information about his editing A History of Western Civilization, Mid-century Nationalism and his too ambitious work of synthesis—The German Mind. As a scholar, however, Bossenbrook was not very successful, that’s because till now, contemporary historians have not acknowledged his contribution to American historical study. It might be disappointed for him, even so, his failure as a scholar had not prevented him to be a successful, and respectful teacher in his students’ mind, especially for Arthur C. Danto and White.
In the preface to his Analytical Philosophy of History (1965), Danto wrote: “Bossenbrook’s courses in history…awakened me, and a whole generation of students, to the world of intellect. His lectures were the most stimulating I ever audited, and I should have devoted my life to the study of history as a result of them were it not for the discovery that they were unique (Danto 1965, xvi; Domanska 1998, 166-87, 166-67 and 176). In responding in 1993 to a question from Ewa Domanska, Danto declared that：
“my interest in history was inspired by a powerful and visionary teacher, William Bossenbrook, whose courses in medieval history and in the Renaissance were tremendously exciting. Bossenbrook read very widely in philosophy and brought his reading to bear on the subject at hand. Bossenbrook’s classes are impossible to describe, but one felt that nothing was irrelevant and that he saw everything somehow connected with everything else (Domanska 1998, 166).”
Moreover, Danto tells us that “Bossenbrook read very widely in philosophy and brought his reading to bear on the subject at hand, the immediate postwar years brought existentialism to America and I found that philosophy very compelling, especially in the way Bossenbrook used it to illuminate the past……he had an assistant named Milton Covensky, who read even more than Bossenbrook. I remember going to Bossenbrook’s office and hearing the two of them trying to mention a book the other had not read. It was very intoxicating (Domanska 1998, 166).” We don’t how Bossenbrook had his classes in Wayne University, and how knowledgeable he was, but we can infer that this teacher inspired White, Danto and other students there by setting himself as a good example, and encouraged his students to read widely and think independently like him, which, directly and indirectly, influenced White’s historical approach and widely interests.
In Bossenbrook’s work four elements remained of the Kuyperian view: an insistence on trying to understand the world as a totality; a tendency to think in terms of dialectical oppositions; an insistence that academic study must address the problems of present-day life; and an ethical concern with confronting the present degraded condition of the world (Megill 2008, 16). In his A History of Western Civilization and Foundation of Western Civilization, he attempts to give students an introduction to the whole, the cultural unity or integration of the “Western” experience as seen from the standpoint of the present. And in the preface to the part two, Bossenbrook asserts that:
“The authors of this survey have been concerned especially with presenting contemporary Western civilization as a dynamic totality…. The preliminary introduction seeks to portray the general physiognomy of contemporary Western civilization as it differed from other civilizations. An introduction to each section presents an interpretation of a period of this civilization, indicating its coherent character and tying the subsequent chapters into a meaningful whole.” (Part Two) [emphases added][2] When we read the books, we can notice several words and terms which represented a synthetic approach toward western civilization. Such as “Broad outline,” “cultural totality,” “the cosmopolitan culture of the Mediterranean,” “unification of the Mediterranean,” “disintegration of Mediterranean unity,” “the advance of western Christendom,” “the emergence of national cultures and overseas expansion,” “rise and fall of the Napoleonic empire,” “the migration of European peoples and institutions,” “cultural integrity or unity,” “quest for unity in the Western world,” “medieval cultural synthesis,” “decline of European hegemony,” “collapse of the world peace structure,” and so on. White, consciously and unconsciously, accepted his teachers’ macroscopic and wholly perspective toward history
We can see more clearly how White was indebted to this enigmatic and respected teacher from his earlier articles and books. Among White’s articles, two of his earliest scholarly papers represented historical synthesis. Dating from 1957 and 1958, they examined the philosophy of history of the English Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, the account of historical thinking offered by the philosopher R. G. Collingwood, and the account of world history offered by the erstwhile diplomatic historian Arnold Toynbee.” Toynbee and Dawson were exceptions among English historians, for both attempted to articulate comprehensive visions of the historical process. However, at this stage in his career White held that the best approach to comprehending history (in the two senses of comprehending, namely, understanding something, and grasping it as a whole) was to be found in the “idealist” approach to history offered by Collingwood and by the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce.
In a 1963 article, White makes this claim most clearly, where he describes Croce as having seen that “the great world-views of the late nineteenth century were all based on partial visions of the world and were slaves to metaphors provided by those partial visions.” According to White, Croce’s solution to the problem of seeing history as a whole was “to frame a concept of history that would depend upon no single metaphor for its characterization but would point to a level of being so complex as to defy equation with any analogue in nature, techniques, or pure thought (White, 1963, 115).” In his 1958 article White detected a similar concern for totality in Collingwood (White, 1957, 147-78; White, 1958, 247-87; Megill, 2008, 6-7).”[3]
In his most unorthodox paper—“The Burden of History (1966),” by analyzing Fabian tacit which historians employed to against their criticism who come from both social scientists and literary artists, he discussed the dilemma of historians and the heavy burden of history as a discipline (White, 1966, 111).[4] White directly stated his dissatisfaction with traditional historians’ definition of history between science and art, and from this paper on, his wholly reflection on history as a “science” was based on it.
In the early 1960s, White also took on the task of editing a book series, of which six volumes were published, that aimed to cover “Major Traditions of World Civilization,” White wrote one of these volumes, The Greco-Roman Tradition, which, like MH, was published in 1973. In this book, White discussed the classical humanism from the perspective of cultural totality of Greco-Roman civilization. Although it is the first monograph for White, he followed Bossenbrook’s historical approach and perspective toward classical civilization. The topics he studied included the land, the people, the inherited cultural tradition of Greece, the political evolution of Greece and its cultural achievement, and also the rise and fall of Roman imperial civilization with the decline of classical humanism.
For a long time, this book has been ignored by philosophers of history, even now, most of them cannot believe that it was written by him and published in 1973. After its publication, there was only one short review we can find from JSTOR by Wesley E. Thompson in The History Teacher, and he reviewed that “anyone who thinks that the Greeks and Romans are worth studying on their own account will best avoid this book. But if one is offering a course in Western civilization and wishes to emphasize the contribution of classical to modern culture, he will generally be satisfied with White's essay” (Thompson, 1975, 304). In fact, it has been neglected not only by professional historians, especially those who are major in Greco-Roman civilization experts, but also by ordinary historians. Even so, for historians who want to know White’s transformation of ideas, and what caused his turn to his masterpiece—MH, it offers us a good answer that young White liked to do some grand and synthetic studies followed Bossenbrook, and we should not be surprised at his later books.
After the publication of MH and The Greco-Roman Civilization in 1973, White published three books which collected most of his important articles, although some other essays, prefaces and forewords which he wrote were not included. Through them, White replied his critics, especially those on MH, and continued his historical synthesis. By using his own formalist and contextualist strategies toward historical topics, he tried to defend his own arguments for himself and persuade his readers and critics. He wrote papers on Vico, Croce, Droysen, Jameson, Ricoeur, Auerbach, Freud, Foucault, Proust and others, however, all of them continued to serve his own historical synthesis, through which he tried to convince us his theories of history on narrativity, modes of emplotment, modes of arguments and modes of ideological implication. (Kansteiner 1993, 278-90) In my opinion, White himself is so ambitious that he wants to use his own ideas which has been explained clearly in MH to cover nearly all other scholars’ monographs and books. His purpose, we can see clearly, that’s to say, is to assimilate other famous scholars’ ideas into his own synthesis, from which we can see how deceptive Bossenbrook’s influence on him.
In 1966, White cooperated with Wilson H. Coates and J. Salwyn Schapiro in writing a book—The Emergence of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe (Vol. I: From the Italian Renaissance to the French Revolution). And in 1970, the second volume, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism was published. In these two books, they focused on the evolution of what they called ‘liberal humanism’ which is said to constitute “the most important tradition of Western civilization (Baumer 1967, 564).” By focusing and examining on the evolvement of liberal humanism in the modern world history, this “illuminating synthesis” continued his synthetic approach toward history (Baumer 1967, 564).
On reminiscing his intention of writing MH, he directly pointed out that it’s a book which comprehensively contributed to the theories on historical writing, that’s because it not only discussed the status of historical writing as a verbal discourse, but also as a science (White 2004, “Preface of Chinese Version,” 1). As Megill tells us, “White, Bossenbrook’s student, emulated Bossenbrook—and went beyond him.……In the early stages of his career—up to MH—.White attempted, like Bossenbrook, to offer a unified and comprehensive vision of the world for the practical and existential benefit of students (Megill 2008, 19).” To some degree, I agree with Megill’s evaluation on White’s historical approach and Bossenbrook’s influence on him, however, what I want to say is, White, as a scholar who has a tendency of grand synthesis, he insisted on it since late 1960s, rather than up to his MH.
As we can see from above, at his early scholar era, by following his “charismatic” teacher, White himself formed a comprehensive perspective toward history, and what he concerned most is the dilemma and cultural burden of history as a “science”. As his historical study moved on, he discussed this burden wholly in detail, we can see clearly from his discussion on disciplinization and de-disciplinization of history as a discipline.
III．White on Disciplinization
As I discussed above, White paid a lot attention to Foucault’s work, but, how Foucault influenced his thinking on history? We can see it clearly from his discussion on disciplinization of history.
For Foucault, by approaching “history of the present,” he discussed the existential status of the criminals, patients, the mad, etc., and analyzed how their “sameness” has been changed to “otherness,” how history has been disappeared and appeared. White diagnosed the status of history, and he pointed out, history, as a discipline, its status and face has been changed from “undisciplined” to “overdisciplined,” which follows Foucault’s examination of “history of the present”.
Up to the eighteenth century, historical studies had no discipline proper to itself alone. It was for the most part an activity of amateurs. Scholars per vocationem were trained in ancient and modern languages, in how to study different kinds of documents (a discipline known as diplomatic), and in mastering the techniques of rhetorical composition. Historical writing, in fact, was regarded as a branch of the art of rhetoric. These constituted the methods of the historian. Prior to the nineteenth century, history had been conceived as a spectacle of crimes, superstitions, errors, duplicities, and terrorisms that justified visionary recommendations for a politics that would place social processes on a new ground. Philosophies of history such as Voltaire’s and Condorcet’s constituted the basis of the Enlightenment’s contribution to a progressive political theory (White 1987, 64, 74). History was not taught at the universities until the early nineteenth century. History was not a subject for study in the university. There was no history faculty. They had faculties of antiquities who studied the ancient, biblical world, but they did not have historians. History was something that anyone could write. You did not have to write a thesis and get a license to do it (Domanska 1998, 14).
Since chairs of history were founded at the University of Berlin in 1810 and at the Sorbonne in 1812, societies for the editing and publication of historical documents were established soon after: the society for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in 1819, the École des Chartes in 1821 and the great national journals of historical studies in mid-century, history begun its professionalized process. Although historical studies were professionalized during this period, the theoretical basis of its disciplinization remained unclear. It was until the late 19th century that history as a discipline had been disciplinized by the “rules of evidence,” “objectivity” of historical realism. (White 1987, 67) Then, historical thinking became “disciplined historical thinking”; “historical consciousness” became “disciplined historical consciousness”; philosophers of history and historians became “disciplined philosophers of history and historians”; the more professionalized history as a discipline, the more disciplined or “overdisciplined” it was.
Obviously, since late 18th century and early 19th century, history as a “science,” its face has been changed from its various faces to a simple and objective one. Now that contemporary status of history has been changed to “overdisciplined,” we have to ask, how history as a discipline disciplinized?
As far as White concerned, “Foucault regards history less as a method or a mode of thought than as a symptom of a peculiarly nineteenth-century malaise which originated in the discovery of the temporality of all things…Foucault writes ‘history’ in order to destroy it, as a discipline, as a mode of consciousness, and as a mode of (social) existence”. At the end of The Archeology of Knowledge (AK), Foucault’s systematic exposition of the analytical principles informing his earlier studies of madness, clinical medicine, and the human sciences, he states that his intention is ‘to free the history of thought from its subjection to transcendence…to cleanse it of all transcendental narcissism; [and free it] from [the circle of the lost origin],’ which encouraged White’s reflection of history and its relationships with other sciences from the perspective of de-disciplinization or “de-sublimation,” and to emancipate philosophy of history, and “beyond Irony” by casting in an Ironic attitude (White 1978, 233-4; White 1979, 106;White 1987, 64; Domanska 2007, 20-1; Foucault 1976, 223-4 ).
We can confirm them more clearly from White’s own words. As White asserted, “contemporary academic historiography remains locked within the Ironic perspective that produced the crisis of historicism in the late nineteenth century, and continues to lament any interest in speculative philosophy of history on the part of nonprofessionals and professionals alike, historical thinking in general continues to generate systems of ‘historiology’ which challenge the Ironic perspective” (White, 1975, 433). In order to alternate this dilemma, he doubted historical consciousness of the 20th century historians in an Ironical mode, which followed continental European thinkers from Valéry and Heidegger to Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, and Michel Foucault, (who) have casted serious doubts on the value of a specifically “historical” consciousness, stressed the fictive character of historical reconstructions, and challenged history’s claims to a place among the science (White, 1975, 1-2).
Moreover, “in the work of writers and thinkers as different as Malraux, Yeats, Joyce, Spengler, Toynbee, Wells, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, Benjamin, Foucault, Lukács, and a host of others, contemporary historical thinking sets alongside the Irony of professional historiography, and as possible alternatives to it, conceptions of the historical process which are cast in the modes of Metaphor, Metonymy, and Synecdoche, each with its own strategies of explanation and each with an ideological implication that is unique to it (White, 1975, 433)”. Here, White cited Foucault twice, and told us that Foucault and others offered him spiritual illumination, which helped him to question the 20th historical consciousness.
Foucault’s work underlie a basic presupposition of White’s book. In Archaeology of Knowledge ([1969], 1976), Foucault aimed to study the “representational space” in which historical objects identify themselves, from which such statements, like the famous one from Ranke, derive their sense. But such a “space” can not be an “object” itself. It does not exist independently of the objects which it defines and which, in the dialectical play, constantly redefine that “space” as none other than their own boundaries and rules. Moreover, in The Order of Things, Foucault firstly stated the two great discontinuities in the episteme (s) of Western culture: the first inaugurates the Classical age (roughly half-way through the seventeenth century) and the second, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, marks the beginning of the modern age (Foucault 1973, “Preface,” xxii and 367). And in Madness and Civilization, Foucault explained how “discourse on madness” unfolded in the West between the late Middle Ages and our own time, which has been shown in four periods. For White, he analyzed Foucault’s classifications in detail on discourse of “madness,” “the Same and the auteur,” and reason with unreason (White 1987, 117-8, 120-3; White 1978, 235; Foucault [1967] (2005)).
In order to find how the “representational space” of objects changed, Foucault analyzed the discontinuities, breaks, and mutation of knowledge and discourse, which helped White to classify the development of historical consciousness in the 19th century.
In MH, White discussed the three phases of 19th historical consciousness in an Ironic mode. He pointed out:
“The first phase of 19th historical consciousness took shape within the context of a crisis in late Enlightenment historical thinking. Thinkers such as Voltaire, Gibbon, Hume, Kant, and Robertson had finally come to view history in essentially Ironic terms. It (shared antipathy to Irony) also accounts for the particular tone of historical thinking during its second, ‘mature’ or ‘classic,’ which lasted from around 1830 to 1870 or thereabout. During the third phase, Marx provided thereby more than ample grounds for the descent into Irony which was to characterize the historical consciousness of the last phase of the historical reflection of the age, the so-called crisis of historicism which developed during the last third of the century” (White, 1975, 38-40).
Foucault analyzed the Different or the “Otherness” in terms of “Sameness,” “Similitude,” or “Resemblance” in the historical process. Here, from Ironical attitude toward history by late Enlightenment historical thinking to antipathy to Irony of the “mature” or “classic” phase, and the descent into Irony, which symbolized the crisis of historicism, White followed Foucault’s archeological method, through with he analyzed the breaks of 19th historical consciousness.
Foucault questioned History and positivity and Western culture from an attitude of finitude, that’s because “History constitutes, for the human sciences, a favorable environment which is both privileged and dangerous. To each of the sciences of man it offers a background, which establishes it and provides it with a fixed ground and, as it were, a homeland; it determines the cultural area—the chronological and geographical boundaries—in which that branch of knowledge can be recognized as having validity; but it also surrounds the sciences of man with a frontier that limits them and destroys, from the outset, their claim to validity within the element of universality…Man, therefore, never appears in his positivity and that positivity is not immediately limited by the limitlessness of History” (Foucault 1973, 371). Here, Foucault stated that History is both privileged and dangerous, both limited and limitless, both finitude and indefinite rather than a positive attitude toward History.
By approaching history in a “metahistorical” way, White followed Foucault’s analysis of finitude in order to dissolve the boundary of history. He said: “I pointed out that the term ‘MH’ could be taken to describe inquiry into the presuppositions necessary for belief in a disciplined mode of historical thinking, including the study of the relations obtaining between the scientific study of history, on the one hand, and the rest of the human and social sciences (such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and yes, even philosophy, literary theory and linguistics) on the other” (White 1995, 233). Usually, every study of history presupposed a set of metaphysical assumptions (an ontology and epistemology) that underwrote belief in the reality of a specifically ‘historical mode of existence and the authority of a specifically historical ‘method’ for studying distinctively historical (as against, say, natural) events; and he argued that this was as true of the work of so-called professional historians as it was of the work of philosophers of history who took as their putative objects of study the fundamental bases of historical processes. In other words, he argued that every ‘history’ presupposes a ‘MH’, in the way that every physics presupposes a metaphysics. Moreover, he stated: “ (although) this offended many historians, especially those who believe that one can look for the ‘facts’ of any matter without presupposing anything of a theoretical or metaphysical nature. My position appeared to collapse the distinction between philosophy of history and historical inquiry upon which history's claims to the status of a discipline (White 1995, Note 1, 245-6)”.[5]
As I mentioned above, Foucault’s attitude of finitude toward human science is to free them from the 19th western episteme, which defined the “order of the things,” and caused disappearance and appearance of the ‘otherness’ and ‘the same’. By following Foucault’s style of thinking and method, White’s aim is to free ‘History’ from professionalization, and tries to dissolve the classification between philosophy of history and history, between literal or rhetorical and historical, between objective history and narrative history.
In addition, Foucault criticized positivity, positive history and Western Reason, which also influenced White’s skeptical epistemology. For Foucault, the different positivity formed by History and laid down in it are able to enter into contact with one another, surround one another in the form of knowledge, and free the content dormant within them; it is not, then, the limits themselves that appear, in their absolute rigour, but partial totalities, totalities that turn out to be limited by fact, totalities whose frontiers can be made to move, up to a certain point, but which will never extend into the space of a definitive analysis, and will never raise themselves to the status of absolute totality (Foucault 1973, 373).
Therefore, there is no absolute totality and objectivity, only partial, limited totalities. So does White. In an interview, he stated that “what it (MH) does, or pretends to do, is to deconstruct a mythology, the so-called science of history. It is against positivism, against a positivistic notion of history (Domanska, 1994, 92-3). So, the demand for the scientization of history represents only the statement of a preference for a specific modality of historical conceptualization, the grounds of which are either moral or aesthetic, but the epistemological justification of which still remains to be established. ” (White 1975, “Preface,” xi-xii) Obviously, White inherited a lot idea from Foucault, and tried to rescue history and historical consciousness from the “bias” and “preference” of disciplinized historians.
In sum, White questioned disciplinization of history as a discipline, and the preference of traditional historians and philosophers of history on historical consciousness and historical thinking, which followed Foucault’s stylization and understanding of “history of the present.” Although White indebted a lot to Foucault, his question on history was to de-disciplinize history as a discipline, then reconstitute it, rather than just question “anti-humanism historiography” like Foucault.
IV．White on De-disciplinization
History, as a “science,” has been tamed by professional historians for a long time. It is so disciplinized a discipline that historians should beyond this kind of historical writing and historical consciousness, and try to rescue it. So, what’s White’s opinions toward de-disciplinization of history? And how to rescue it from professionalization? Here White offered us his answers to these questions:
Firstly, history as a discipline, it based on different kinds of ideologies rather than objectivity. In “The Burden of History,” White started the discussion of historians’ “Fabian tactic” against critics in related fields of intellectual endeavor, which directly stated the dilemma of historians and the cultural burden of history itself. Due to historians’ perception on history as a positive science, and the rule of historical facts, therefore, history should be objective rather than ideologized, which caused “history is perhaps the conservative discipline par excellence.
In fact, historical studies as a discipline in the modern period, it was carried out in servicing of political values and regimes that were in general antirevolutionary and conservative, “the burden for establishing the feasibility and desirability of treating history as the object of a possible science falls upon those who would so treat it… endowed history with the authority of a discipline in order to recognize the ideological benefits to new social classes and political constituencies that professional, academic historiography served and, mutatis mutandis, continues to serve down to our own time.” (White 1987, 60-1) In response to his critics on Nazism, White speculates that the success and very existence of the volatile fascist ideologies of the twentieth century are at least in part to be explained through the disciplinization and covert politicization of historical consciousness in the last century. From his perspective the ideologies of fascist regimes appear as a backlash against the overly ambitious attempts to establish historiography as a bourgeois science in the powerful disguise of a value-free discipline (White 1982; White 1992). As the professionalization of history moves on, it permitted this kind of historical knowledge produced by professional historians to serve as the standard of realism in political thought and action in general, which, finally, “depressed” the various faces of history.
Then , our very notion of the possibility of discriminating between the Left, the Right, and the Center is in part a function of the disciplinization of historical studies which ruled out the possibility—a possibility that should never be ruled out of any area of inquiry—that history may be as meaningless “in itself” as the theorists of the historical sublime thought it to be (White 1987, 82). Thus, it is ideology, rather than objectivity which history based on.
Recently, historians of historical thought often lament the intrusion of such manifestly ideological elements into earlier historians’ efforts to portray the past “objectively.” But more often they reserve such lamentation for the assessment of the work of historians representing ideological positions different from their own. As Mannheim noted, in the social sciences one man’s “science” is another’s “ideology. (White, 1978, 69)” This is especially so in historiography, whatever standpoints historians adopt in their historical writing, they will be attached to the work of anyone conceiving the tasks of history-writing differently from oneself. Following Mannheim, White offered four models of ideologies, that’s to say, liberalism, conservatism, anarchism and radicalism.[6] Now that our own historical writing based on our own ideologies, therefore, it is impossible for historians rejecting it in historical writing.
Secondly, historians and philosophers of history should look back upon the early nineteenth century as the golden age of their discipline, and reconstitute the relations between epistemology with ethic and aesthetic, rather than just locate it within the framework of epistemology. Historical work as what it most manifestly is—that is to say, a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them (White 1975, 2). Before the historian can bring to bear upon the data of the historical field, the conceptual apparatus he will use to represent and explain it, he must first prefigure the field. This poetic act is indistinguishable from the linguistic act in which the field is made ready for interpretation as a domain of a particular kind.
As White tells us, most of the classical work gave birth to the golden era, during which time there wasn’t clearly distinction between philosophy of history and history. While for those professional historians, since late 19th century, due to their “theoretical torpor of the best representatives of modern academic historiography,” their professional historiography continued to flourish as the dominant mode of historical writing and historical consciousness, which caused the contemporary historical “crisis”. So, the demand for the scientization of history represents only the statement of a preference for a specific modality of historical conceptualization, the grounds of which are either moral or aesthetic, but the epistemological justification of which still remains to be established. (White, 1975, Preface, xi-xii)
Thirdly, in order to de-disciplinize history, it should go back to the early nineteenth century in which history was “undisciplined,” and reconstruct its close working relationship and interchange between history, art, science, and philosophy. Here, Vico helped him a lot on historical writing. In the opening sentence of De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, in which Vico’s project was to unearth the ancient wisdom of the Italians from the origins of the Latin language itself, he announced the verum-factum principle. For the Latins ‘the true’ (verum) and ‘the made’ (factum) are reciprocal or, in the common language of the Schools, convertible (cf Miner 2002, 26). Inasmuch as the poets came certainly before the vulgar historians, the first history must have been poetic……the poets must therefore have been the first historians of the nations……all gentile histories have their beginnings in fables, as we set forth in the Axioms [202] and demonstrated in the Poetic Wisdom (Vico, 1948, 278-81). Far from devaluing the importance of verum and factum, imagination complements this much better known aspect of his work. There is no contradiction in his thought between the two concepts; indeed his belief that one could only truly know what one had made, ‘verum et factum reciprocantur…convertuntur,’ was fulfilled by means of imagination, the creative instincts of man (Miller, 1993, 127).
However, historians have systematically built into their notion of their discipline hostility or at least blindness to theory and the kind of issues that philosophers have raised about the kind of knowledge they have produced since Hegel. This blindness takes the form of the commonplace which has it that, if historians were to take the time to consider epistemological and ontological issues regarding their objects of study, they would never be able to get on with the work of sifting the evidence that alone permits them to write authoritatively about their subjects (White 1995, 244). Therefore, ethics and aesthetic were expelled from the place, in which epistemology had been occupied since late 18th century and early 19th century.
Conclusion: White and the Opening of Further Possibilities
Following Foucault, White questioned history as a discipline. However, he never became a radical post-structuralist like Foucault, why?
In Foucault’s work, he openly attacked “knowledge” of human science in all its form by virtue of its overtly political tone and open orientation towards contemporary political questions. Comparing with Foucault, White is a nostalgic historian, and addicted to classical civilization and humanism, which renders him never be a pessimist and radical criticism as Foucault (Foucault 1987, 130). Although he illuminated a lot from Foucault, Foucault’s consideration on history, as an anti-humanist rather than a humanistic thinker, which is in contradictory with his own humanistic ideal. That’s because, for White, “history is the humanistic discipline par excellence…it is concerned to determine the extent to which all men participate in a common humanity and how they expressed that humanity in different ways…It is the ideals of Greco-Roman civilization, rather than its realities, that must interest us as students of our own past seeking orientation in a distressed present” (White 1973a, 5, 7).
Throughout White’s work, he has consistently “condemned pessimism and fatalism…His criterion is clear and simple: whatever reinforces the human sense of the possibility of mastery, the sense that the game has rules which make is worth playing, constitutes for White the precondition for a valid philosophy of history” (Kellner 1980, 4). While for Foucault, he launched his criticisms of humanism, science, reason, and most of the institutions of Western culture as they have evolved since the Renaissance (White 1987, 106), and in White’s mind, he never considered how to save human science, humanism, Western reason, history, science, etc., which caused White turned his intellectual inquiry from Foucault away, and tried to emancipate history as a discipline, and reconstitute history as a form of intellectual activity.
Encouraged by Foucault’s archeological diagnosis and categorization on the “discourse of discourse,” White diagnosed that historical consciousness and history as a discipline has been “depressed” and “disciplined” by conventional historians. Unlike Foucault, however, who stopped here, White moved on and made his effort to find a way to save history, which opened the further possibilities of history. What he cared most was how to go out of the dilemma of history, rather than just harshly criticize Western Reason, History and human science. Therefore, on the one hand, he believes in traditional humanism and classical civilizations; on the other hand, he thinks that history should open to the re-establishment of its links with the great poetic, scientific, and philosophical concerns which inspired the classic practitioners and theorists of its golden age in the nineteenth century, which will free historians and philosophers of history from conceptualized history (White 1975, 434).
Moreover, due to his a lot illumination from Vico, and addicted by classical civilization and humanism, White wanted to go back to the golden age of 19th century, during which time historical consciousness was prefigured by poetical-wisdom. As Vico told us, “the wisdom of the ancients was that of the theological poets, who without doubt were the first sages of the gentile world, as we have established in the Axioms; and because the origins of all things must by nature have been crude: for all these reasons we must trace the beginnings of poetic wisdom to crude metaphysics. From this, as from a trunk, there branch out from one limb logic, morals, economics and politics, all poetic; and from another physics, the mother of their cosmography and hence of astronomy, which gives their certainty to its two daughters, chronology and geography, all likewise poetic……Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony, all the first tropes are corollaries of this poetic logic (Vico 1948, 100, 116-8) .
With the help of Vico, he finally found a way for reconstituting historical consciousness and historical writing from the “tamed” historians. That’s to say, historians should be poets; historical writing should be poetical-history, which based on poetical wisdom and aesthetic rather than epistemology. Following Vico’s consideration on history, White analyzed masters and their classical work of the golden age. He told us, for 19th famous historians and philosophers of history, their work were prefigured by poetical-wisdom, which based on imagination, irrationality, aesthetic rather than rationality. By turning his intellectual inquiry from Foucault to Vico, he switched his intellectual exploration, which made him a nostalgic and conservative historian.
Finally, White desired for “historical pluralism,” which made the finally departure of his intellectual inquiry between White and Foucault. In MH, he analyzed the modes of emplotment, argument and ideological implication, and their “elective affinities” among the various modes that might be used to gain an explanatory affect on the different levels of composition, which “open(ed) up the possibility” of historical writing and the “plurality of interpretative strategies” (White 1966, 131; White 1975, 429). For this, we can see it clearly from the form below:
Chronology | History | Mode of Emplotment | Mode of Argument | Mode of Ideological Implication | Tropology |
Romantic | Formist | Anarchist | Metaphorical | ||
Tragic | Mechanistic | Radical | Metonymic | ||
Comic | Organicist | Conservative | Synecdochic | ||
Satirical | Contextualist | Liberal | Ironic |
(White 1975, 29) (Here, I revise White’s form and add chronology, history and tropology. )
It seems that, for historians, if they want to write a book, what they should do is make up a story chronologically, then combine modes of emplotment, argument, ideological implication and tropology, sooner or later, a history will be appeared, although, historical writing itself has its own “elective affinity” .
Therefore, when historians write history, and tell them to their readers, they can tell the various stories chronologically, rather than just one rationally History. Here, White’s learning experiences, and historical writing constituted for him many opportunities to deepen and broaden his own reflections, to cast aside both hasty and vague generalities, and the cliché that had long served as authoritative dogma in historical field. What White’s historical writing inspires us is that history has its own heterogeneous face, which has never, and will never be homogenized. Through this way, White emancipated the “disciplined” historical consciousness and professional historiography, and opened the box of Pandora, which offered historical writing further possibilities.
Notes:
*When I was visiting TJMF(Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation) in April this year, UVa professor Allan Megill sent me his unpublished paper—“The Rhetorical Dialectic of Hayden White,” which helped me to know more about William J. Bossenbrook’s influence on the young Hayden White. In this article, I have used a lot from his paper, thanks a lot for his kind help.
[1] Cf. Ann Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historic Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p.1
[1] Megill, “The Rhetorical Dialectic of Hayden White,” in Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, and Hans Kellner, eds., Re-figuring Hayden White, Stanford: Stanford University Press, will be published in 2009.
[2] Pursuing a similar line, Bossenbrook and his colleague Raymond C. Miller co-authored a 5,000-word essay on the theme “The Introductory Course in History: A Declaration of Independence,” where they claim (in words that sound like Bossenbrook more than Miller) that “any age and any period must be viewed as part of a cultural totality, for the description of which the historian must have some sort of theory (call it a philosophy of history if you like) which will relate the culture to the totality of man’s development.” See Raymond C. Miller and William J. Bossenbrook, “The Introductory Course in History: A Declaration of Independence” (Faculty Publications Collection, University Archives, Wayne State University, 6). This undated, privately-printed essay was accessioned by the Wayne University archives in September 1941, according to a date stamp on its first page. Megill indebted to Brecque Keith, University Archivist at Wayne State, for her assistance. See Megill, “The Rhetorical Dialectic of Hayden White,” note 44, p. 24
[3] White, “Collingwood and Toynbee: Transitions in English Historical Thought,” English Miscellany 8 (1957): 147-78, and “Religion, Culture and Western Civilization in Christopher Dawson’s Idea of History,” English Miscellany 9 (1958): 247-87. He praised Collingwood for having attempted to “raise historical thought” to the dignity of a form of thought that “contained implicitly the artistic, religious and scientific moments,” but which “transcended their limitations by seeing the world as a totality…”( “Religion, Culture, and Western Civilization,” 261). Cites from Allan Megill, Ibid, 6-7
[4] When criticized by social scientists for the softness of his method, the crudity of his organizing metaphors, or the ambiguity of his sociological and psychological presuppositions, the historian responds that history has never claimed the status of a pure science, that it depends as much upon intuitive as upon analytical methods, and that historical judgments should not therefore be evaluated by critical standards properly applied only in the mathematical and experimental disciplines. All of which suggests that history is a kind of art. But when reproached by literary artists for his failure to probe the more arcane strata of human consciousness and his unwillingness to utilize contemporary modes of literary representation, the historian falls back upon the view that history is after all a semi-science, that historical data do not lend themselves to “free” artistic manipulation, and that the form of his narratives is not a matter of choice, but is required by the nature of historical materials themselves.
[5] The term “Metahistory (MH)” was used by R.G. Collingwood to refer to what philosophers used to call “material philosophy of history,” that is to say, works like those of Hegel, Marx and Spengler which purported to reveal the purpose, end, plan or pattern of world history and, in some cases, predict the future. Northrop Frye used the term, whose coinage he attributed to F. T. Underhill's characterization of Toynbee's work, to indicate a genre of prose which fused mythical-cosmological speculation with historical data to produce quasi “poetic” structures exactly like that found in Spengler's Decline of the West. The term 'MH' is conventionally used in a pejorative sense, and Professor Marwick is fully justified in substituting the notion of “metaphysics” for that “MH” which he derided in his inaugural lecture. White pointed out in his remarks on Marwick’s lecture that his MH was a study of the phenomenon in the nineteenth century, not an advocacy of a “metahistorical” approach to the study of history.
[6] White’s understanding of ideologies directly followed Karl Mannheim’s categorization on ideology, while in fact, Mannheim’s classification on ideology cannot cover all the ideologies. That’s to say, there are more than four ideologies. See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, London, Routledge, (1936)1997.
References
Bossenbrook, William. J. and Rolf Johannesen. (1939). Foundations of Western Civilization, D. C. Heath and Company
—. (1940), Development of Contemporary Civilization, D. C. Heath and Company
Baumer, Franklin L. (1967). “Review on The Emergence of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe” by Willson H. Coates Hayden V. White and J. Salwyn Schapiro, The American Historical Review, Vol. 72, No. 2, pp. 563-564.
Coates, Willson H., Hayden V. White, and J. Salwyn Schapiro. (1966), The Emergence of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe, New York: McGraw-Hill Book.
Danto, Arthur C. (1965). Analytical Philosophy of History, New York: Columbia University Press
Domanska, Ewa; Hans Kellner, and Hayden White, (1994) , “Interview: Hayden White: The Image of Self-Presentation,” Diacritics, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp.91-100.
Domanska, Ewa, (2007). Encounter: Philosophy of History after Postmodernism (《邂逅：后现代主义之后的历史哲学》), Beijing: Peking University Press
Domanska, ed. ( 1998). Encounter: Philosophy of History after Postmodernism, Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press.
Foucault, Michel. (1973). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books.
—. (1976). Archaeology of Knowledge, Alan Sheridan (trans.), London: Routledge.
—. [1967] (2005). Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Richard Howard (trans.), London and New York: Routledge.
Kansteiner, Wulf. (1993). “Hayden White’s Critique of the Writing of History,” History and Theory, Vol. 32, No. 3., pp. 273-95.
Kellner, Hans. (1980). “A Bedrock of Order: Hayden White's Linguistic Humanism,” History and Theory, Vol. 19, No. 4, Beiheft 19: Metahistory: Six Critiques, pp.1-29.
Megill, Allan. (2008). “The Rhetorical Dialectic of Hayden White,” unpublished (2008), pp.1-35.
—. (1987). “The Reception of Foucault by Historians,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 48, No. 1., pp. 117-141.
Miller, Cecilia. (1993) Giambattista Vico: Imagination and Historical Knowledge, New York: St. Martin’s Press
Miner, Robert C. (2002). Vico: Genealogist of Modernity, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.
Paul, Herman. (2008). “A Weberian medievalist: Hayden White in the 1950s,” Rethinking History, 12:1, pp. 75 - 102
—. (2006). “An ironic battle against irony: Epistemological and ideological irony in Hayden White's philosophy of history,” 1955–1973. In Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate, ed. Kuisma Korhonen, PP. 35–44.Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Tagliacozzo, Giorgio.
Sturrock, John., (1979), Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Thompson, Wesley E. (1975). “Review of The Greco-Roman Tradition,” The History Teacher, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 303-304
Vico, Giambattista. (1948). The New Science of Giambattista Vico, T. G. Bergin and M. A. Fisch (trans.), Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press
White, Hayden V. “The Abiding Relevance of Croce's Idea of History,” Journal of Modern History 35 (1963), pp. 109-124.
—. (1957). “Collingwood and Toynbee: Transitions in English Historical Thought,” English Miscellany 8, pp.147-78,
—. (1958). “Religion, Culture and Western Civilization in Christopher Dawson’s Idea of History,” English Miscellany 9, pp. 247-87.
—. (1966). “The Burden of History,” History and Theory, Vol.5, No. 2, pp. 111-34.
—.and Willson Coates, (1970). The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe, vol. II: Since the French Revolution, New York: McGraw-Hill.
—. (1969), co-editor; consulting editors, Isaiah Berlin, Max H. Fisch, Elio Gianturco. Giambattista Vico: an International Symposium, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
—. (1973a). The Greco-Roman Tradition, New York: Harper & Row
—. (1973b). “Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground,” History and Theory 12, No. 1
—. (1975). Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press
—. (1977). “Review of Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison by Michel Foucault”, The American Historical Review, Vol. 82, No. 3., PP. 605-606
—. (1979), “Foucault’s Discourse: The Historiography of Anti-Humanism,” in The Content of The Form, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
—. (1982). “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation,” in The Content of The Form, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
—. (1987). The Content of The Form, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
—.1992, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” Edited by Saul Friedlander, Cambridge: Harvard University Press
—. (1995). “Response to Arthur Marwick,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 30, No. 2., pp. 233-246.
— . (2004).《元史学： 十九世纪欧洲的历史想象》【MH: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe】, Trans. By Chen Xin, Revised by Peng Gang, Nanjing: Yinling Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment