University of Auckland

Postmodernism - gravedigger of traditional history?

Name: 

Geoffrey Schöning

Final Essay

“In our contemporary or postmodern world, history conceived of as an empirical research method based upon the belief in some reasonably accurate correspondence between the past, its interpretation and its narrative representation is no longer a tenable conception of the task of the historian.”¹

Wrong, Mr Munslow, although otherwise you are perfectly right! One need not go into detailed explanation of this somewhat opaque retort of mine to place a sceptical question mark after the above quote. The mere presence of contention inevitably clouds the clear, straightforward set of circumstances seemingly implied in Munslow’s statement. Even if there is only one oppositional voice to his view, how can there be a “contemporary or postmodern world” that literally takes all of us into account, making it a storehouse of generally accepted ideas, making it “our” property. Given that perspectives other than the “postmodern” do exist, could it not be that ‘facts’, including those of an “empirical research method” and its guiding beliefs, are moulded just as well by perspectival interpretation? Thus, is the “task of the historian” really conceptualised in the way Munslow describes it? If not – if it is itself a deliberately created spectre invoked only to be subsequently exorcised in the intellectual conflict about what constitutes history and what this discipline has to deal with – do we have to stroll from the beaten path at all? Are Clio’s followers so helplessly entangled in reveries that they need to be awakened from them? 

These questions, and their echoing connotations, sketch out the frame within which my discussion of postmodernist ideas and their validity for the practice of history will take place. It is well-nigh self-evident: we are moving on highly theoretical ground. Although postmodernist critique is aimed at methodological problems of the historical discipline, it departs from the very battlefields of occidental philosophy. What is reality? Is there any ontological truthfulness ‘out there,’ beyond our representations of the world? 

Postmodern answers to these questions do not only undermine the intellectual premises of a self-indulgent group of academics, burdened with theory. Indeed, they attack the whole profession of history; they might impact on the fate of careers. To say so is certainly not to distort the debate into a struggle of life and death; but it helps understand why the so-called ‘postmodernist challenge,’ threatening as it does to invalidate the very life-paths of persons, has provoked, and still provokes, intense emotional responses – albeit less fervently in most recent years. What is at stake is the future, and in fact the past, of a discipline whose foundations were laid some 150 years ago, and, since then, have not been shaken seriously. Postmodernism’s most uncomfortable cannonades aim at the very pillars of historical work – “the belief in some reasonably accurate correspondence between the past, its interpretation and its narrative representation,” as Munslow puts it. What does that mean? To understand the full significance of the ‘correspondence theory,’ often referred to in the pamphlets of postmodern theorists, ² it is worthwhile scrutinising each of its explanatory terms in its own right. What exactly is the ‘past’ historians are confronted with? Suffice to say, it is not an entity one suddenly stumbles over while doing historical research. The ‘past’ is the designation for an open-ended temporal space, extending from the present up to infinity. It can include a sole season in a rural village on the upper Nile or the whole evolution of mankind – the historian decides what part of it he analyses. However, as said before, the past is not just there, it has to be reconstructed. Means to this end are historical sources. Any remnant of bygone days, be it left behind deliberately or by accident, may serve as a tool to get to grips with past ‘reality,’ i.e. to show “how things actually were.”3 The Rankean motto already includes a second aspect of the correspondence theory; reconstructing the past presupposes that contexts are being established, lines are being drawn from one piece of evidence to another; in short, that the historian traces back the furrows of causality.

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1 Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, London and New York, 1997, p. 2. so is certainly not to distort the debate into a struggle of life and death; but it helps understand why the so-called ‘postmodernist challenge,’ threatening as it does to invalidate the very life-paths of persons, has provoked, and still provokes, intense emotional responses – albeit less fervently in most recent years. What is at stake is the future, and in fact the past, of a discipline whose foundations were laid some 150 years ago, and, since then, have not been shaken seriously.

2 Kramer, for example, paraphrases it as the ‘historiographical paradigm of reality and representation,” Lloyd S. Kramer, ‘Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra’, in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History, Berkeley, 1989, p. 100.