THE PROBLEM WITH ‘ANTI-REALISM’

The key move of anti-realist, structuralist historiography, as stated, is to bracket the question of ‘what really happened in the past’, thereby re-describing ‘history’ as, essentially, a literary exercise. A consideration of this anti-realist stance is impossible without acknowledging the influence of Fernand de Saussure’s linguistic theory. Indeed, the anti-realist position within historiography can essentially be understood as a historiographical application of Saussurean linguistic theory. For Saussure, the linguistic ‘sign’ is a ‘two-sided entity’ comprised of the ‘signifier’ (the sound-image) and the ‘signified’ (the thought or concept), which may have an external ‘referent’, but this is beyond the linguist’s purview. Saussure’s insistence on the ‘arbitrariness’ of the sign leads him to claim that language can be analysed as a formal, self- contained, enclosed system (‘langue’), considered separately from the series of communicative speech acts which make use of this grammatical and semiotic system (‘parole’), and moreover, from its material ‘referents’ (Saussure 1970)65. In the historiographical context, this idea translates into a re-description of history as a ‘system of signs’, rather than a system or series of ‘events’ (Rayment Pickard 2000:275).

The Saussurean influence is clearly evident, for example, in Roland Barthes’ essay on ‘Historical Discourse’ (1970), in which he famously claims that ‘historical discourse does not follow reality, it only signifies it; it asserts at every moment: this happened, but the meaning conveyed is only that someone is making that assertion’ (Barthes 1970:154). For Barthes, history is simply one ‘species of narrative’, and what distinguishes historical narrative as a ‘genre’ is not its referential links with an external ‘real’, but rather the literary and discursive features which produce the ‘effet du réel’, or ‘reality effect’, signifying or coding the text as ‘history’ rather than fiction (1970:154). In support of this claim, Barthes draws on Nietzsche’s argument that ‘for a fact to exist, we must first introduce meaning’, by which he means that we can only designate something as a ‘fact’ if we already possess the

65_{For more on Saussure’s}

interpretative framework by which to categorise it as something ‘factual’ as opposed to fictive (ibid: 153). The ‘fact’, he argues, can only exist within language, as a term in a discourse. Yet historical discourse behaves ‘as if it were a simple reproduction of something on another plane of existence altogether, some extra-structural “reality’” (ibid: 153). Indeed, Barthes questions any kind of ‘realism’ in literature or narrative, historical or otherwise. ‘The function of narrative’, he writes, ‘is not to “represent”, it is to constitute a spectacle… not of the mimetic order… “What takes place” in a narrative is from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; “what happens” is language alone, the adventure of language’ (Barthes 1982:294-5) 66.

Hayden White’s work similarly formulates an anti-realist epistemology, yet White concentrates more closely on the implications that the anti-realist epistemology has for understanding historical practice and method. ‘It is sometimes said’, he writes, ‘that the aim of the historian is to explain the past by ‘finding’, ‘identifying’ or ‘uncovering’ the ‘stories’ that lie buried in chronicles, and that the difference between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ is that the historian ‘finds’ his stories, whilst the fiction writer ‘invents’ his. This conception of the historian’s task, however, obscures the extent to which “invention” also plays a part in the historian’s operations’ (White 1973: 6-7). Linguistic tropes and interpretative modes, White argues, underlie not only the ‘emplotment’ of the story, but also underlie what are usually considered to be the ‘primitive elements’ of the process of history-writing, i.e. the processes of selecting and arranging ‘unprocessed’ historical data67

. Although this level of

66 _{The extent to which Barthes’ ‘structuralist analysis of narrative’ ought to be understood as fixed or} exhaustive is a contested issue. Some commentators argue that by the end of the 1960s, there is a significant shift in Barthes’ work, from the desire for all-encompassing structural models towards an affirmation of multiple structural possibilities in a text. Sanford Freedman and Carole Anne Taylor, fore example, emphasise Barthes’ S/Z, in which Barthes’ concept of ‘différance’ attempts to reconcile

evaluative criticism with plural readings of a text, drawing us ‘aesthetically towards the extension of meaning’, and ‘narrative flux’. As such, they argue, ‘Barthes’ interest is no longer in fixing the meaning of texts but instead mapping their movement’, and différance, an idea that Derrida also takes up, ‘underlies all discussion’ (1983:xx-xxiii). Susan Sontag also emphasises this shift from textual system to textual play (1983). What is unequivocal, however, is the radical epistemological challenge Barthes’ work poses for historiographers in his disconnection of the historical narrative from the ‘referent’ or past event.

67_{White defines ‘trope’ as ‘manner’, ‘mood’ or ‘style’, and ‘tropics’ as the process by which language}

understanding and description is ordinarily seen as essentially pre-interpretative, he claims, ‘descriptions of events already constitute interpretations of their nature’ (White 2009:361). Echoing Barthes’ Nietzschean point, White argues that even when we think we are simply identifying or describing sets of events that we ‘find’ within historical records and archives, there are figurative tropes at work which dictate the way in which those events are described, as ‘facts’ or otherwise. For White, this implies that linguistic conventions must therefore be given historiographical priority in the analysis of historical discourse: firstly, because language protocols are required for the understanding of anything, and secondly, because the choices we make regarding the linguistic models we use to mark out a terrain of analysis should ideally be self-conscious rather than unconscious ones (White 1978:22).

Barthes’ and White’s challenges to ‘outmoded’ objectivism and ‘naïve’ realism in history have provoked a much-needed scrutiny of the assumptions about fact and interpretation that we bring to the idea and practice of history. ‘We should no longer naively expect that statements about a given epoch or complex of events in the past “correspond” to some preexistent body of “raw facts” (White 1978: 47). However, whilst these challenges to the objectivist conception of historical reality are to be welcomed, my contention is that neither theorist offers an adequate alternative means of conceiving of historical reality. ‘Historical reality’, I agree, ought not to be construed as a complete sum of ‘raw facts’; but it does not follow that ‘historical reality’ is therefore simply an effect of language. When narrativist historiographers consider a ‘referential illusion’ as a simple ‘meaning effect’, the problem concerning the ‘reality of the historical past’ is not thereby resolved or abolished. It is simply bracketed or ‘set aside’ (Ricoeur 1984:79).

White, in fact, takes a less extreme or cavalier approach to the question of historical reality than Barthes. Barthes’ reduction of the status of ‘historical reality’ to an ‘effet du réel’ entirely dismantles the distinction between historical and fictional literature, in that he treats them simply as different genres (Rayment Pickard 2000: 275). In contrast, White is careful to

‘tropes’ he identifies, as I will discuss further in section 3, are ‘metaphor’, ‘metonymy’, ‘synecdoche’ and ‘irony’.

stress that he is not denying that there is a ‘real’ referent which makes historical narratives historical rather than fictional (White 2009: 354). On the other hand, however, White’s core argument is that what should interest the historiographer is the ‘literature of fact’: the techniques or strategies that language uses to constitute an event as factual or fictive. Indeed, because ‘there are no apodictically certain theoretical grounds on which one can legitimately claim that any one representative mode is more ‘realistic’ than another’, he claims, ‘the best grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another are ultimately aesthetic or moral rather than epistemological’ (1973:xii). According to his ‘tropological’ approach, then, the only way historical narratives can be critically assessed is in terms of their linguistic or tropological characteristics. Thus, whilst White wants to preserve the distinction between historical and fictional events, he does not offer any means to distinguish between them, other than by construing the way they are described as different figures of speech.

The referent on the ‘other side’ of the narration, I contend, thereby hovers in White’s work as a shadowy figure. It functions as the term that prevents history from sliding wholesale into fiction, but which cannot be brought into the critical frame. This performs an essentially Kantian move, by according the past event a ‘noumenal’ status as that which must be thought but cannot be known, thereby severing the link between ‘history A’ (‘what happened’ in the past), and ‘history B’ (the account we give of ‘what we think happened’), and pushing ‘history A’ outside the boundaries of legitimate enquiry and critique. Hemmings does something similar, as she claims that feminist narratives are ‘haunted’ by past events that they exclude, whilst at the same time confining the critical field to an analysis of textual techniques and knowledge politics of the present. As with White, the gesture is towards something that really happened, something that makes a historical narrative historical, and that makes existing historical narratives inaccurate and inadequate. But from this narrativist perspective, the ‘past event’ cannot be taken up into historiographical enquiry, which remains fixed on the form rather than the content.

My core argument, then, is that narrativist formulations of ‘anti-realist’ epistemology rely upon a highly impoverished notion of ‘historical reality’. In Barthes’ work, ‘historical

reality’ is reduced to a linguistic ‘reality effect’; in White’s work, ‘historical reality’ is reduced to a kind of regulative idea, i.e. an idea which must be thought (in order to maintain the history/fiction divide) but its reality cannot be known. To be clear, the anti-objectivist claim that there are no ‘raw historical facts’, and that there can only ever be ‘events under description’, is not the problem (Mink 1978:146). Historical events will always be symbolically mediated and subject to various interpretations, both in retrospect and at the time of their occurrence. The problem, rather, lies with the implication that because a past event is symbolically or ‘tropologically’ mediated, its ‘reality’ cannot be ‘known’, and thus must be bracketed from historiographical analysis. In doing so, anti-realist historiographers construct a pre- or extra-discursive notion of the historical ‘real’ that is akin to the Kantian noumenal, or indeed the Lacanian Real68. This is a highly impoverished or abstract notion, as it implies that historical reality is a realm which is somehow made inaccessible, or blocked out, by the conceptual frameworks and lenses through which individuals and groups interpret and shape the worlds that we inherit and the lives that we live. Yet what would ‘historical reality’ be, if stripped of its symbolic, interpretative determinations?

Accordingly, we need a more complex and much richer notion of historical ‘reality’, to serve as an alternative to the objectivist idea that past reality is a reservoir of ‘raw facts’ waiting to be discovered, and to the narrativist idea that past reality is an effect of language, or an ‘external’ realm somehow ‘beyond’ the symbolic frameworks through which historical discourses and knowledges are shaped. This shift can be accomplished by turning to the broadly ‘pragmatic’ conception of ‘lived reality’, outlined in the Introduction, which affirms that lived reality is always mediated through symbolic structures. More specifically, a richer understanding of the ‘reality of the historical past’ can be reached through the historiographical approach of ‘indirect realism’.

68 _{In Lacan’s account, the order of the ‘Real’ (into which we are born) has no differentiation, no} boundaries or borders, no ‘lack’. It is outside language and the order of the Symbolic, which in contrast, is constituted in terms of oppositions, e.g. presence/absence, and a differentiated set of signifiying elements. The Real is impossible to integrate into the Symbolic order, utterly resisting signification (Evans 1996). I discuss the Lacanian approach further in chapter 5.

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