Alena Blagova. Conventions of the genre

The book by Paul Vienna , work on which dates from April 1969 - August 1970, arose in the wake of the widespread popularity of late structuralist and already partly deconstructivist methodologies and techniques in the humanities and literary criticism in Europe and America.

The author is French , which is very symptomatic and indicative, especially since the “Appendix” to his main work contains an analytical study about Michel Foucault , the leader of that unforgettable era of the late 1960s, when Foucault’s books turned the scientific and cultural paradigm (“Archaeology” knowledge", "Words and Things", etc.), J. Derrida ("On Grammatology", "Writing and Difference"), J. Deleuze ("Difference and Repetition", "Logic of Sense"), and at the same time published "moderately "The philological works of J. Genette , Ts. Todorov , the semiotic "breakthroughs" of R. Barth " was gaining momentum were carried out and the well-known leftist group " Tel Kel . Basically, they all turned to the discourse of literature - it was almost Foucault alone who cracked history.

In 1973, Columbia University professor Hayden White’s book “ Metahistory ”, already familiar to Russian readers, will be published (in Russian, see: Ekaterinburg: Ural University Publishing House, 2002), and will occupy the niche of a non-rhetorical explanation of how history is written and that she is. Paul Wen managed to fit between Foucault and White, and truly his work is work “in between.” It makes a claim to a new understanding of the essence of history, which, against the backdrop of the shifts taking place in culture and science, could no longer be understood traditionally - as a discursive description of the past and a body of corresponding knowledge, for some reason (obviously, in the old fashioned way) called scientific. It contains criticism of all existing approaches to history - in this regard, Wen's work is quite in the spirit of postmodernism. But against the background of both Foucault and White, Vienna’s book clearly loses. Perhaps it is too academic, and perhaps it lacks fundamentally new ideas - at least those that we would consider new today.

Most likely, this book was late for us; it should have been published in Russian earlier, and certainly before White, accompanying Foucault. Then it would literally have no price - which, however, even today does not exclude its usefulness both for specialists and for the general reader interested in the problems of historical knowledge. But let's deal with the book specifically.

“...Historians talk about true events in which a person is the protagonist; history is a novel based on real events ,” the author writes in the preface. Here is his main thesis, which unfolds further on 350 pages. Like White and Paul Ricoeur , whose book (Time and Narrative) also appeared after Vienna's work, he advocates a rapprochement between history and fiction, history and literature, and considers the traditional distinction between history proper and the philosophy of history irrelevant. His return to history of the Aristotelian concept of intrigue is associated with a total critique of the “scientific nature” of history, which Wen carries out consistently and continuously (as if contrary to the thesis common to Foucault about the elimination of the principle of continuity of history). “The reduction of explanatory claims, the elevation of narrative ability: both of these movements are continuously balanced, as on a swing ,” says Paul about the method and direction of his work Veyne (the Russian translator of the book made him Venom; cf. French: Paul Veyne ) P. Ricoeur (Time and Story. T. 1. M.; St. Petersburg, 1998. P. 196).

The book has three parts. The first is devoted to the “Subject of History,” that is, what history studies. The main point of Venom's revision of canonical historiography here comes down to a dispute about the "eventfulness" of history - about the nature of historical events, their "specificity", the presence or absence of their meaning and value. All this falls within the range of problems of the Annales school , whose followers, of course, include Paul Wen, but with whose decisions he does not absolutely agree.

On the one hand, Wen writes, the essence and purpose of history “depend on the choice of point of view ,” but this does not mean its subjectivity and arbitrariness, for history “has chosen a certain way of knowing” : it comprehends events “through documents and evidence, one might say, through tekmeria, through traces" , that is, through sources. History is written as a historical narrative, but it gives "a story about true facts, and not about plausible (as in a novel) or implausible (as in a fairy tale)" . Therefore, it does not have its own special, historical method, there are no special rules for historical synthesis, except perhaps the rules for working with sources. Moreover, history is “crippled knowledge,” because the historian speaks about the events of the past not what they “really” were, but what we know about them or can still find out. Therefore, the inconsistency and discreteness of history, the abundance of gaps in it are its integral features: “after all, it is not fabric, it has no basis . ”

A kind of “zest” of Wen’s work consists of the following provisions, arising from his partly positivist (and the author’s connection with logical positivism is quite noticeable), partly postmodernist criticism. He seeks to define "the difference between the 'field' of historical events and history as a genre, taking into account the differences in its perception over the centuries . " The “event field” is a “virtual domain of the historical genre,” a kind of “pre-conceptual background,” as Ricoeur puts it, akin to “pre-predicative evidence”; it creates the possibility of a historical genre that emerges with intrigue. It was the concept of intrigue that allowed Vienna to remove the drama between the eventful and non-eventful nature of history, which was essential for the Annales school. The non-event, according to Wen, is that “area of ​​history that we do not perceive as such . ” Non-eventfulness fills the indefinite field of history, distinguishing it from the field of intrigue, where events, so to speak, took place and became the subject of the historical genre.

Further. Any kind of talk about the idea of ​​history or its meaning, from Wen’s position, is nonsense, “the fruit of dogmatic illusions,” as well as attempts to find values ​​in history or try to explain it from the point of view of a value approach. History with a capital H does not exist, it “consists of the same substance as the life of each of us ,” and in general, it is interested in “not the uniqueness of individual events, but their specificity ,” even moreover, their typicality. “History is a description of the specific, that is, comprehensible, in the events of the human dimension. <...> What is historical is what is not universal, and what is not unique,” ​​- this is how Wen, quite provocatively, formulates the essence of history. For a historian, the concept of time is not necessary - he “needs an intelligible concept of process,” that is, again, intrigue. History is “a bookish concept, not an existential one,” therefore any historical knowledge is, first of all, knowledge, and not intuition. Vienna's provocations do not end there - they are just beginning.

In the book's second section, entitled "Understanding," Wen questions the explanatory claims of history. “Explaining” for him means making intrigues understandable; all explanations “are contained in the meaning that the historian gives to the story . ” Any cause-and-effect explanation of events is impossible; more precisely, even if we give it, another historian can just as successfully connect the causes and effects with a different knot and build a different series of events, that is, create a new intrigue. For - as the third section of Vienna's book already says - "there are laws in history... but there are no laws of history ." Therefore, historical explanation connects events according to one of three schemes: either according to the scheme of chance, or according to the scheme of objective circumstances ("material causes"), or according to the scheme of freedom of movement of thought ("final causes").

When implementing the first type of explanation, history appears as a theater “where fortune amuses itself with the destruction of our plans” ; according to the second version, the Marxist concept of the historical process was created; the third option results in an “idealistic” concept, when the past is explained by the action of an absolute idea, moral or any other principles. Thus, it turns out that history has neither an ontology nor its own method, and all its theories and types are only “summaries of intrigue.” “...History does not need explanatory principles, but words about the former state of things ,” therefore, its concepts, although they exist, and are even sometimes necessary, do not cover the entire variety of specific things: after all, things change faster than words.

Thus, Wen balances between nominalism and realism, recognition and denial of logical universals, as well as between acceptance and criticism of Dilthey’s category of “understanding” ( “... the only advantage of the understanding technique is that it shows us the angle of view from which any behavior will be appear explicable and ordinary; but it does not allow us to say which of the less ordinary explanations is true . " In general, we can say that Paul Wien pronounces in a new scientific and cultural context much of what W. Dilthey , G. Simmel and other “ philosophers of life ” said at the dawn of the twentieth century: both for them and for Vienna history not scientific - it is a “work of art”, its method is experience, which sets the limits of historical objectivity, it, as we said above, has no laws, and all attempts to explain its events are subjective, history has no values, but there is interest and goals incomprehensible to us, inaccessible to observation, hence “the most difficult problem of historical synthesis” is “the relationship between consciousness and action.” However, the historical <anti>hermeneutics of Vienna has a clear positivist orientation: solving problems Baden school , he does this in the spirit of Cohen - if we turn to the original analogues, and in addition, from the angle of the narrativist strategy that has been characteristic of humanities since the late 1960s.

In the third section, entitled “The Progress of History,” the idea (also far from new) is naturally put forward about the absence of progress in history. “The progress of history consisted in liberation from it ,” the only form of its progress is “the expansion of rubrics,” history is descriptive, like the art of drawing, and ” “it has almost nothing to expect from science . However, Wen does not reject the humanities as such - about man and his activities; moreover, from his position, history embraces many of those “pseudosciences” that have appeared in modern society.

For example, sociology gets a lot from him: “Sociology is a pseudoscience generated by academic conventions that limit the freedom of history” ; “sociology is a science that would like to be” , it “refers to the history of modern culture, but not to the history of science” , etc. To gain completeness, modern history “must overcome three limitations: the opposition of modern and historical, the convention of a continuum , and the event-based approach.” Thus, merging with sociology, and with ethnography, and with “comparative” history, it will acquire the truth of integrity and the unity of intrigue. “...History is what its sources make it, history is what the conventions of the genre make it, without our knowledge ,” concludes the book by P. Wen. Apparently, he is right - otherwise there would be no genre of criticism of history, which guides his writing.