Conventions of the genre

The book of Vienna Field , which dates from April 1969 - August 1970, arose in the wake of the widespread popularity of late Non -demonstralist and partly deconstructivist methodologies and methods in the humanities and literary criticism of Europe and America.

The author is a Frenchman , which is very symptomatic and indicative, especially since the “application” to his main work gives an analytical study about Michelle Foucault , the leader of that unforgettable era of the late 1960s, when the Foucault’s scientific and cultural paradigm of the book, Words and things, etc.), J.Derrida (“Archeology of Knowledge” turned out at once. Grammatology "," Letter and Difference "), J.Dezes (" Ralism and Repetition "," Logic of meaning "), and in parallel the" moderately "philological work of J.Todor , Ts. Todorov , the Semiotic" breakthroughs " of the R. Bart and gained their revolutions were carried out by the famous Levakian group" Tel Kel ". Basically, they all turned to the discourse of literature - almost one Foucault hacked the story.

In 1973, a book of Professor of Columbia University Hayden White Methastoria , already familiar to the Russian reader (in Russian, see: Yekaterinburg: Publishing House of the Urals, 2002), and will take a niche of an unexpected explanation of how they write history and what it is. Paul Ven managed to fit between Foucault and White, and truly his work is the work "between". It has a claim to a new understanding of the essence of history, which, against the background of shifts taking place in the culture and science, could no longer be understood traditionally - as a discursive description of the past and the totality of relevant knowledge, for some reason (obviously, in the old fashioned way) by scientific. It contains criticism of all existing approaches to history - in this regard, the work of Vienna is quite in the spirit of postmodern. But against the background of both Foucault and White, Vienna’s book clearly loses. Perhaps it is too academic, and perhaps there are not enough fundamentally new ideas in it - at least those that we would consider new today.

Most likely, this book to us is late, in Russian she would have to go early, and of course - to White, accompanying Foucault. Then she would literally have no price - which, however, today does not exclude its usefulness for both specialists and a wide reader who is interested in the problems of historical knowledge. But let's take the book specifically.

"... Historians talk about genuine events whose acting person is a person; history is a novel based on real events," the author writes in the preface. Here is its main thesis, unfolding further on 350 pages. Like White and Paul Riker , whose book (time and story ”) also appeared after Vienna, he advocates the rapprochement of history and fiction, history and literature and believes the traditional difference between the very history and philosophy of the history of irrelevant. The return of the Aristotelian concept of intrigue is connected with him with the total criticism of the “scientific” of history, which veins conducts consistently and continuously (as if contrary to the general thesis of the elimination of the principle of the continuity of history). “A decrease in explanatory claims, an elevation of narrative ability: both of these movements are continuously balanced, as on a swing,” speaks of the method and orientation of the Wayne Field (Russian translator of the book; cf. French: Paul Veyne ) P.riker (time and story. T. 1. m.; SPb., 1998. C.196).

There are three parts in the book. The first is dedicated to the "subject of history", that is, what history is studying. The main point of the audit of the Venom of canonical historiography here comes down to the dispute about the "event" of history - the nature of historical events, their "specificity", the presence of their reference to their meaning and value. All this is included in the circle of the problems of the Annals school , to which the followers of which, of course, belongs to Paul veins, but with the decisions of which he did not absolutely agree.

On the one hand, the vein writes, the essence and purpose of history “depends on the choice of point of view,” but this does not mean its subjectivity and arbitrariness, because the story “has chosen a certain way of cognition” : it comprehends the 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 genuine facts, and not about believable (as in the novel) or implausible (as in a fairy tale)." Therefore, she does not have her own special, historical, method, there are no special rules of historical synthesis, except for the rules of working with sources. Moreover, history is “mutilated knowledge”, because the historian speaks of the events of the past not what they were “in fact”, but what we know about them or can still find out. Therefore, inconsistency and discreteness of history, the abundance of gaps in it is its integral feature: "After all, she is not a fabric, she has no basis."

A kind of "highlight" of the work of Vienna consists in the following positions arising from it partially positivist (and the author’s connection with logical positivism is quite noticeable), partly postmodern criticism. He seeks to determine the "difference between the" field "of historical events and history as a genre, taking into account the difference in its perception for centuries." The “event field” is a “virtual domain of the historical genre”, a certain “pre -conceptual background”, as Ricker says about this, is akin to “domestic evidence”; It creates the possibility of a historical genre that arises with intrigue. It was the concept of intrigue that allowed Vienna to remove the drama between the event and non-existence of history, essential for the Annals school. Non-state, according to Vienna, this is the "area of ​​history that we do not perceive as such." Non-existence fills the indefinite field of history, distinguishing it from the field of intrigue, where the events, so to speak, took place and became the subject of the historical genre.

Next. All kinds of conversations about the idea of ​​history or about its sense, from the perspective of Vienna, the essence of 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 the value approach. History with a capital letter 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 a specific, that is, comprehensible, in the events of the human dimension. Historical what is not universal, and that which is not unique," so, quite provocative, formulates the veins of the essence of history. For a historian, the concept of time is not necessarily - he "needs a intelligible concept of the process," that is, again, intrigues. History is a “book concept, not existential,” therefore all historical knowledge is primarily knowledge, not intuition. The Vienna provocations do not end there - they are just beginning.

In the second section of the book, entitled "Understanding", veins question the explanatory claims of history. To “explain” for him means to make intrigues understandable, all explanations "are concluded in the sense that the historian gives the story." Any causal explanation of events is impossible, more precisely, even if we give it, another historian can just as successfully connect the causes and investigation with a different knot and build a different series of events, that is, create a new intrigue. For - as the third section of the book of Vienna reads - "there are laws in history ... but there are no laws of history ." Therefore, the historical explanation combines the events according to one of the three schemes: either according to the scheme of randomness, or according to the scheme of objective circumstances ("material reasons"), or according to the scheme of freedom of thought ("final causes").

When implementing the first type of explanation, history appears as a theater, "where Fortune is amused by the destruction of our plans" ; According to the second version, the Marxist concept of the historical process was created; The third option gives an “idealistic” concept at the output, 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 ontology nor its own method, but all its theories and types are only “brief presentations of intrigue”. "... Stories are not explaining the principles, but the words about the past state of things," therefore its concepts, although they exist, are sometimes necessary, do not cover the whole variety of specific things: after all, things change faster than words.

Thus, the veins balances between nominalism and realism, recognition and denial of logical universals, as well as between the adoption and criticism of the Diltheeva category of “understanding” ( ”... the only dignity of the understanding methodology is that it shows us the angle of view under which any behavior will look explained and ordinary; but it does not allow us to tell which of the less ordinary explanations are true” ). In general, it can be said that Paul veins pronounces in a new scientific and cultural context a lot of the fact that V. Dilthey was pronounced at the dawn of the twentieth century, G. Zimmel , etc. “ Philosophers of Life ”: both for them and for Vienna are not a “work of art”, its method is an experience that sets the limits of historical objectivity, it, as we said above, has no laws, and all attempts, and all attempts are there. The explanations of its events are subjective, history has no values, but there is interest in us, which are not clear to us, inaccessible to observing the goal, hence the "most difficult problem of historical synthesis" is "the relationship between consciousness and act." However, the historical hermeneutics Vienna has a distinct positivist orientation: solving the problems of the Baden school , he does it in the spirit of the Cogene - if you turn to the primary analysts, and in addition, at an angle of narrative strategy, characteristic of humanistic from the late 1960s.

In the third section entitled "Progress of History", the idea (also far from new) is naturally nominated about the absence of progress in the history of progress. "The progress of history was in liberation from him," the only form of its progress is the "expansion of the headings", the story is described, like the art of drawing, and "she almost has nothing to expect from science." However, the humanities as such - about a person and his activities - Ven not rejects, moreover, from his position, history has embraced many of those "pseudo -nause" that appeared in modern society.

For example, there is a lot of sociology from him: “Sociology is a pseudo -dn, generated by academic conventions that limit freedom of history” ; "Sociology is a science that would like to be," it "relates to the history of modern culture, but not to the history of science" , etc. To gain completeness, modern history "must overcome three restrictions: contrasting modern and historical, conventionality of the continuum , an event approach." Thus, merging with sociology, and with ethnography, and with a “comparative” story, it will gain the truth of the integrity and unity of intrigue. "... History is what its sources do, history is what it is doing, without our knowledge, the conventions of the genre," concludes the book by P.Vin. Apparently, he is right - otherwise there would be no genre of criticism of history, which sends his letter.