Translated material
Interview with Hayden White
Print Maria Malikova
Hayden White (b. 1928) is a professor of comparative literature and Germanic languages and literatures at Stanford University, and professor emeritus of the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His early works were devoted to intellectual history, in particular the history of ideas of the Middle Ages, but the publication in 1973 of the book “Metahistory” became a kind of milestone that determined his place in modern knowledge - in that general movement of humanitarian thought, which is known as the “linguistic turn”. , recently translated into Russian1. The words of Michel Foucault, said about Marx and Freud, can easily be attributed to White: “The peculiarity of these authors is that they are the authors not only of their works, their books. They created something more: the possibility and rule for the formation of other texts.” For a complete bibliography of White's work compiled by his student Eva Domanskaya, see: http://www.pre-text.com/ptlist/white.html , for a useful annotated bibliography on the rhetoric and poetics of historiography, see Geoffrey Hearn's website “The untimely past” .
Maria Malikova. Who are you by origin, what are your roots? What influenced your choice of field of study?
Hayden White. I don't want to ruin the interview format, but in the spirit of what I'm trying to do, let's start by thinking about the interview genre itself. At first glance, the question about the origins of a humanities or natural scientist’s choice of subject matter may seem “natural,” because it seems to help get to the bottom of the motives that motivated him. I, of course, have a myth of my own origin: a boy from a working-class environment, living on a scholarship, poor but honest, and so on in the same spirit - but I believe that such “origin” actually explains absolutely nothing, since here I was no different from millions of young people of my generation. Why did I choose history as my field of study? Several real, great teachers, and above all one scholar, William J. Bossenbrock, whom I met in my first year at university, showed me that historical reflection can be an exciting vocation. All my life I have been interested in the past as a problem - probably mainly because I don’t have a past myself, that is, I have never found any inheritance or property bequeathed to me by generations of ancestors. I wanted to understand how the idea of a “past,” or the shared past of a group or community of people, could serve as the basis of personal identity. Therefore, under the influence of Bossenbrock, the great “deconstructor” of both “history” and “identity,” I devoted myself quite early to the study of history. Then another mentor told me that the key to studying history is knowing languages, and on the way to your PhD you should learn as many languages as possible. So I started learning languages quite early: Spanish, German, French, Latin and Greek, in that order. Then I did not know that in parallel with the study of languages I should study comparative grammar - now I know; If I had the opportunity to go through this path first, I would become a philologist. And now I am an amateur philologist. But this is precisely where my interest in text, textual criticism and textuality goes back. So where are the roots? If this question could really be answered in relation to an individual or a group of people, we would receive the key to a specifically “historical” understanding of the object that interests us.
Do you like teaching? Do you have followers?
Yes, I really enjoy teaching, I enjoy teaching as a performing art. I like to encourage young people and arouse their interest in exploring the same problems and issues that inspired me. Not with the goal of creating a “follower” who would reproduce or even continue what I do. My task is to instill in them a sense of an individual “voice”, a personal language, and their own working style. I have never tried to create a circle of “faithful” or followers, although, naturally, there are many students whose interests and what they do are especially close to me. But my main goal as a teacher is not to educate adherents who would disseminate my own views, but to offer students a model of a certain kind of intellectual activity.
Do you think it is possible to consider history as a single project? If so, how would you describe it?
Of course, the “utopian dream” of any scientific discipline is to achieve a comprehensive synthesis, to bring together the efforts of thousands of workers who work in this field. But there are a number of reasons why the “idea of history” (“Begriff” of history, as Hegel would say) must remain unfinished, open, incomplete and fragmentary. One of these reasons is that traditionally the object of historical research is considered to be “individual”, be it a specific person, thing, object or some kind of collective community - a class, institution, social movement, etc. Consequently, historical research is always aimed at clarifying the specific features of the thing being studied, and not at the abstract properties that include it in the class. The second reason is that historical objects, by definition, must be considered as things in the process of development, undergoing changes not only in their qualities or properties, but also changing in essence. Therefore, the central problem of history is the problem of description. How to describe a single thing that is in the process of change? Hegel believed that the possibility of such a description, more scientific than artistic, is provided by the “dialectical” method. But the so-called “dialectical method” turns out to be a metaphor describing what has already been achieved in “poetry” by great artists - Dante, Pushkin or Proust. As for generalizing ideas about the historical process as a whole, such as those created by Vico, Hegel, Marx and ... yes, Spengler, all of them, and this is very significant, were aware of the “poetic” nature of their projects. So, in my opinion, a comprehensive picture of world history can only exist as a metaphor, not as a concept. The most "conceptual" philosophies of history, those of Comte and Buckle, and to some extent Hegel and Marx ultimately failed because of the inability of these concepts to capture the individual personality. The desire for this inspired poets such as Dante, Yeats or Eliot. However, they, like Spengler, used metaphorical speech to express their ideas.
What do you think of anthropological approaches to history—for example, the work of Carlo Ginzburg?
First, Ginzburg's work can only be called "anthropological" in the most general sense. There is absolutely nothing anthropological in them, with the exception of an interest in “folk” culture. Anthropology helps history understand its possible subject, first of all, pointing out the presence of such areas of history that were deprived of their own voice and remained undocumented. After all, history has traditionally been limited to the study of peoples who had a “written” culture. Modern anthropology (as opposed to so-called "philosophical anthropology") initially focused on oral cultures, "preliterate" peoples. It is useful to keep in mind that anthropology in the West has a dual basis: first missionary activity, then capitalist imperialism. Only recently has anthropology become interested in modern cultures and societies in the process of modernization. At the same time, it became more “historical”, although it remained “presentist” and “populist”. Anthropology has a number of conceptual tools that historians can use to define their own research topics, but anthropology's methods, particularly the participatory and observational method, are not applicable to the past, which by definition consists of events and things no longer observable. Anthropology influences history mainly by “bringing it down”, shifting the interest of historians from the “great” in history to more modest aspects. But historical research continues to be dominated by “great events, people and institutions.” Internally, this is motivated by an interest in “grand” and, in particular, catastrophic events, such as the Battle of Stalingrad or the French Revolution. It is this interest in the catastrophic that determines the tendency of historical writing as a literary genre towards plot types of tragedy and/or satire (tragedy in the case when the greatness of historical agents is emphasized, satire when the “recklessness” of the plans that led to the depicted catastrophe is emphasized).
The New Historicism idea of "history as text" was largely influenced by you. What do you think about how this idea has developed and about the place of “new historicism” in history?
What can I say? Let's start with the fact that representatives of the “new historicism” (Greenblatt, Gallagher) were hardly under the strong “influence” of my works. Of course, they read them, because we are old friends. I myself consider their works to be original and innovative, useful for the study of literary history and cultural history in general. But their main influences were anthropologists Clifford Geertz, Michel Foucault, and people like Roland Barthes, who came from semiotics and orthodox (i.e., Freudian) psychoanalysis. In their excellent recent book, Practicing New Historicism (The University of Chicago Press, 2000), Greenblatt and Greenblatt cite my work as the theoretical basis for their view of the interaction between text and context. , where the context itself is considered as a text, that is, it is subjected to that “close reading” with which literary scholars illuminate a literary text. However, the new historians, unlike the representatives of the new criticism against whom they rebelled, do not treat the literary text as some kind of sacred object, intended only for veneration and not for analysis. They place a text from an aristocratic culture next to a text from a lower culture, juxtapose a work of Shakespeare with a medical work or a legal document, and study the entire corpus in its entirety, reading first one and then the other. In fact, New Historicism seems to have a kind of "organicist" view of culture, similar to that held by Geertz, who pioneered the use of reading techniques borrowed from New Criticism to study everyday events (such as the famous cockfights). in Bali, which he reads as if it were text). This “organicism” distinguishes representatives of new historicism from Foucault, whom they revere mainly for his interest in the relationship between culture and power. The new historians are only a little younger than me, but that is why they were politically influenced by the events of May 1968 and the consequences of these events. For me, these events, although I took part in some of them, were not formative experiences. My political views are left-wing, but they are more traditional than those of my younger colleagues. I have little interest in "alternative" or "countercultural" programs based on sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, although I can appreciate the effects, good and bad, of such programs.
I have never actually argued that history is a text, or that the past does not exist and is merely a textual construct. But what interests me in historical writing is its “discursive” aspect, how it can, in some successful cases, create a “reality effect,” and how it replaces the thing itself with the image of the thing. Unfortunately for historical writing, this effect is created much more clearly by film or video, so that ordinary prose against their background looks more... that's right, more ordinary. Discourse theory makes possible the scientific analysis of the relationships that exist between different types of texts. Text theory, developed by theorists such as Greimas and Barthes, makes it possible to recognize and describe the artificially constructed elements of such a text, which, like historical writing, claims to deal exclusively with “data.” The past is what is or was, while historical information about any part of the past is a construct. Therefore, if we want to identify the ideology of a particular genre of writing, it is important to have a theory that describes how the past is constructed in and through language or discourse.
You recently published an introduction to a collection of essays by Reinhard Koselleck and participated in a discussion of the legacy of Hana Arendt at a philosophy seminar at Stanford University. Can you name any modern researchers who have played an equally significant role in the study of history?
It depends on what kind of story you're talking about. First of all, Hannah Arendt and, to a certain extent, Koselleck are analysts of the history of the very idea of history, and, in addition, they are historians of a special kind. Arendt used historical writing for philosophical and sociological purposes, primarily to analyze totalitarianism and to defend democracy in the modern world. Koselleck tried to create a new field of study: the history of concepts and, above all, the history of the concept of history. Both of these thinkers trace the evil of modern totalitarianism to a painfully distorted idea of history—essentially apocalyptic and crypto-religious. None of them actually tried to change the established or academic way of studying history. In this respect they both differ from figures such as Michel de Certeau or, for that matter, Michel Foucault. The first tried to introduce psychoanalytic (primarily Lacanian) concepts into historical research and, at the same time, use the approach of modern anthropology with its interest in the “other.” This is a different line than Giovanni Levi, Carlo Ginzburg, Jacques Revel, François Artog, Roger Chartier and others, for whom the main thing was to change the subject or topics of historical research - in accordance with the goals pursued by the Annales school. A change of subject naturally requires changes in methodology, but the French thinkers I named had only minimal changes in mind. It was more important for them to repel the attacks of radicals - adherents of feminism, post-colonialism and neo-Marxism, who were trying to change the social function of historical research. It is very difficult to change historical research programmatically. For most historians, the past appears from the very beginning as given (or already positioned as complete and complete). Intending to study some part of this past, they are not ready for fundamentally new changes in their understanding of it. Even among feminists who rebelled against historiography written by men, about men, for men, a split has emerged between those who want to simply “add” women to “history” and those who understand that feminist historiography involves restructuring the entire field of historical research. The same with postcolonialism. Some of them remain historians who simply want to give voice to colonial peoples through traditional methods, but there are others who understand that the study of these peoples, for example, requires a revision of the very idea of history. Who else in the 20th century played a significant role in redefining our understanding of history? Walter Benjamin, Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, Max Weber and Toynbee, Lukács in the history of literature and especially in the history of culture. Several Yet...
What is history for you - a humanitarian or sociological discipline? And what do you think is the relationship between these aspects of it?
First of all, we must assume that when you say “humanitarian,” you mean “humanistic.” There is a curious ambiguity here. In English, “humanitarian” means “concerned with the needs of humanity, with the satisfaction of human suffering.” ''Humanistic'' refers to a follower of humanism, an ideology that emerged during the Renaissance and was based on the idea that the highest manifestations of the human spirit are to be found in Antiquity. Further, historical research has always been part of the field of “humanities,” that is, it arose in Antiquity, in Greece and Rome, and existed as a section of rhetoric. It was only in the 19th century that they began to be perceived as a “science,” and only in the 20th century did they undergo reform to model the study of history on natural philosophy. To me, the attempts of the 19th century to build historical science on the model of natural philosophy seem unsuccessful. In our time, the natural sciences themselves have become much more “historical,” not only in the awareness that various scientific disciplines have their own history and should be studied in their dialectical, so to speak, development, taking into account those “errors” that seem to us , were replaced by “truth”. The point is that they themselves have become much more, shall we say, “historicist,” to the extent that they have accepted a view of truth that depends on the point of view of the researcher and the context of the study. It is even believed that modern natural sciences are concerned not so much with the “true” as with the “real.” And although historians have always insisted that they are primarily interested in truth, in fact, since the time of Ranke, they have primarily tried to distinguish the “real” from the “imaginary.” Ranke said that he was interested in the past “as it really was” (“wie es eigentlich gewesen”), which refers to the “real” rather than the “true.” So can historical research be “scientific”? My answer is yes, if they follow the model of modern sciences rather than the 19th century sciences (empiricism and positivism). Can historical research even be “humanistic”? Just not in its classical, ancient form, which was determined solely by interest in “great people” and “great events” of the past. One can think of attempts to use historical research for humanistic purposes, especially by Walter Benjamin, but also by historians of the masses and historians of the poor.
How do your two statements fit together: on the one hand, narrative is “an extremely efficient system of discursive production of meaning” through which an individual can learn to exist in an apparently “imaginative relation to his real conditions of existence”; on the other hand, “every historical narrative” is “allegorical” and serves as a means of endowing events with a meaning that is not simply causal, but rather moral or ethical?
I consider allegory to be a typical tool of ideologization, and narrativization to be a typical tool of allegorization. It sounds abstract. But as far as the past is concerned, it is, from the point of view of the present, a place of fantasy, or anxiety, or hope, or regret. It is not directly achievable, and in general there is reason to ask: why achieve it? Modern cognitive research clearly shows that memory is not the best tool for adapting to reality: spending too much time thinking about the past, you lose sight of the present and the dangers lurking in it. So why cultivate “memory,” that is, do what historians apparently do? And how to do this? Since the past is available only in an indirect and fragmentary form, man "fills in" - through imagination - the gaps, causes and motives that are missing in the historical data. What is the relationship between this evidence and “reality”? There is no “reality” to which the data can be compared, only contradictory evidence. Regardless of whether these testimonies confirm each other or not, this is not “reality” before us, but just more evidence. Historians, of course, can be inspired by the dream of a true and complete picture of the past and create it to the best of their ability. But it always remains an ideal, not a reality.
You say that the need for completeness in the historical narrative is a need for moral meaning, a need for the significance of certain real events to be assessed by their role as an element of a moral drama. What is your idea of “morality” for history, historical storytelling, and the storyteller?
The concept of “morality” is associated with ideas about good and evil, therefore, morality in history is the qualification of agents and their actions from the point of view of good and/or evil. It couldn't be simpler. Until the moment when history is thought to have become a science, the idea of the historical process as a moral drama did not pose a serious problem. The depiction of the hero's rise and fall as a struggle between good and evil, or, for example, a struggle between good and good, formed the basis of historical narrativization. I keep repeating that real life does not break down into stories or narratives. You can talk about real life or a sequence of real events, but to do this they need to be given a plot form, “subjected.” And to plot in historiography, as in other forms of prose discourse, means to give moral functions to the agents and events of history.
Speaking about the boundaries of representation in the historiography of the Holocaust, you propose a certain “middle voice” for an adequate representation of this event. What do you think about personal involvement, the narrator’s empathy towards the event, on the one hand, and the need for the discipline of historical research, an attitude towards the objectivity of historical analysis, on the other?
There are two circumstances here. First, there is no inevitable conflict between empathy for an event and studying it, a disciplined approach. This is convincingly proven by the work of Primo Levi. There are many types of discipline, scientific is just one of them. The other is an artistic discipline. And another is the discipline of great storytellers. It is too often said that discipline and objectivity require that the observer of an event be “outside” it, or at least try to distance himself from it. This can be commendable when it comes to the natural scientist resisting the temptation to anthropomorphize the object of his research. But in historical reflection, anthropomorphization is necessary, since the objects of our research are anthropos, that is, human beings doing what only human beings are capable of doing. How can one be both inside and outside an event at the same time, remain both an external observer and an internal agent? The Greeks considered this possible and distinguished three voices (or modes) of the verb in their language: active, passive and neuter. The latter was used to denote an action in which the agents have some special personal interest or in which they directly participate to protect their own interests - such as making a sacrifice or pronouncing an oath. When pronouncing an oath, the action is neither active nor passive - you do not influence anything or anyone and are not the object of influence. Here you yourself become the object of your own actions, but not in the accusative or dative sense. I do something to myself (take an oath) for myself (change my relationship with the world, accept responsibility). The same kind of action occurs when narrating real events, and the more acutely these events touch my human nature, the more it forces me to be both objective and subjective in relation to them. Of course, all this has nothing to do with those situations where we are talking only about curiosity about the events of the past. Many people believe that history is a dispassionate study of past events, but the result of this approach is at best an archival record, not a story, not a narrative, and there is no moral sense in it.
Is there a fundamental difference between historical eyewitness narratives and retrospective research?
Maybe. It seems to me that there are two types of witness literature: one is nonfiction (where the effort is simply to report one's experience, regardless of whether the narrator has a compensatory purpose or not), and another where the testimony rises to the level of a work of art . This is the difference between what Primo Levi, Ameri or Borowski created from the huge volume written by other, ordinary witnesses. Artworks such as “Is This a Man?” Levi, they are not so much trying to talk about “what happened” as about what a person feels when they are subjected to the same humiliation and torment that the Germans and their allies subjected Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and other groups of the population during the Second World War, considered "parasitic". Anyone who knows the necessary languages and knows how to work can create a message about the facts of the Holocaust - which in itself is a great achievement, it requires a lot of work and discipline. And it’s quite another thing to recreate all the feelings of the victim (or even the criminal) in an actively affecting image. “Is this a man?” Primo Levi is a great reconstruction of history, and not only because of its factual accuracy.
How does the epigraph you used from Barthes “Le fait n'a jamais qu'une existence linguistique” [1] relate to your recognition of the reality of past events?
It seems to me that a distinction needs to be made between “fact” and “event”. Events are things that are happening now or have happened in the past. Facts are statements about events. Thus, it is more accurate, in my opinion, to talk about “statements that receive the status of a fact” or “statements that have the value of a fact.” Philosopher Arthur Danto defines a fact as a “described event.” In other words, a fact is a statement that “categorizes” an event: “The storming of the Bastille was the beginning of the French Revolution.” Is this true or false? We can ask this question about a statement, but not about an event. The question of whether “the storming of the Bastille” is true or false is meaningless. That is, an event either happened or not, but before we begin to find out whether it happened, we must determine what exactly we are finding out. Was the Bastille taken or not? If so, at what time and under what circumstances? This is how we begin to accumulate facts that, taken together, are intended to illuminate the event. But, as Aristotle taught, to describe something individual [2] - activity that has no end. This is why historical interpretation is endless. And if so, is it worth doing it at all?
Stanford, California, summer 2005
[1] R. Barth speaks here of “fact” as an element of discourse. Wed. this quote in a broader context: “So we come to a paradox that governs the entire system of historical discourse (as opposed to other types of discourse): a fact has only linguistic existence (as an element of discourse), but at the same time everything happens as if it existence is simply a “copy” of some other existence that takes place in a non-structural area, in “reality”” (Barthes R. Discourse of history // Fashion System. Articles on the semiotics of culture. M., 2003. P. 438. Translation with . Zenkin).
[2] Wed. in “Metaphysics” about the general and the individual and their definition (Aristotle. Works in four volumes. M.: Mysl, 1975. T. 1). Wed. also: “... poetry speaks more about the general, history - about the individual” (ibid. T. 4. Poetics. 1451b. Translation. M. Gasparov).
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