I post here some revised ideas on representationalism, presence and listing that I made into an essay. There really is something so appealing about 5 page essays, the ones I wrote in my early years of high school before our teachers, much to their own determent, pushed for longer papers. Introduce-expound-conclude.
Although I am a little tired of this subject, in the process of redacting the following text I learned that I still have much to understand about presence and all the rest. I also realized how I am so easily pulled in and swayed by style [and what I am calling personal philosophy] and it is for this reason that these historians have pulled me under so swiftly, Ankersmit with his metaphors about our history-perception as though through paperweights, Runia and his presence as stowaways. Its true what several of my teachers have told me over the years, style is more than just important. I think of those afternoons in
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In the process of revising a transcription of a 17th century inquisition trial and after listening to a presentation by Teófilo Ruiz a few weeks back called “Itemizing the World Revisited: Memory and Litigation in
Drawing on medieval historiography and a host of theorists, including Jean Genette, Tzvetan Todorov, and Jacques Lacan, White suggests that there are three ways of writing history: 1) the annals (a vertical, non-narrative representation of history without subjectivity, a history whose events are agentless), 2) the chronicle, an incomplete story without narrative closure, and 3) history, a story that communicates a moral. My initial reaction to this classification was that it was narrow. My attempts to understand it luckily were facilitated by my interest in listing, if only in that it narrowed my scope of interaction with the beginning chapters of White’s text. I considered the following questions about lists, forming them bearing in mind White’s classification: 1) Would a list fit only in the annals category? If so, are the stories told by a listing strategy only implicit or do the mechanisms of selection, ordering, even lack, that which is missing, fill out the outline that a list establishes? 2) What does the emptiness say? Are these blank spaces, then, emphasizing the importance of the included events? Or, alternatively, do the blanks enable the reader of the list to overtake that which is listed with their own memories, to create their own hierarchy, or, alternatively, their own list? Is it inconceivable to think that a reader can make a story from holes? 3) Further, we could ask whether or not the list, which clearly does not have a narrator, is discourse, in the Hayden White sense. Do these lists tell themselves, or, alternatively, are they “narrated” by the reader?
These are difficult questions which would likely require much more reading to answer. What does seem at least able to be studied at this point, and what will hopefully help elucidate the phenomenon of listing are some of the differences between White’s approach to categorization of history and the theories of history and approaches of Ankersmit and Runia. Historians such as Ankersmit and Runia acknowledge their debt to Hayden White and in particular, to his Metahistory (1973), but call for a radicalization of the narrative approach to history, for a new or at least a revised model that allows for the consideration of phenomena traditionally left out of historical models.[2] At least in the opinion of Runia, “representationalism”, the theory of history that began with White and that in the past two decades has become more and more postmodern, is in need of new revisions due to the growing awareness of other phenomena that take part in and impact history, including memory, remembrance, and trauma.
While the term representationalism varies in definition depending on the historian, I provide here a few of Ankersmit’s ideas. He suggests that in the past several decades, theories of history have made a move from conceiving of history as description and explanation, to thinking in terms of narrativist and hermeneutic theories of interpretation. More recently, history theory has turned to the idea of representation. Drawing on Hayden White, as historian John H. Zammito has noted and cites in his article “Ankersmit’s Postmodernist Historiography,” Ankersmit proposes that we cannot separate a historian’s process of telling historiography from history itself: “The historical narrative is a complex linguistic structure specially built for the purpose of showing part of the past. In other words, the historian’s language is not a transparent, passive medium through which we can see the past as we do perceive what is written in a letter through the glass paperweight lying on top of it…We do not look at the past through the historian’s language, but from the vantage point suggested by it” (Dilemma, 64) As in other avenues of poststructuralist criticism, here the text takes on a life of its own and the historian’s own experience in writing and reading, his performance and interaction with the text, becomes important. What historical reality becomes, then, is the “intertextual interplay between the historical narratives we have to have on some topic.”(Dilemma 26) Each one of these narratives is in turn, the product of a historian and his particular circumstances and goals.
What Runia and also Ankersmit propose is a theory of history that posits history not only as a “transfer of meaning”, but also as a process by which we remember and experience other phenomena, such as those already listed, e.g. memory, and trauma. In order to address these phenomena Runia proposes the idea of “presence”, or “the unrepresented way the past is present in the present.” Runia invokes metaphor and metonymy as a means to explain the difference between the processes of “transfer of meaning” and “presence”:
Whereas metaphor is instrumental in the “transfer of meaning,” metonymy brings about a “transfer of presence.” A metonymy is a “presence in absence” not just in the sense that it presents something that isn’t there, but also in the sense that in the absence (or at least the radical inconspicuousness) that is there, the thing that isn’t there is still present. The presence of the past thus does not reside primarily in the intended story or the manifest metaphorical content of the text, but in what story and text contain in spite of the intentions of the historian. One might say that historical reality travels with historiography not as a paying passenger but as a stowaway (1).
In addition to the transfer of “meaning” the historian’s text thus also possesses a historical reality, “the unrepresented way the past is present in the present.” This presence element is not necessarily something we can put our finger on, its not something “of the historian”, or even of the text, its outside of any project, a stowaway, “what story and text contain in spite of the intentions of the historian.”
What does any of this have to do with my questions about lists that I posed at the start of this essay? I repeat numbers one and two here [1) Would a list fit only in the annals category? If so, are the stories told by a listing strategy only implicit or do the mechanisms of selection, ordering, even lack, that which is missing, fill out the outline that a list establishes? 2) What does the emptiness say? Are these blank spaces, then, emphasizing the importance of the included events?] and cite Runia on metonymy and metaphor:
Now, the remarkable thing is that by veiling [the] metonymical…, metaphor paradoxically enhances one of the key features of metonymy: its being a “presence in absence.” The words “gall bladder” in the phrase “the gall bladder in room 615” make present in his or her absence a real and particular human being. In a historical text, however, the conspicuousness that signals “look, something’s absent here” is suppressed. So, one might say that in a metaphorically emplotted historical text presence is even more absent than in a text in which metonymy is allowed to stand out. But, and this is a point that can’t be stressed too much, it is still there. Below the surface of the text—in words and phrases we take for granted when we speed along, in expressions we happily forgive the historian, in the concepts and categories the author keeps so masterfully in the air, in the proper and improper names that fill up with color, sense, and meaning—below, I repeat, the surface of the text—the things the metonymies stand for are still present. In absence, but present. The words and phrases that have been woven into the texture of the text are metonymically connected to the places that are left behind—all the way down to the point where names have been substituted for reality (26).
For Runia who draws heavily on Giambattista Vico, history is full of metonymy: history is stored in places to be visited from the vantage point of the present, as opposed to White who considers metonymy, along with synecdoche, irony, and metaphor, as one of the modes of emplotment. For Runia, like all strategies of emplotment, White’s are basically metaphorical and participate in the transfer of meaning. With regards to my questions regarding lists, and bearing in mind the previous Runia citation about intention, it could be concluded that while a list might be part of the annals category, and despite the fact that the list does not constitute a narrative, it is lacking in information. The actual list items, able to function metonymically, are able in turn to achieve realization: they have the potential to transfer presence in spite of the intentions of the person who wrote the list. Another question which I cannot answer here in a satisfactory way, mostly for lack of an answer, is how exactly we could say that a list functions in a metaphoric and in a metonymic way, able thus to transfer both meaning and presence. Might it be, for example, that while a list is basically a text organized around metonymies, in the process of reading and interpreting the list and the blank spaces, the reader creates a metaphor, emplots, makes sense of the story? To add an additional complication, we could consider what is not said in a list and analyze the blank spaces. Recalling Runia, in particular the following citation “one might say that in a metaphorically emplotted historical text presence is even more absent than in a text in which metonymy is allowed to stand out,” we might conclude that in a list text, one that lends itself to an interpretation focused on metonymy as opposed to metaphor, that presence is not at absent and that it is thus able to communicate a significant helping of historical reality.
While it is clear that I am far from answering any of the questions I posed about lists in a satisfactory way, I hope to have learned a more about history theory and from where the “poststructuralist” theorists like Runia and Ankersmit have come. Although for the most part they seem to consider White as the father of representationalism, a philosophy still very present in their theoretical frameworks, they take metonymy, a concept White discusses in Content of the Form and Metahistory and transform it, essentially promoting a new, but possibly not better, paradigm for the study of history.
[1] I refer just to the articles I have read and considered for this essay: Eelco Runia, “Presence,” History and Theory 45 (February 2006), 1-29. A.F. Ankersmit, "The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History," History and Theory, 65.
[2] In “Presence,” Runia notes for example that White’s Metahistory was one of the first to recognize what he many scholars now take for granted: “that there is a schism between what actually happened in the past and the way memories coagulate into (biographical or historical) plot” (2).
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