Do folks going on about discourse need a reality check?

As you enter a bookshop in the UK, the first thing the new visitor is likely to notice is the distinction between fiction and non-fiction on the shelves, a distinction that seems to be based on the closeness of a piece of writing to ‘reality.’ We are unlikely to find any history books in the fiction section, but why should this be the case? Who created the division between myth and history and for what reason? ‘Post-ist’ thinking since the 1960s and what has been called the ‘linguistic turn’ shifted worries about whether the mind and its ideas represent reality appropriately to the problem of how language represents reality through discourse. This shift posed a challenge to the 19th century belief that some sort of empiricism was the proper basis or the practice of professional history, and that the works of the historian had the status of an epistemology, i.e. that historians possed certain empirical methods by which they could have objective and demonstrable knowledge of the ‘past.’ But construing representation as reference has not ended the debate between realists and idealists. After briefly reviewing the standard constructionist and reconstructionist discourses of history and their relationship to ‘reality,’ this essay presents the poststructuralist stance as formulated by Derrida, Barthes and White to argue that the historicising of the past as much a linguistic undertaking as it is an empirical one, as much the product of the historical imagination as discovery in the archive.

Adam Ferguson (1723-1816)
Scottish philosopher and historian

Different ‘genres’ of history have seen the relationship between discourse, i.e. the narrative and rhetorical means for the conveyance of that knowledge of the past that we call history, and reality, i.e. ‘what happened,’ in different ways. What Jenkins and Munslow have called ‘reconstructionist’ historians believe in the power of empiricism to access the past as it actually was. They believe in accurate representation, and as Frye has exposed they work inductively, ‘collecting the facts and trying to avoid any informing patterns except those that reside on the facts themselves.’ The historical is seen in opposition to the mythical, and the connection between reality and discourse is a simple, straightforward and objective one. History is descriptive, not fictive: the facts (referents) ‘speak for themselves,’ the meaning lies in the facts histories point to, the narrator is mostly absent by suppression all the traces of ‘I’ in the text. Similarly, constructionist historians, stemming from Comte’s positivism, believe in the existence of laws of human behavior and argue that history can be objective not just through source analyses (as reconstructionists do) but when the understanding of these sources is fostered by appropriate theorisation and through the deployment of various helpful concepts. Thus, the connection between historical discourse and reality becomes a bit more complicated, but access to reality (what happened)  is still mostly taken for granted provided one has the right concepts.

These two ‘genres’ of history have been the ones that poststructuralist and deconstructivist thinkers have set out to challenge, and we have to take into account that their description in this essay is simplified for the purpose of their critique, and that some nuances within both genres may have been lost as no history fits perfectly with a general theory of genres as that developed by Jenkins and Munslow and followed here. What poststructuralist critiques such as those by Barthes, Derrida and White set out to question is, first, the epistemological principle of empiricism whereby content, or reality (the past) must always determine its narrative form or discourse: while historical discourse claims to provide a truthful content based on the rules of evidence, it has to do so in the form of a known narrative; second, the ‘hermeneutical somnambulism,’ as phrased by Derrida, of some other historians who argue for the existence of a discoverable emplotment or laws of history (derived from their lack of ‘linguistic self-consciousness) and for objectivity based on the ontological separation between knower (historian) and known (the past). The desperate search for an ultimate, hidden meaning in everything is highly criticised by Derrida in Spurs, in which he argues for many meanings and readings to ‘perforate the hermeneutic sail.’ This multiplicity of meanings leads to a deferral, a lack of closure and a refusal of ‘God and his hypostases: reason, science, law’ according to Barthes.  Although some have seen Derrida’s claim that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ as anti-realist, it is better understood as anti-representationalist and anti-referentialist, i.e. meaning that discourse does not refer to anything non-linguistic (‘real’). As White has pointed out, turning to narrative something that isn’t in the form of narrative is an act of imagination, a verbal fiction. The historian brings to his consideration of the historical record types of configurations of events (emplotments) that help us make sense of the past by creating a complex of symbols which gives us directions for finding an icon of the structure of those events in our literary tradition. We do not live stories, we tell stories. Reality contracts, as it becomes only knowable through discourse (and for some such as Barthes is substituted by intelligibility), and at the same time expands, as the reality of the past becomes closely intertwined with two other realities:  that of the author/historian and that of the reader. The relationship between discourse and reality becomes even more nuanced: historians do not create reality per se but constitute it as a possible object of narrative representation by the very language (discourse) used to describe it. In White’s words, ‘we can only know the actual by contrasting it with or likening it to the imaginable.’

Thinkers such as Foucault and Habermas have criticised the politics of poststructuralism’s relativism, which can become close to neo-conservatism in some occasions. Foucault has warned that Derrida’s attempt to restrict interpretation to a purely syntactic and textual level dismisses the social practices that the text itself both reflects and employs, precluding raising questions about truth in normative, social and political matters and perpetuating the status quo. This critique to poststructuralism is important because a philosophy of interpretation (hermeneutics) cannot avoid the question of whether its theory has political ramifications, as the context of understanding will include social, historical and political horizons. We do not lose all grounds for rejecting inappropriate criteria and context (i.e. Holocaust denialists), but with the more nuanced relationship between discourse and reality we find other useful and valid criteria becoming more available. Ultimately, any good reading aims at balancing the complexity of the text against its sense. The relationship of the historian and his/her discourse with the past (reality) is not dismissed but seen as a conversation in which other factors such as culture, ideology and morality, a preferred position to pictures of the past’s texts as either inert specimens under the scientist/historian’s microscope or as empty sites for deconstructive revelry.

In ‘objective,’ (re)constructionist history reality is always seen as an unformulated meaning sheltering behind the apparent omnipotence of the referent, creating a ‘reality effect’ which hides the fact that historical discourse does not follow reality but only signifies it. This doesn’t entail the loss of meaning, but its opening and de-hierarchization. Facts have however more than linguistic existence: as texts they reflect and employ social practices that cannot be always ‘decoded’ through linguistic analysis. This essay has tried to show different historians’ approaches to the relationship between reality and discourse, arguing that the historicising of the past is a much a linguistic undertaking as it is an empirical one. The past thus influences history, but it does not determine it, and post-empiricist history becomes an authored story constructed out of evidence, argumentation, language and a historian’s ethical choices.