Towards a new historiographic paradigm[1]
Carlos Barros
At the end
of the 20th century, the crisis of history is being discussed, and rightly so.
The dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy of Language says of the word
crisis that it means two things at the same time: an important mutation and a
difficult situation.In other words, that a crisis exists when there are
difficulties but at the same time a change is under way, and most surely the
latter explains the former. Yet, it is seldom seen that way. When a crisis is
mentioned, it conjures up a scenario of problems and complications rather than
one of solutions and opportunities,
which makes its resolution ever harder.
History in
crisis
But
when we speak of the crisis of history some people may think, and also rightly
so, that there are those who belive in the crisis of history and those who
simply do not. However our disciplines crisis is independent of the degree of
acquaintance a colleage may have of it. When in Octuber 1917 the revolution of
the Czarist Russia exploded, some people might be sewing while these events
were taking place, and that did not make them the less extraordinary on
historical grounds[2]
. Or is it not our task as social scientists to go beyond the appearances and
the daily routines of things and attempt
to look at what occurs at the depths of historical
moments and at the heart of our doubly historical discipline ?
The
crisis of history as a discipline is part of a general crisis that pertains
ideology, politics, values and which affects social and human sciences as a
whole. Much of what will be said about
the crisis and about possible solutions, could be applied mutatis mutandis to anthropology or
sociology. We will, however, limit ourselves to what we know and are more
interested in: history as a profession at the turn of the century.
The
general nature of this crisis has its origin in the simultaneity of the crisis
of history and the crisis of the writing of history. It concerns all dimensions
of the profession of historian and his or her relation to society. We are,
therefore, living through a crisis, a difficult/ mutated scenario, which is
global because it affects the practice of history (the way of conducting
research and of writing history); the theory of history ( the concepts and
theoretical approaches underlying our work); and the social function of history
(underestimated in a future world that some envisage technocratic and devoid of
soul).
The
first victim of the historiographical crisis has been the economic, determinist
and struturalist paradigm that has characterised new historians from the Second World War
onwards[3]. But it has not stopped there as George Iggers
has demonstrated[4]. It also concerns the very historical
definition of our discipline, whose origin dates back to 19th century
positivism. Critical with history as a science, these historians advocate its
comparison with literature through its connexion with fiction, hermeneutics or
the linguistic turn proposed from the Unites States. Productive epistemic relations in their moderate
form which, however, turn destructive when they take us back, whether their
stalwart proponents want it or not, to the 19th century, when history was a
pre-paradigmatic discipline, thus bringing to nothing all the background
accumulated by our discipline for over a century. If we follow this path the difficulty-element of
our crisis hits rock bottom. It is then when the element of paradigmatic
change, necessary to provide answers to the anomalies that question our old
identity ( the new history), starts to impose itself.
We will
explain in three phases how this turn-of-the-century crisis of history[5]
started to unfold, taking as reference the decades of the seventies, the
eighties and the nineties ( the tendencies we analyse are apparent at the end
of each chronological period). At the same time, it should be clear that we are
speaking about the evolution of international historiography in general and not
of a concrete country except when illustrating an argument. It is a well-known
fact that Spain and Latin America have received the impact of the most advanced
historiographies with a chronological lag that would force us to introduce time
variations in the case of our national historiographies. A lag which- and this
should be pointed out- is dwindling. Over the last decade of the century, the
historical globalisation is making the differences among the national
historiographies smaller as changes are transmitted more quickly. In the 21st
century, these changes and evolutions of history will be lived even more
simultaneously.
The first
return of the subject
The
sociopolitical and ideological context that characterised the seventies is
marked by the backing down on what May 1968 meant in history and its writing.
In this context of backward movement the
economic, structuralistic and determinist paradigm dominant in the sixties in
our discipline and in other social sciences receives its first blow . The first
historiographical reaction to the rampant objectivism, which heralded a happy
future thanks to the inescapable development of the structural contradictions,
was the return of the subject virtually inscribed, but never developed, in the
matrices of the new history, be it Annaliste
or Marxist. History discovered, then, the subject before sociology and
philosophy[6]
did. Almost twenty years before sociologists
began to investigate and reflect on the social actor, the rational
choice or the collective action or
before it became fashionable to reflect on the philosophy of the
subject.
We
have therefore that 1970s European historiographys advancement is greater than
that of economic and structural history: French historiography by developing
what came to be known as history of mentalities and which later resulted in history
of the imaginery, historical anthropology, new cultural anthropology[7]...
and British historiography by promoting a new type of non-structuralist social
history.
In the
first case we are speaking of the passing from the second to the third Annales, of the rediscovery of the
mental subject already present in the work and reflection of the founders
of this school. In the second case, we
are before an original development of historical materialism, with a strong
empiric and anthropological foundation and focused on the historical study of
revolts and social change.
However, the British rediscovery of the social subject occurred
too late and too soon. I will make myself clear. Too late because the common
paradigm, those consensus shared by historians
during the central decades of the century had clearly evolved, in the
sixties, towards an economic, structuralist and determinist approach that also
dominated the academic ( and non-academic) reading of Marxism. We should be
reminded here that the reaction of Marxist historians before the excesses of
structuralism takes place too late. 1978 was the year of publication of E.P.
Thompsons The Poverty Of Theory: Or an Orrery of Errors , a
superb book - although open to criticism as Perry Anderson, among others,
showed. This book advocates a Marxism with a subject as opposed to the
objective Marxism, devoid of conscience and history, of the proponents of the
Althusserian structuralism. And too late because when this cultural and
humanistic reading of Marx that understood history as the history of class struggle becomes
apparent in Great Britain, the ideological and political context had changed to
such an extent that Marxism, whatever the version, no longer held any interest.
As a consequence, doctoral theses and dissertations on conflicts, revolts and
revolutions were no longer done. And lastly, it came too late if we take into
account that the interest in hardsocial history reappears in the nineties, as
we have analised elsewhere[8],
and that the conditions for the transition to a new paradigm that can take on
the (social and mental ) subject are just now starting to appear.
These
historiographical advances which twenty years ago put the subject back into the
centre of history are, therefore, an inescapable reference to the discussions
under way on the new paradigm, whose main challenge is the integration, in a
unique approach, of subjective and objective history (whether we are speaking of the historical
agent or of the historian himself). 20th century historiography has oscilated
between both. The future of the history of mentalities and of the history of
social change is, consequently, in the global change of paradigms.
The
fragmentation
In the
eighties there is a radical change in the political and ideological context,
notably in the United States and Great Britain. We are living through the years
of neoconservatism, which later was called neoliberalism or single thinking and
are also the years of the spreading of postmodernism as the fashionable
philosophical proposal. Western historiography becomes fragmented into themes,
methods and schools to a limit hard to imagine before. French colleages called
this the crumbling of history[9].
The
first great rift was the return of the concept of the mental and/or social
subject in the seventies. Until that moment the concern was mainly with
economic history and with the history of social structures[10].
From then onwards we have an objective history and a subjective history and it
is there where the diversification and the separation of some specialities away
from others starts: economic history seldom looks at the subject. The history
of mentalities seldom includes the socio-economic aspect.
Some
others claim, and not without reason, that the fragmentation of history and the
unavoidable specialisation is nothing more than a crisis of development, which
bears witness to the maturity of our discipline. It is obvious that going from
the monocultive which meant the socio-economic history to the current
hetereogenity, where all aspects of the past are considered interesting, is a
great advance. But fragmentation is not without problems because it takes us
away from the global picture of the human past that science and society demand.
In the
eighties the second great return of the subject takes place. In this case, it
concerns the traditional subject - the biography, the narration, the political
history - whose return implies a clear denial of the 20th century
historiographical revolution, promoted by the Annales
School, Marxism and reclycled sectors of traditional historiography. At the
same time, there is an implosion, an explosion from inside, of the common
paradigm of the new historians: a global crisis of the three great currents
that renewed the way of writing history in the century about to end. The crisis
of the Annales, and those of
social history and of cliometry[11],
were discussed separatedly as everyone saw the mote in their neighbourseye and
not the beam in his own thus failing to understand until this very day, when it
is all the more evident, that the the crisis of history has a global nature, to
say nothing of the underlying change of paradigms.
T.S.
Khun, the author of Structure of the
Scientific Revolutions, has found that the shared paradigms that
unify a discipline remain in effect while there is not a common paradigm that
substitutes them. This accounts for the fact that in the eighties and even in
the nineties the same things that were said twenty years ago are repeated in
many historiography classes and projects submitted by applicants to lecturer
posts, the only occasion in which a lecturer - in Spain- must define his concept of history and where
it is usual to devote part of the project to positivism, another one to Marxism
and a third one to Annales in the
hope that since three of the members of the examination board are randomly
chosen it would be difficult that they do not feel closer to one of the three
currents. That was how applicants projects were typically done, an invaluable
source to study the shared paradigms of a discipline until not so far back in
time[12].
This demonstrates the strength of the inertia of a paradigm that lives on,
despite the crisis, while no alternative takes shape.
Philosophy
versus history
In
1989 reached its climax a decade marked
by neoliberalism and postmodernism, historical fragmentation and the crisis of
the idea of progress. Such idea is the backbone of the three most important
historiographical movements of the 20th century and of social sciences in
general, which have nurtured from their origins, as it was the case of
scientific history, on the philosophy of Enlightment.
The
attacks from political philosophy to the idea of progress[13],
which come on the one hand form the thesis of Francis Fukuyama and on the other
from postmodernity pertain one of the most important shared paradigms of 20th
century historians: the past/present/future relationship. These were concepts
that until recently were successfully interwoven: we study the past to
understand the present and thus construct a better future- a socialist future-
it was even claimed from Marxism.
The
proclamation of the end of history had its origin in a clever and intuitive
article by neconservative Fukuyama written in the summer of 1989, when the
author could not know that by the end of that very year the Berlin Wall would
fall and the transition from real socialism to capitalism ( which later proved
frustrating, wild and crimminal) would start in Eastern Europe. According to
Fukuyama, a close exponent of Hegel, history had come to the end of the line
and all the countries in the world would unify around the democratic system and
around what is euphemistically called
market economy. The historians reaction was one of hostility and contempt.
In other words, they killed the
messenger, shrugging off his announcement as a cunning imperialist political
argument. Some historians, without having read Fukuyamas works, even
understood that he intended to bring to an end the discipline that earns our
living . They mistook history with a small h, history seen as sucession of events,
with History spelt with a capital letter of universal history.[14]
It should be pointed out that Fukuyama himself in later works has qualified and
self-rectified his innitial approach to the point of denying it and
recognising his mistake in an interview in the New
York Times ( August 30th 1998), once the failure of the transitions
in Eastern Europe was evident, especially in Russia and the crisis of the
emerging ecomonies of the Far East had taken place, economic events that
threaten with a worldwide recession.
All in
all, what have we learnt from the Fukuyama controversy ? Simply that history
does not have a pre-established aim[15],
quite a revolutionary conclusion because we come from a Judeo-Christian
tradition, whose providential reading of history establishes its end at the
Final Judgement. Such teleologism was continued by 19th century German
philosophy, replacing the resurrection of the dead and the second coming of
Christ with first the Hegelian liberal state and later with Marx and Engelss
communist society . The most influencing western philosophy has been
finalist. Does not the fact alone of
accepting now that the future is open justify our speaking of a new paradigm in
history, one which makes us freer because we know that we are responsible for
our destiny ? The futures are manyfold,
and the function of the historian, by making the crossroads of history known,
is to have our contemporaries realise that there are alternative contingent
futures.
If
humankind does not ineluctably advance towards a happy end, does this mean that
we should resign to what we have and renounce to transforming the world? No,
to be sure. By renouncing to a determinist history - which is being vindicated
today, strangely enough, by single thinking we recover a freedom for the
subject, without messiamism, which does not rule out the great objectives, even
the revolutionary ones, as Mexican neozapatism demonstrates.
We have
said that at the same time there had been an attack from postmodernism to the
past/present/future relationship. By postmodernism, we are refering here mainly
to the work of Jean-François Lyotard and
Gianni Vattimo, whose influence has been especially great in Europe. In the
case of the United States, there is a tendency to include inappropiatedly
poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault and deconstructionists like Jacques
Derrida under the label of a postmodernity whose positioning against
intellectual commitment clashes with the accommplishments of such authors[16].
Postmodern philosophers and Fukuyama certainly start from opposing
assumptions. The former deny modernity and the latter says that its heyday has
come, but both coincide on one thing: they deprive us of a future. Both
approaches confuse historians by attacking the classical past/ present/future
paradigm, because if we do not have
anything to say about the future,we have nothing to say of the past either.
Fukuyama denies an alternative future because he claims that history has
come to an end and therefore the future as something essentially different from
the present disappears. His future is a continuous present . And postmodernism
renounces the conquest of a better future which is based on the knowledge of
the past and a criticism of the present, when it asserts that the failure of
modernity leads to the notion of progress. In short, from either option the
suggestion is made that there is no future for us as historians, except as
isolated or marginal learned scholars, embedded in a past whose research has no
social interest whatsoever.
When
we speak of historiographic postmodernity we do not want to imply that
historians are conversant with the latest developments in that philosophical current. Historians do not
regularly read philosophy, but we do share with the turn-of-the-century
philosopher an environmental postmodernism that fully affects the methodology
of history and the philosophy that, whether we want it or not, underlies our
work[17].
The disgregation of the discipline and the everything goes attitude, the lack
of interest on the part of historians- as such- in the world around us and its
problems, some sort of existential nihilism born of the post-1968
disenchantment, the exacerbated individualism, the anarchist oposition to all
paradigm, etc.
This
takes us to look at postmodernism from its ambiguous and negative side. The
vital feature that defines the postmodern historian - who usually subscribes to
that view without knowing it- is that he finds himself at home in the crisis
and the fragmentation of the discipline but without the will -or the interest-
to overcome both flaws, which of course are not seen as such. This generates
three stances:
The
first stance is that of those who argue that if 20th century historiographical
paradigms have collapsed, why should we look for others? What they mean is: we
are well without shared paradigms ( which some, without reading Khun,
inventing an adversary equal with simple orthodoxies), everything goes,
certainties are over and done with, everyone is free to act as he pleases.
Thus, they apply- many without even being acquainted with it- Feyeranbends
proposal of replacing rationalism by anarchism in the theory of knowledge[18].
It is, at heart, a conservative position in which the present - as we have
already said -is perpetuated.
The
second stance, and the most coherent one, is that held by those who mantain
that the new paradigm is fragmentation
itself with all that it means for the historian in terms of freedom, pluralism
and guarantee against political or academic orthodoxy. In other words, the
methodological anarchy carried to its logical conclusion by paradoxically
turning it into an institutional category.
The
third stance is proposed by those who reduce postmodern history to new history
or, more precisely, to the newest history: linguistic turn, microhistory or
new cultural history. By so doing, they sometimes distort the intention of its
proponents who seldom intend to wholly disregard the discourse of modernity[19].
The
three approaches (anarchist,coherent or neopositivist postmodernity) share
the abandonment, to a greater or a lesser extent, of the critical function of
history and, in the worst of cases, a renounce to any critical definition of history as a science,
which seriously conditions the future of our discipline in society and in the
academe.
The
definitive blow to the process of disgregation and dis-orientation of history
as a profession during the eighties was the assertion - one which incidentally
went unanswered- that the market replaces people as subject of history, in an
astonishing turn in the intellectual ( and economic) history that has brought
us back to an objectivism, an economicism and a structuralism of a different
kind than that of the sixties and seventies, but more harmful epistemologically
if possible, because it coincides with a socio-historical retreat of the
humanist values that have informed social and human sciences since they were
first conceived.
And
with this we approach the nineties which, surprisingly enough, are proving
decisive in several senses, among them in the change of paradigms in our
disciplines as, without our noticing it, the foundations for the 21st century
are being laid.
A new
century, a new paradigm
The
context of the nineties is the very crisis of neoliberalism and postmosdernism.
It is becoming fashionable to speak of middle roads between modernity and
postmodernity. The time has come, therefore, to seek a new modernity, one which
is more self-critical, more local, more social and cultural, state-and freetrade-oriented , one
more complex and difficult that does not abandon criticism but one which does
not renounce either to a transformation of society guided by reason.
Our
discipline is, certainly, in crisis. But it has also mantained and even
increased its dynamism. There is a stable premise among historians ( civil
servants in many countries) which, by means of tacit consensus, is replacing or
trying to replace the paradigms in crisis. Some historians insist on the crisis
scenario and some others on the increase in the number of studies on history.
It is even said that never before have so many historical works been published as
nowadays. Some affirm that there is not such a crisis because such works are
being published. Actually there is some truth in both diagnosis. Their
confluency is resulting in a transition between 20th century paradigms and 21th
century paradigms, which is giving rise to new consensus, still perceived in a
blur, that are transforming the way of writing history, and not always to the
better. The new consensus have, in our view, positive and negative
aspects. Among the negative aspects is
the change of paradigms that has initially taken place without a suitable
degree of self-awareness, debate and reflection. In order to fight this flaw we
organised in 1993 the First International Conference History under Debate
with a view to grasping and understanding the changes under way, the second edition of which is being
organised and will take place between 14-18 July 1999. The aim is now to contribute to the process
of formation of new paradigms, that is to say, the writing of history in the
21st century. One of its features will be a greater interest for
historiographical reflection. There is,
in fact, a growing number of colleages that combine- or try to combine
-empirical work with historiographical reflection and debate.
The
question we pose therefore is the
following: how can a paradigm be changed? Is there any world or national authority that establishes
the paradigms that must rule a discipline ? No, strictly speaking. The forces
behind the paradigmatical changes are not usually seen and they are imposed
through consensus and discussion rather than through force. We verify that
there are three reasons that have usually made us change the line of
research:1) the law of decreasing return. Both individually and collectivelly, when a
line of research is exhausted, another one is usually sought. Further reseach on a subject or methology on
which work has been done for too long a time does not add to historical
knowledge, and then , the change takes place, for instance: the transition ( on
which other factors have also an incidence) from economic history to mentality,
cultural and anthropological history. 2) the nemesis with avant-garde
historiographies. Hispanic historiographies, traditionally dependent on
Europe or North America are a good example (to supersede). 3) the influence
of society. This is nowadays a key factor: we are before a turn of the
century that coincides with a change in civilization which, naturaly enough,
affects all social sciences.
And
historiography does not always go ahead of history. To the sixteen theses of
La historia que viene ( which is actually the conclusion of the First
Conference History under Debate) we would now add a further one, the
seventeenth, which would stress that the future of our discipline depends on
our capacity to adapt to the profound, vertiginous and paradoxical changes that
are occurring between the 20th and the 21st centuries. It seems a platitude,
but the truth is that we are too often deluded into believing that the academe
is oblivious to the world ( or even worse, that the world is oblivious to the
academe).
Let us
look at some of the challenges that the new century poses, in our view, to the
new paradigm of the writing of history:
1.- Social
demands derived from globalisation. We understand by globalisation the
phenomenon of word-level economy ( anticipated by Marx in the Communist Manifesto) and media (
the global village heralded by MacLuhan), an objective process only partially
identifiable with the ( transitory) neoliberal policies[20].
In which way may or is it affecting the informative, cultural social and
economic unification of the world to the history that is being written? Which
are the challenges that globalisation pose to historigraphy ?
- The fragmented history
of the eighties is not valid for the globalised world ahead. It is urgent
that we recover the concept of global history; that we seek new forms of
implementing it and study why the paradigm of total history of 20th century
historigraphy failed.
- The new paradigm of
history as a whole will be digital The computer not only influences, or
will influence, the access to the sources ( CD-ROM, digitalised files), the method
of work ( word processing and database) or the process of divulgation, but
also, and most importantly, it is going to change the final outcome of our
work. It leads us to the construction of
another object ( the means is the message), which is obviously a more global
one. The possibility of introducing, together with the text, sound and visual
elements ( still and animated) in a CD-ROM or in a DVD-ROM, alters the way of
both stating the fact and doing research.
Is it not the case that the simultaneity of the written, oral and visual
history makes possible a more global reconstruction of our object? That is
certainly the case of the hipertext (habitually used when navigating through
Internet), which widely supersedes the possibilities of a book, that so far was
almost the only means at our disposal for doing research and where we can
interpolate some textual quotations and footnotes, provided we do not abandon a
linear discourse ( every book has a beginning and an end). With hipertext, by
means of links, we will be able to gain access to much greater deal of
secondary information, to another book, which in turn, may take us to other
links, in such a way that there is no longer a single beginning or end but
several readings, as reality itself - always multidimensional and hence more
faithfully reconstructed. History will thus be more global from an empirical
point of view, not just theoretically.
To this, we should add the possibilities that virtual reality[21]
and artificial intellegence offer. In short, new technologies will allow us to
overcome the technical and epistemological limitations that have thwarted our
accounting for historical reality globally.
With Internet a new
community of historians is born. The digital web changes the rules of socialition
in the community of historians. The national communities of historians will
still be important, but the international community will be closer, more
important as debate and global communication will be easier and freer, in every
field and for historians as a whole. The formation of the new paradigms under
way will benefit from the web (E-mail, WEB sites, news groups and chatlines) as
the distribution of users (and of the languages involved) becomes really
international.
- With globalisation,world historiography
turns more policentric. Western historiographies in the 19th and 20th
centuries have always had a focal centre (Germany, France, the United Kingdom.
. . ). In 1993, in the First Conference History Under Debate, Peter Burke claimed that , right
now, renewal is to be found in the periphery. True and we add: what is
important now is that each historiography develops its capacity to think for
itself, free of colonial bounds, but, and this is important, with a close
knowledge of what is happening in the world ( more accessible now thanks to new
technologies). There is no longer a great centre pushing changes ahead. Any
historiography may become the centre of a proposal. From the United States
there has somehow been an attempt to reproduce old dependencies, but it will
not be easy to extend the North American world hegemony from film-making to the
academic world, and even less likely to the field of human and social sciences,
once we have left behind the cold war and when we are so sensitive to what
regards our national identities, as post-colonial historiographies and the
subordinate studies in India and other countries demonstrate and which attest
to what extent historiographial decentralisation and decolonisation already
belong to the new global paradigm.
2.- Cultural and educative demands that
will condition the 21st century: the historians answer. We are
experiencing a return- still a timid one- to formative and humanistic values[22]
which should not go unnoticed. It is a consequence of the retreat of the
economicism and neoliberal technocraticism that characterised the eighties
and part of the nineties. In some
countries like Spain, the role of history and humanities is being considered anew[23].
The proponents of the middle road between neoliberlism and socialism,Tony
Blair and Bill Clinton, made education
their chief cause in their latest political ( and successful) campaigns
in the United Kingdom and the United States. New values and challenges are
becoming established for the role of history in the new century: how should
historical research be conducted in the multicultural, multiracial and
multinational century of globalisation?
3.- Political and
social demands of the new ( and the old) political and social subjects.The
new ( and old) political subjects seek their identity in History at a local,
regional, national and macronational level. History has been mythizised by new
(and old) nationalisms, which revives the critical function of the historian,
as E.J. Hobsbwam has pointed out. Furthermore the new (and old) collective
subjects seek the intellectual and the historians commitment to elaborate
their discourse and practice. That is the case of the new social movements
derived from ethnic groups, genders, age groups, sexual options .... In the
case of conflicts, revolts and revolutions, they are returning[24]
in the last decade to the historical arena in Eastern Europe ( 1989-1991); in
Chiapas (1994); France (1995- 1998); in Belgium against pederasts and their
accomplices; in the United States, where
one million Afroamerican men gathered to proclaim their grievances; in Spain (
six million people took to the streets in July 1997 to protest against the
murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco, incidentally the graphic motif of the second
edition of the poster of History under Debate[25]).
Social movements, when they are truly significative end up by drawing
academics. For the first time since the sixties and seventies, intellectuals
recover in some countries a certain social and political commitment (which has given rise to a bitter but
necessary debate). Right here, in Mexico, we have the best example at the UNAM,
where academics have been working since 1994 in favour of a social, ethical and
democratic commitment as regards the Chiapas situation. It is not something
limited to the Third World but a
phenomenon that is growing into world dimensions. France is also seeing a
return of intellectual commitment, which was sparked by the 1995 social
demonstrations, and whose main concern is with illegal inmigrants. It was first
led by film-makers, artists and writers but it also includes social scientists
like Pierre Bourdieu, who has created the one most important controversy in
French social sciences - through the group Raisons
dAgir- on intellectual commitment since Zola and Sartre and Jacques
Derrida, who in his work Spectres de Marx
brought new life to the debate over Marxism, a taboo subject among French
intelligentsia since the time of Althusser. We are obviously before quite a different commitment from that we saw
in the sixties and seventies[26]:
it is less partisan, less unidimensional and absorbing, stemming from academic
specialisation rather than from political commitment, away from television
(impervious to debate and criticism, unlike Internet). It was foreseeable. How
could we limit the returns? The synthesis we are seeing between modernity and
postmodernity gives rise to paradoxes like the funny disconnection between
historian and citizen some colleages suffer.
They are committed in their private lives but mantain out of inertia
academicist stances in their work as researchers and teachers. And this occurs
precisely when the main political and social challenge of the new century to
professional life is the search for a past for the subjects who struggle to
determine the future.
3.- Scientific demands: the redifinition
of history as science. The positivist 19th century definition, which is
still influential in our discipline ( to know the past as it was), is
untenable nowadays. Because a science cannot be thought of without a conscience
( Edgar Morin), a subject without an object, the theories of chaos and
complexity are going into great detail on this direction. The new physics , is
again, the surest reference to redefine scientifically our discipline with a
view towards the future. In thesis nº 3 of La historia que viene we asserted
that it is a false alternative to say that history, as it cannot be
"objective" and "exact", is not a science because we know today that the task
of science is not to find out an unexisting, absolute truth, since the only scientific truths are the
relative truths. Such is our future: not to abandon the identity of history as a science but to
define it anew by relying on the concept of science, of paradigm and of
scientific revolution that is nowadays applied by physics and elaborated by the
philosophy of science. In fact, the notion of new paradigm that we have been using
historiographically for many years comes from epistemology and the history of
science.
After the crisis
The latest historiographical tendencies
suggest the adequate avenue to overcome the crisis: they advance by
synthesizing the oldest and the newest[27].
The new paradigm cannot be- as it does not
answer to the contextual demands or the consensus of the community- the simple return to traditional history,
individualistic, of the great battles but neither the leap in the dark of
postmodern fragmentation, without this precluding an acceptance of the positive
aspects of both approaches ( which converge just as likely as they diverge).
The history and historiography of the new
century cannot ignore entirely 20th century history and historigraphy, with all
their valuable teachings and mistakes, to say nothing of a return to the 19th
century. We would like to help create a better 21st century, post-postmodern,
post-neoliberal, helping from history to construct a different modernity, a
different learning, a different rationality, a different history and a
different generation: you.
Between the years 2010 and 2020 there will
be, because of biological reasons, a great generational renewal, affecting
research and teaching posts. As it is well known, the new and the young does
not necessarily mean better, more progressive and efficient than the old. The
last service the 1968 generation, the most self-critic and consistent, can do
before leaving the greater and smaller decision-making posts is to become a bridge so that the new
generation -that has a poor knowledge of recent history- and therefore
mythicizies it excessively- learns from our most inmediate past and is able to
open new paths . Let us hope it be so, and that the spirit of March Bloch be
with us.
[1] This is
the written version of the lectures delivered, under the same title, on April
23rd 1998 at the school of Social Sciences of the Universidad Autónoma de
Chiapas ( San Cristóbal de las Casas) and on July 24th at the school of Arts
and Humanities of the Universidad de Rosario (Argentina).
[2] In a
recent British film Two Deaths (
1995) several guests gather for a banquet at Ceaucescus doctors house while
outside in the street the Romanian democratic revolution is taking place. They
pretend to ignore a fact which, even before the end of the film, will radically
change their lives.
[3]"
El paradigma común de los historiadores del siglo XX", La formación del historiador, nº 14,
winter of 1994-95, Michoacán, p. 4-25; Estudios
sociales, nº 10, 1996, Santa Fe, p. 21-44; Medievalismo, nº7, Madrid, 1997, p.235-
262.
[4]George
IGGERS, la ciencia histórica en el siglo XX.
Las tendencias actuales,Barcelona,
1995.
[5] The
turn-of-the-century crisis is symetrical to the one positivist historiography
went through at the start of the 20th century.
[6] It is
usually the case that we are so attentive to the evolution of other disciplines
which are more focused on theory that we tend to underestimate the findings of
our historiographies to welcome enthusiastically similar ideas from other
social sciences. This is an undesired effect of a way of understanding
interdisciplinarity that ignores its own tradition.
[7]"La
contribución de los Terceros Annales y las historia de las mentalidades.
1969-1989", La otra historia: sociedad,
cultura y mentalidades, Bilbao, 1993, p. 87-118.
[8]"
El retorno del sujeto social en la historiografía española", Estado, protesta y movimientos sociales,
III Congreso de Historia Social, Vitoria, July 1997.
[9] François DOSSE,
La historia en migajas. De " Annales" a la " nueva historia", Valencia 1989 (
Paris 1987); one of the mistakes of this book, which so much stirred debate, is
not having realised that fragmentation not only affected the school of Annales, but also all historiographical
currents as well as the relationships among them.
[10] In the
case of Spain we should add at least a decade to perceive more clearly these
subjectivist changes in the way of investigating history.
[11] Cuantitative history has been the most
important contribution of the neopositivist current to the common paradigm.
[12] Since 1995 it is becoming increasingly
frequent to use the Conference Reports of the 1st Conference History under
Debate when writing teaching projects as a means of ensuring a more updated
and controversial view of our discipline.
[13] 'Attacks
between inverted commas because they are not unjustified. They have an
objective basis which forces us to take them into account for the sake of
intellectual rigour.
[14] Israel SANMARTÍN, La historia según Fukuyama, 1989-1995,
Santiago de Compostela, dissertation,
1997; the reader may confirm that what would certainly disappear according to
Fukuyamas thesis is history seen as theoretical reflection and commitment with
the progress of humankind, something historiographical positivism has always
denied.
[15] The history
of humankind does not advance towards a pre-established aim, but it cannot be
reversed either, thesis nº 5 of La historia que viene, Historia a debate, I, Santiago,
1995,p.101; the fall of comunism confirms the first part and the disaster that
later occured in Eastern Europe, the dismantling of the welfare state built up
by comunists confirms the second part.
[16] On Foucaults commitment by the end of the
seventies and the early eighties with human rights, in the manner of Sartre,
see François DOSSÉ, Historie du
structuralisme, II, París, 1992,p 424-426; Derrida has been one of
the French social scientists that has recently joined film-makers in the
defense of inmigrants.
[17] The linguistic reductionism, which has spread
from the United States, is also claimed by postmoderm history but it has had a
much lesser influence among historians than the mentioned environmental
postmodernism.
[18] Paul FEYERABEND, Tratado contra el método. Esquema de una teoría anarquista del
conocimiento, Madrid, 1992 (London 1975).
[19] The greatest problem here is to succumb to
the illusion that the current crisis of history can be solved by changing the
lines of research, promoting innovation, a necessary factor but not enough in
itself given the global nature- methodological, epistemological and social- of
the historiohraphical crisis.
[20] To reduce globalisation to capitalism would
be to make a similar mistake to that made by left politicians and academics
when they identified - and fought- in the past democracy as a bourgeois
phenomenon.
[21] Computer advance and simulation have already
made possible three- dimension, animated,
virtual reconstructions- on the basis of archeological excavations -of
neolitic, ancient or medieval cities and other monuments.
[22] Some reactionaries still intend to move
against history . Here follows a pearl of wisdom found in a recent academic stay
at the Universidad Nacional del Sur ( Argentina): it is unnecessary that the Government keeps on paying the formation of
writers, philosophers, sociologists and psychologists, editorial on
the front page of La Nueva Provincia
( Bahía Blanca, July 6th, 1998). Some
others believe it, they are democrats, and they even belong to left parties,
but they do not say it, out of shame of course.
[23] In this change, France follows suit. The government
of Lionel Jospin, after the demonstration of October 15th 1998, which was
attended by half a million secondary students, has promised a return to the
ethical and civic formation of students by increasing attention to philosophy
and literature (unlike the case of Spain, history kept its educative role in
Socialist France) in the national curriculum, together with computer skills and
mathematics.
[24] This is the third return of the subject
(social and collective). The first return occurred in the seventies, (mental
and social) and the second in the eighties ( individual and political)
osee
note 8.
[26] A sure way of manipulating the debate is ,
of course, by holding the opposite.
[27] In this we qualify Kuhn, who has a too
simplistic view of the ( scientific) revolution as a break between the new and the old ( paradigms).