Hi Nate,
When I think about what I had to read in school (high school, right?) I
think of history BOOKS and there can be no doubt that history books are
texts, in fact that's what they're called: textbooks. But the question of
what produces the history books is quite different than the question of what
produces history. Only in the Orwellian dystopia is the fundamental
historical dimension of all human existence totally subsumed into the
production of texts. This in part is the basis of my anathema to the idea
that history is text; once that is granted the road is open to the Orwellian
regime even it comes in satin and lace instead of jackboots and fatigue
jackets.
I was trying without success to find a passage in Thompson's "Poverty of
Theory" in which he poses the question: Why is walking my dog not a
historically significant event? I forget what he counterpoises to it that
does count as "historical" or if he explores the possibility that the event
of walking his dog might assume historical significance in certain
circumstances (e.g., he had forced his dog to swallow a capsule containing
microfilm containing a formula for curing AIDS that some major
pharmaceutical company had purposefully kept off the market). The point is
that some things assume historical significance and this occurs quite
independently of any individual's interpretation of them; these events
assume historical significance for collectivities independently of the
interpretations, it is more correct to say, these events come to define
entire families of interpretations that people who come afterwards adopt as
defining what is significant.
The problem with seeing history as text is that the notion of a text
presupposes a reader (an interpeter if you want) who stands outside the
text, but the situation with history is that it generates both the
interpreters and the interpretations. I feel that when one stretches the
notion of text to encompass both, the question is begged, and the category
of text becomes the most abstract of all abstract universals from which
there is no possibility of "ascent to the concrete." In fact, if anything,
the notion of text has the ideological role of dissolving the notion of "the
concrete" and in particular, "the historically concrete." In this sense,
the notion of history as text is essentially a disempowering theory since it
diverts attention from the domain where power is really exerted. Quite
appropriate as a product of the centers of ideological production in
capitalist societies.
The independence of historical process from individual interpretation comes
into focus when we ponder the entire issue of independent invention; e.g.,
the invention of the calculus. Here the processual unfolding of various
traditions with long histories leads to inevitable outcomes. Leslie White's
essay "On Genius" also explores this dimension.
The marxist theory of history focuses on specific aspects of human social
existence and explores these theories on the basis of the study of a
historical record that is composed of texts. But historians work with what
are called "primary texts"; e.g., accountant's records, birth/death records,
baptism records, production records, etc. Texts that document real processes
that occurred between and among human beings are not arbitrary. The key
here is that the historical record is not composed of documents that were
meant to tell a history, they were rather produced as texts in the process
of humans conducting their everyday affairs: being born and dying, buying
and selling, building up and tearing down (turn, turn, turn!). The
categories in which these processes were recorded were not produced to be
read as history; the primary data of historical demography, economic
history, the history of property as found in the records of the accountants
who recorded the sale and purchase of real property. The categories in
which these records are maintained reflects the real categories that the
people used to regulate their everyday lives: .
Marx's Capital is a critique of the categories of bourgeois society, that is
a study that shows how the categories that govern people's economic
activities in capitalist society are generated out of the workings of
capitalist economic relations (ie, wage labor and private property of any
and everything). The theoretical categories of that theory are not the
categories that the theory accounts for. Capitalist society is presented
as a specific historical form, a stage of development of human society, on
the basis of a more general theory of human activity, the same one that
underlies activity theory. Capital present the genesis of this society and
its forms out of earlier social forms. That process was lived out by people
as periods of struggle and social change; the death of certain forms of
property, the birth of new ones, for example. No questions about
interpretation here, at least not at the level of text, although at the
level of concrete social struggles one could say there was (e.g. the
Luddites). These categories of bourgeois society (profit, interest, rent)
really do account for how people conceive their economic activity when
bourgeois economy is dominant, not before that, and they are only valid in
the historical period of capitalism. Historical materialism is the theory
of stages of human social development, that is it is the theory of human
history. Most people are familiar with the Stalinist reification: primitive
communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism. This reification of
Marx's theory is clearly inadequate but the fundamental idea that human
society develops through a series of forms that have an overall determinant
pattern remains. History is ontologically prior to all texts, not just
texts about history although these provide evidence and are subject to, as
EP Thompson says, strict canons of evidence.
I think this is important here because AT, and CHAT, are derived from the
same theory of human activity as is historical materialism and the notion of
history as text is incompatible with that theory.
I think there will be more opportunity to return to the question of history
in the course of reading LBE if for no other reason than its tantalizingly
partial presence and the entire issue of "retreat to the micro-level" where
the larger historical processes become secondary even though they account
for the fundamental contradiction of all activity systems in capitalist
society: the contradiction between use value and exchange value, the
constant pressure of commoditization.
Paul H. Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: Nate <vygotsky@home.com>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Sunday, April 01, 2001 4:06 PM
Subject: RE: history-text relations
> Paul,
>
> When I think "history" I think of the various "texts" that one had to read
> in school. As I'm sure you'd acknowledge those are very ideological tools.
> If I'm incorrect let me know, but I take you coming from a Marxist
> historical framework which of course gives a strong(er) truth value to
> history.
>
> I've always enjoyed Bruner's comment "historians construct history its a
> lame excuse to say children can't do it". This was in reference to debates
/
> discussion Bruner had til 5 in the morning with Russian friends about how
> now should history be approached in Russia. He asks why we don't have
those
> discussians in the states and of course the answer is we won.
>
> Maybe a better seperation would be history and histography - but here I
> think its essential to acknowledge that there is an ideological mediation.
> Yet, a seperation to a certain extent is essential - certain events did
> happen - cargo cults, holocaust, slavery that had a profound impact on
> various activity systems.
>
> In reading the intro, this debate was in my mind and I wondered how an
> activity outlook could allow us to think differently - if at all. In
> particular rather than history (human) encompassing culture (Papua New
> Guinea)or the other way around - trying to look at it as two activity
> systems intermingleing. One contemporary (last 30 years) issue is that in
> New Guinea there were hundreds of local languages, but with the cargo cult
> came pig latin (slave language)which was somewhat universal.
>
> Personally, to say that history is a text preserves its ideological
> character which I believe is central to remember. One can read Capital or
> any of the other historical texts as claiming some sort of objective truth
> or as ideological master pieces - I prefer the latter.
>
> Nate
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul H.Dillon [mailto:illonph@pacbell.net]
> Sent: Sunday, April 01, 2001 4:03 PM
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: history-text relations
>
>
> Kevin,
>
> One thing is certainly clear from your quite self-assured comment: for
you,
> as apparently for Dianne and Martin, there is nothing but text and you
feel
> no need to ground this further. (of course the notion of grounding is
> antithetical to the purposes of deconstruction which is rather to
dissolve).
> I suppose it is impossible, and probably pointless, to discuss it , since
> the discussion becomes one of: "Yes it is" "No it isn't" "yes it is" etc.
> even if one party is attempting to provide more complete responses. I
> won't go there, and in each of my preceding posts I have presented quite
> specific positions that you find convenient to overlook.
>
> Nevertheless, allow me to point out that in my several posts in this
thread,
> I certainly have indicated an entire range of processes, structures, and
> perpsectives to indicate why history shouldn't be considered as text any
> more than gravity should, and that to reduce my position to being
something
> about the events I used in one of the first posts on the topic to
dramatize
> a point, is not deconstruction, it is decontextualization.
>
> Paul H. Dillon
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Kevin Rocap <krocap@csulb.edu>
> To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Sent: Sunday, April 01, 2001 11:31 AM
> Subject: Re: history-text relations
>
>
> > Dear Martin, Diane and Paul,
> >
> > And any history we can write or talk about is certainly "text;" to
> > deconstruct "history" one must be very, very quiet.
> >
> > And my sense is that Paul is evoking the primal experiences of being
> > shot or bombed or colonised, the "what happens to us" or to others when
> > we are not talking or writing about it, which perhaps you (Diane and
> > Martin) are right is not-history.
> >
> > In Peace,
> > K.
> >
> >
> >
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 01 2001 - 01:01:37 PDT