Date: Fri, 6 Oct 1995 09:05:52 EST From: "H-German Ed. Norm Goda" Reply to: H-NET List on German History To: Multiple recipients of list H-GERMAN Subject: debate on postmodernity Submitted by: Peter Fritzsche, University of Illinois pfritzsc@uiuc.edu I walk to school now so I end up musing along the way. To get some idle thoughts out of my head, I'd like to add some comments to the postmodern debate before it goes away, additions from someone who is not so theoretically able but is taken by some postmodern assumptions. I am not sure the debate about the real world is getting at the salience of postmodern assumptions. Perhaps I terribly distort postmodernism, but I have found it very helpful in my work to distinguish between facts and the construction work that creates meanings around facts. The Holocaust as such is not really in dispute, but the facts themselves do not create meanings. This work of creating meaning is something historians, and the wider public, do in their representation of the facts. Postmodernism, I don't think will help a great deal in reconstructing the role of the Wehrmacht or the Foreign Office in the Holocaust, but will be helpful in examining the memory of the Holocaust, the way it is received, revised, forgotten, by-passed in all sorts of historical thinking (thinking since 1945 and thinking to come). Postmodernism is also helpful--if one follows Zygmunt Bauman--in thinking about how value-neutral the modernist ethic of social cultivation and social improvement can be and how hard social entities have struggled to efface ambivalence. 1) The real world is not terribly manageable. There are lots of facts running around. So obviously we create meanings and histories that order these facts. We can't, after all, draw a map as big as the country itself. Where postmodern theory has helped me is to become more and more aware of the construction work involved in putting a country on a map, of creating a meaning out of facts, of the operations of inclusion and exclusion that go into the production of meaning. Reading Haydn White for the first time in 1982 I felt a rush of liberation as I realized how much my own aesthetic (or, at first glance, political) sensibilities shaped the way I constructed a history. White talks about the modes of romance and tragedy which go into moving a narrative forward and I suddenly saw that in my own way I was deploying modes, tropes, as well (Michelet lite, so to speak). This might sound very obvious but it leads to further suspicions about the construction of meaning. Once I became sensitive to the degree to which we as historians authorize various kinds of histories, I became aware of the pleasure I take in being a historian. I realized the degree to which I (and I don't mean to sound pretentious) create history-- not because I make up facts, and not even because I arrange them in pleasing ways, but because I am attracted to certain kinds of problems and issues and because I enjoy creating certain strange worlds (German aviation was one, Berlin 1900 will be another). Much of the choice between writing about an event or a person, the longue duree or an encounter, paradoxes or continuities, German history or not, is aesthetic. Some of us are splitters, others lumpers (me), some are Isaiah Berlin's hedgehogs, others foxes. Facts are the grain of the material we work; we can't work against the facts, as little as one can resist the property of wood, or marble, or canvas, but we can still work wood and marble in many various ways and we can also draw attention to the properties of the facts: what they enforce and also how they can be worked. History is very much what historians like to do (or feel they have to do). I for one find that the postmodern turn has among other happy and unhappy things pointed to the centrality of pleasure in writing a history. (I could ask myself why am I producing this intervention: to clarify my thoughts, to contribute to a debate, to get more well known in the profession, because I'm still in my first giddy days of being hooked up to the net and therefore use my e-mail frequently?) To accept this is also to appreciate (if not necessarily applaud) the various ways in which people have made use of the past. Geyer and Jarausch point intriguingly to changes in cross-Atlantic power and I think they are right in alerting us to new configurations that revise (not totally determine) our German histories and our interactions with and access to German German historians. To me, the change in tone in the profession's German-American relations since 1989 is astonishing, paticularly among younger historians. (Its a lot less deferential.) Geyer and Jarausch are also right to ask why we sometimes get so uneasy, so fast about these trends. But its not just historians; there are other people who use the past: antiquitarians, antiquers, readers of historical romance, simple rememberers (and forgetters). The way people use the past may make historians very uneasy. On the other hand, I believe we have to consider why people use and need histories (very small "h") in order to understand the nature of our own productions. 2) Once the manufactured process of creating meanings became more and more clear to me the horizon of historiographical critique opened up. There were all sorts of new ways of thinking about the conversations of historians, but more importantly new ways of thinking about narratives of meaning constructed by ideological machinery, by states, by social elites, by national histories--all of which struggled to put forward one version at the expense of others and attempted to erase any trace that this or that version was just a version. Postmodern theory helped identify what was said and not said and how (the "master narrative"), and helped indicate just how these narratives have dramatized political and social life, which, after all, cannot be deduced from material conditions but from the templates of meaning and perception that people have constructed or have had constructed for them. Depending on inclination, one could investigate the forces of homogeneity which have naturalized all sorts of non-necessary ideas about how the world works (reification) or one could examine how that machinery sometimes falls apart or is resisted. All this is terribly important if one is to understand ideology and social practices and their contests and to understand the conditions of subjectivity, agency, and choice (who gets to act, who can act). One could go a step further: what happens when historical actors become aware of the conditions of contingency under which they operate and use that contingency to create new techniques of mobility. I think this happened after World War I (Carl Schmitt, for example, on Political Romanticism) and helped constitute a fascist practice of using and managing the modernist categories of instability and crisis (on this, see the September 1995 and January 1996 issues of Modernism/Modernity). 3) The manufacture of meaning is also a function of new "regimes of perception" (if I quote Michael Geyer correctly), new ways of seeing and ordering that came to be as a result of cities, photography, movies, colonial encounters, mass production. Postmodern theory hypothesizes the ways in which industrial society changed the nature of sightfulness (of artists and writers, but also of ordinary city people). Crucial social identities such as spectatorship and consumption cannot be understood--I think-- without reference to new and novels ways of perceiving the world. Of course, not everyone has to be interested in this stuff. 4) Postmodern theory has also led me to be more sensitive to the origins of "History" itself. If White and Stephen Bann are right, history as a profession and a practice was not always "there," but is very much a product of the last two hundred years and Western conceptions of progress. The ways we approach the past as a pointilist splendor would have seemed very strange in the 18th century. To put it another way: I am now writing a history of nostalgia and one of the things that I am looking at is the trip up the attic stairs to rummage among the big treasure chests of the past, to discover the past as a past, as something different and lost, or retrievable only in fragments. It is my sense that this trip to the attic is a very nineteenth century but not at all an eighteenth century movement (and the extent that it seems strange to us today is perhaps the extent to which the past has become a spectacle of media images that have doomed "master narratives" because the present's pasts and the present are so commingled) All of this might not be original, but I think it is worthwhile to consider: postmodern theory has emphasized the various operations of manufacture and the regimens of perception both in our own work as historians and also in the social and ideological practices of all sorts of historical subjects. There is no past not because we do not really know whether the person was murdered but because the murder is constantly vulnerable to being reinterpreted, recontextualized, re-seen as simply a death, or forgotten altogether. It is not so much historians who do all this reinterpretation, recontextualization, reseeing, or forgetting, but the politics, the plays of power in the past. And the recovery of the manufactured nature of meanings in the past, of the vulnerability, is greatly advanced by our own acknowledgement of the (not limitless) manufacturing that we as historians undertake. .