Useful Stories

It appears to be something of a psychological truism – unduly obvious, self-evident, trivial – to say that when we tell stories about ourselves and our world, we tell stories that will be “useful” to us.  We tell stories that are interested in something.  They are invested in the outcome.  Perhaps not overtly, even consciously, but nonetheless, when we tell stories about the past, we put the past to work: on us, on those around us.  It is a kind of self and world-fashioning that we do everyday.

Let me underline that this does not mean that everybody floats around in a bubble, not touching other people, other groups or communities, each living in isolation from th other.  Our stories are fashioned in and by communities.  And communities are fashioned in and by their relation with still other communities.  The words we use are common.  Our stories are negotiated.  One could say, cautiously, that they are democratic.

Take, for example, the family photograph album.  Typically, more than one photographer must contribute.  If a mother takes photo’s of her children, then another, perhaps the father, must take photographs of the mother in order for her to appear.  Or perhaps a stranger.

Later, gathered around the family album, a conversation takes place: who is this?  What was happening then?  Who took this photo?  The story is pieced together again, and again, over and over.  It is retold, perhaps embellished, perhaps reduced in size, significance and extravigance.  New events, new photo’s change the rhythm, and topography of the story.  But it is still a real story – see the photo’s?  We were there, it happened, you and I can remember.  Memory becomes inescapably intertwined with photographs, viewed on dozens of different occasions.

But notice: what happens when you stop making photograph albums?  Or, your photograph “albums”, are actually files uploaded to Facebook, or Flickr, or a blog?  The community has changed, the format has changed, the conversation has changed.  The stories we tell are going to change, and the uses to which they are put, and their effects will change too.

It leaves me wondering what kind of stories I tell.  It makes me think that it is worth making the time to remember, and to create albums, journals, records.  What I’m talking about here is really tradition. Not in a negative or positive sense, but in a necessary sense.  We will make traditions, for better or worse.  The question is whether they are deliberate, or ad hoc.

Filed under: Family, Historiography, experiences, history, memory, technology , community narrative, family photo albums, family tradition, self-narrative, social structure of memory

Autumnal descriptions

You can see why they call it fall.  The leaves fall, the rain falls, the temperature falls… I could go on.  Autumn has well and truly sunk in.  It’s actually rather nice.  The campus at Macquarie is ecstatic with colour, the trees are treasuries of gold, or else a deep, dark, bloody red.  Buildings covered in vines have patches of red and green on them that make them look like the hugely drawn topography of a strange land.

The rain has been falling every day or two for weeks.  Four seasons in one day is certainly not unlikely, and I’m sure I could get a few more Finn songs in if I tried.  I pity all the graduands who are having their ceremonies during the mid semester break at the moment.  Although perhaps not – a colourful landscape, the wash grey clouds contrasting with the fireworks of the trees makes a lovely photo.

There’s a long running debate in historiography – was it possible to keep my study out of this post? – about narrative, (well, it’s not just in historiography, but it crosses disciplines across parts of philosophy and literary criticism too), and it’s relation to the ‘real’ world.  Some might argue that a narrative is an invention, that arranges the raw data of experience.  That experience is a meaningless sequence which we then shape to provide order, meaning etc.  Others argue that narrative is ‘built in’ so to speak, in the way we experience the world.  That our retention of the past, and protention of the future (that is, anticipation), down to the smallest moment, gives a ‘natural’ structure of beginnings, ends, and processes to the most bland of experience.

Autumn.  The leaves change colours; first a pale green, a rich gold, a pale blush, a deep blood stain.  Long after they fall, they will turn brown.  Millions of creatures will live amongs their decaying bodies.  I can imagine a story, ends, beginnings, processes, that has no person to behold it or structure it into a neat narrative.  The question is not that there are stories.  Rather, why do we desire them in the first place?

Filed under: Historiography, experiences, observations, random thoughts , Autumn, Historiography, narrative

Does Derrida have a future?

This is a post attempting to sketch out some preliminary thoughts on the thesis material I’ve been reading.  That is, nerd alert.

Derrida’s relationship to the pursuit of history as an academic discipline, is, at first glance, somewhat distant. 

Insofar as his work consists of specific engagements with Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Levinas, Plato, Rousseau, Levi-Strauss, and so many more (a voracious reader if there ever was one), then it is of interest to historians of philosophy, which is indistinguishable (although this is a debateable point) from philosophy, and little else.  In his engagements with the first four that I listed, Derrida makes glancing comments on a philosophy of history – for example, in his Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, or in Violence and Metaphysics, usually when the passages he is exegeting do so.  But historians are rarely interested in rigorous discussions on the philosophy of history, as Louis Mink points out so well.

However, this is not to say that Derrida and history are finished.  For there is an important historical element to Derrida’s general approach, particularly visible in early texts like Violence and Metaphysics and Of Grammatology, that should be accounted for.  I’ll try and summarise it as follows, mainly based on the intro part of Violence and Metaphysics:

Philosophy (defined as an ‘adventure of the question’) is, citing Husserl and Heidegger who call us to return to this root, primarily Greek.  Meanwhile, we live in a ‘today’ when ”the Greco-European adventure is in the process of taking over all of humanity.”* This raises the question of whether philosophy is a determined, which is to say finite and historical, moment of the question, or if it is the only form of the question in general.  The difference between these two points is “the difference between philosophy as a power and adventure of the question itself and philosophy as a determined event or turning point within this adventure.”**  That is to say, Derrida is devoted to thinking the difference between these two poles – it is an act of philosophy to think about the possibility of philosophy.  Hence the interest of Emmanuel Levinas’ thought, in that it seeks to confront Greek thought with another – Jewish thought. 

But this moment is prompted by, is a response to, a specific historical trajectory; what we call in general ‘the history of the west’.  Thus we see the source of Derrida’s interest in political and legal questions about Europe, its states, and its future, about international law and other realities of a ‘globalised’ world, a word he is ever suspicious of.  Particularly in his early works Derrida is concerned with conducting this debate at a technical and rigorous level, a terrain that is difficult ground for historians - the presuppositions inherent in detailed phenomenological analysis.  However, there are some points which we can derive from this that are relevant to historical practice. 

1. Philosophy is solicited by non-philosophy, that is, empiricism.  That is, contrary to what many historians have taken Derrida to mean, he is not opposed necessarily to empiricism.  Neither is this a relativism.  But it is an injunction to think in response to what one finds.

2. Derrida’s thought is inherently historical in its considerations.  It testifies to the way ideas are inseperably intertwined with our material history.  Again, this is not a relativism.

3. A pressing question to be considered is the relationship of the inheritors of Western traditions to those who are foreign to such traditions, not as an academic question, but as one of responsibility in the face of the domination of the West being expanded to a world wide scale.  That this debate is conducted in the very terms designated by that tradition is inescapable. 

4. That the history of ‘history’ as a discipline has a parallel one to that of metaphysics – think Herodotus, Tacitus… Greeks, should be considered.  What other traditions of history exist – Jewish, Chinese – and what differences exist between them?

It strikes me that these general principles are not foreign to historiography.  Afterall, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – translator of Of Grammatology - is quite influential in historical debates, particularly those about colonialism, which is, precisely the point in issue.  Also, historians like Henry Reynolds, who attempt to imagine The Other Side of the Frontier, are attempting something in this vein.  What Derrida brings to such a discussion is a philosophical awareness of the difficulty of achieving such a task. 

Given all of this then, it would seem bizarre that Derrida has been employed in debates about the theories underpinning historical practice mostly in an epistemological sense.  That is, historians who get hot under the collar, or excited, by the thought of there being ‘nothing outside the text’.  That is, that there is no substance that historical narratives are referring to.  There are some historians who have read Derrida well and applied his work in the ways I listed above – but they are often few and far between.  Strangely enough, the epistemological readings of Derrida’s work have perhaps partially contributed to quite a rigorous rethinking of the concept of ‘event’ and ‘narrative’, something which is no bad thing, and in the case of the former, something that Derrida himself invisages in Spectres of Marx.  A comparison of their findings might be in order. 

Historians, however, when giving an account of recent developments in the development of history as an academic discipline, still feel the need to touch, ie. reference, on Derrida’s thought as a key point in debates over a ‘linguistic turn’ or ‘postmodernism’.  The actual role of his work in these debates is not as great as one would think from the number of general invocations.  Thus Derrida’s name serves as a guiding star from which historians orient themselves – despite it not having quite the sense and direction that they think it might. 

This suggests then that there is a future of deconstruction, and of continuing the injunction of Derrida’s work to think responsibly – in more than one sense of this word – which does not need either the vocabulary of Derrida or deconstruction.  I have no doubt that ‘Derrida’ studies will continue, and that ‘deconstruction’ will continue as a name for various vague designations.  But so will thinking that uses none of these resources, and may still perhaps be considered faithful to this tradition. 

*Violence and Metaphysics, Writing and Difference, ([1967] Routledge, 2001), p101.

** Ibid.

Filed under: Derrida, Historiography, Philosophy, history, postmodernism, research , deconstruction, Derrida, Historiography