Preliminary Programme

When Hayden White reintroduces Michael Oakeshott’s concept of the practical past, he stresses the ethical nature of this concept by referring to the Kantian use of the word 'practical'. The practical past aims at answering the ethical question “What should I (we) do in the present situation?”, an ethical dimension that, according to White, is not to be found in the historical past.
This paper challenges the division between an ethical practical past and an unethical historical past and support the claim that every encounter with the past is in essence ethical. Every representation of a past demands an ethical position. There is no strict division between an ethical and an unethical past but a continuum between three different positions. The first is aimed at the future and future generations and resembles the practical past. It is a past that can be applied for a better future. The second is aimed at the present, for example the academic community, and resembles what is called the historical past. It’s a past that hopes to uphold the notion of truth. The third is aimed at the past, for example the people who suffered. It’s a past that wants to right a wrong. Each of these positions are ethical and can be connected to a specific ethical theory (either deontological or consequential), a kind of narrative and a particular notion of time. This ethical position is to be found both on the side of the production of the past, the historian, writer, judge, politician, … who represents the past, and on the side of the receiver, who interprets these representations. There is an ethical discussion underneath the methodological and rhetorical choices that are being made every time one encounters or represents the past.
This paper claims that although Whites distinction, following Oakeshott, between the practical past and the historical past, is a valid distinction, it gives only a part of the very complex interaction between ethics and history. (Show less)

In this talk, I will examine the relation between the historical and the practical past by analyzing two infamous historiographical debates: the Historikerstreit in Germany and the History Wars in Australia. What is interesting about this, is that these debates dwell on the border between the historical and the practical past. On the one hand, they are (largely) conducted by professional historians (or academics at least), and causal and explanatory claims and empirical evidence play an important role. In this sense, they belong to what White (2011) calls the 'Historical Past'. On the other hand however, they are conducted in the public sphere (in newspapers and tv-shows rather than academic journals), they are intimately connected with political, social and ideological differences, and they are of great importance to the lives and identity of many ordinary people. Seen from this light, they clearly belong to the 'Practical Past'. My argument is that, in the way these debates were held and in the way we think about them, their 'Practical' nature is ignored. Most participants to the Historikerstreit or the History Wars seemd to presuppose that the aim of the debate was to reach a consensus: one single objectively true representation of the past. However, when we analyse their arguments (which I will do through the so-called erotetic model of explanation (Van Fraassen 1980, Achinstein 1983), it becomes clear that consensus never was a possibility. In both debates, disagreement was not the result of lacking empirical information or careless model-building, such as in more 'normal' scientific or historical debate. Rather, it is a direct consequence of a difference in perspectives, of irreconcilable ideological and political differences. Or, in the terms of White, dissensus here is of a 'Practical nature', and not a 'historical' one. And since the dissensus is a Practical one, the solution has to be a Practical one as well. And this in its turn entails that debates such as the Historikerstreit or the History Wars cannot be 'solved' by means of a consensus, but only by a recognition of differences, by reaching a legitimate pluralism of perspectives.

When the past becomes practical, it also becomes dissensual. (Show less)

This paper examines a blurring of the boundary between institutional history and everyday appropriations of the past that it attributes to contemporary understandings of 'history'. A central claim is that the theorizations of radical histories since the 1960s are in part responsible for a wide-ranging turn to entertainment rather than to increased political or ethical engagement even within institutional representation of the past. The relation of this (rather peculiar) outcome to the social and political ideals behind the narrative turn is discussed, as is the way in which the focus on entertaining might now be moderated and critical intentions reinserted into theorizing history. One route suggested here is that of embracing and redescribing entertainment as a valid critical cultural strategy in a society where irony has, by and large, become an acceptable mode of discourse. The implication is that placing institutional histories before popular depictions of the past is no longer (if it ever was) a useful way of thinking our engagement with the past.

As can readily be seen, many of the formulations here follow from those originally presented by Hayden White in his defence of narrative constructivism. The core idea of now thinking this problematic in terms of 'recreation' rather than of entertainment also owes a debt to White. Reconceiving the crude opposition between authorised, institutionally sanctioned histories and popular appropriations of the past for diverse practical purposes and by the entertainment industry in terms of 'recreation' accomplishes several things: Crucially it shifts the focus from authorised production and passive consumption (implied by both 'professional history' and 'entertainment') to active engagement with representations of the past. The role of playfulness and individual purpose in descriptions of the past becomes more emphasised. It thus also admits the practical nature of meaning-construction to the broader 'history'/past debate: The past is what we make of it with respect to particular, context-sensitive goals and purposes.

With the (implied) idea of re-creation, the folk belief that 'history' (and crucially the meaning of representations) somehow reflects reality is still kept alive, however, which -- although epistemologically unwarranted -- helps in explaining the (rather limited) range of representational strategies utilised. -- Despite any ironic condition, there still appears to be a need to distinguish talk of the past from more fictional discursive modes. In order to highlight the problems with this, the ways in which the instinctive commitment to realistic forms informs the traditional hierarchy between professional and popular representations of the past is discussed. Further, and in order to better determine the limits of any 're-creation', several strategies for taking representations in directions not obviously offered even by the model of modernist literary forms -- the model that has been held up by narrative constructivists for 'experimental' historying -- are put forward. (Show less)

This paper argues that professional historians have actually already been extremely busy during the last few decades studying and dealing with White’s practical past. Historians have grouped practical pasts together with virtually every other way of relating to the past, that strays from the norm of academic historiography, under the nebulous concept of “collective memory.” Although historians take the practical past seriously they, perhaps unsurprisingly, refuse to grant it the status of “truth,” as something that needs to be dealt with on an equal footing with historiography. Instead historians have sought to account for these challenges to the historical past by inserting them into historical narrative itself. The phenomenon of people seeking to engage with a practical past has been historicized: The product, is as a story of a “memory boom” which emerged in a late 20th century and can be explained as a reaction to the post-holocaust and post-political world and the decline in future oriented political projects (read communism).
Historians have not adopted or incorporated the literary innovations that the modernist novel produced in an attempt to deal with the past in a practical way as Hayden White seems to believe they should do. On the contrary, the study of the practical past has actually led to a retrenchment of the historical past and to academic history’s commitment to the literary form of narratio. History is more and more defined in opposition to collective memory. Emplotted as the late 20th century memory boom, the practical past is subsumed within the historical past, and given a place in narrative that supports its coherency rather than corrupting it or endangering it.
I will illustrate this metahistorical argument by referring to the case of scholarly historical accounts of African American memory of slavery. (Show less)