Alun Munslow
Over the years the practice of history has witnessed a good many shifts and turns. Since the 1960s, for example, the discipline has experienced a social science turn, a cliometric or statistics turn, a women’s history turn, a cultural history turn and so on. These are not fads. Each has developed and still remains a vibrant way in which historians elect to study and write about change over time.
But, in this “history of history” one thing has apparently not changed. That is its epistemology. In other words, despite all these methodological developments and thematic innovations, the basic way historians “know” has remained fixed.
Despite the use of statistics and the new themes (society, women, gender, culture) there remain two immovable points in the historian’s universe: empiricism and analysis. By empiricism is meant knowledge gained through the senses as we observe and experience life.
In the case of historians the assumption is that the reality of the past can be discovered through the observation of its traces the evidence. By analysis is meant inference the reasoned drawing of conclusions. As the product of the Enlightenment, the empirical-analytical model has become the epistemology for doing history.
However, since the 1960s doubts about the empirical-analytical paradigm as the privileged route to knowing have emerged. This has not happened in history alone but in all the arts, humanities, social sciences and even the physical and life sciences. How can we be sure that the data and inference really do get us close to true meaning? How can we trust our sources not because they are false or forgeries or missing, but because of the larger claims empiricism makes about our powers to find and represent their meaning accurately?
It is no abstract philosophical point: where does meaning come from in history? Is it the past itself or the historian as he narrates it, or both? This is the essence of the post-modern challenge, the turn toward the narrative-linguistic.
The narrative-linguistic turn in history continues to deploy the empirical-analytical model. But it does so self-consciously and in ways which, without denying the reality of the past or brushing aside the desire to get at meaning, extend the knowing process to include its representation, and the cognitive form we give to the past within our texts. The narrative-linguistic turn recognises that history, a literary activity, is self-consciously (and self-evidently) authored.
Postmodern historians thus ask many fresh questions. Is there only one story to the past, or several, and is it the past or the historian who provides them? Is history what happened or what historians tell us happened? If the latter, we must understand the telling process that is so essential to knowing. All these questions have to be addressed when we do history: to ignore them is to do only half the job.
The emphasis now is less on history as a process of objective discovery and report and instead more on more of an acceptance of its unavoidably fictive nature that is, its literary constructedness.
By this I mean recognising the assumptions that underpin authorial activity in creating the text and that are already (in a pre-empirical sense) and necessarily brought to the historical field, often determining the selection of evidence and its most likely meaning. None of this is to deny the reality of the past or to become amoral or relativist or to slip into the denial of the data. It is, rather, to recognise that history is a complex linguistic process, and that the truth of the past cannot be revealed by the analysis of its traces alone.
In other words, the postmodern challenge extends the remit of history to include the historian’s pre-narrative and pre-figurative assumptions and how we weave those assumptions into forms or strategies of narrative explanation.
In a very real sense the postmodern challenge forces us to face up to the highly complex question of how we can know truthful things about the past and what we, as moral beings, so as a result.
Alun Munslow is professor of history and historical theory at Staffordshire University and is United Kingdom editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice