A Brief Response - To Regazzoni, Platt, Bevernage

This volume is a unique and adventurous endeavor in that it offers theory of history in the making as opposed to theory of history made. The reader catches me in the process of developing an argument for a new theory of history, which will be brought forth in my next book, The Surge, but began as the essay published in this volume. It was originally delivered as my Koselleck Lecture at Bielefeld in 2021, which I then revised in discussions with friends and colleagues while serving as the Reinhart Koselleck Gastprofessor (visiting professor) at the Center for Theories in Historical Research during that year. I have since continued to develop the concepts and arguments, and some of the views presented in this piece have been adjusted or changed, so the reader will see me “showing my work,” as it were. Thus, the volume is a window onto a moment of intellectual instability, which certainly renders the author vulnerable, but also creates the opportunity for genuine dialogue, which is rare in a published book. The precise and forceful interventions by Lisa Regazzoni, Kristin Platt, and Berber Bevernage offer important criticisms and alternatives that I need to take up. For this, I am deeply grateful.

The respondents are each uncomfortable with the notion of an “end-time of truth,” and they want to “imagine a different ending,” in Lisa Regazzoni’s words. For Regazzoni and Berber Bevernage, this different ending is one where we conserve history, or at least significant aspects of it, in its current disciplinary form. Regazzoni argues that “constant micro-negotiation and micro-contentions” to historical method can serve to restore its force and power over the long term. Bevernage is concerned by “the intellectual, socio-cultural, and political advantages that could potentially be lost by rejecting a historicist temporal logic”. Kristin Platt is less troubled by the possibility of a different mode of history but is worried that the idea of a compass will reintroduce the notion of “objectivity” by substituting space for time. All three have concerns about whether a “new compass of history” will overdetermine the directions we are able to go and who is granted the power to make such a decision. None of them question the precarity of our moment, but they all ask for, or offer, a different pathway to get through it. These are large, formidable issues, and while I do not have the time to address each of the respondent’s concerns, I will try to tackle the ones I consider most important.

One place to start is what Bevernage describes as my “grand claim” that we have reached the end-time of truth. Bevernage is surprised by this claim, arguing that I typically reject such narrative closures in favor of an “openness to uncertainty,” but also because it strikes him as “factually questionable”.

This leads him to also question what he calls my onto-epistemic diagnosis which he sees as “merely a symptom of a more profound problem”. Regazzoni takes issue with the postulate that “the crisis of the truth system inevitably goes hand in hand with the crisis of method and vice versa”. It strikes me that these critical interventions are related. I suppose one could read my essay as a story of narrative closure, which would explain the desire for a different ending, but to my mind, it is a story about beginnings, openings, and possibilities, which appear when a dominant truth regime collapses. In the essay, I argue that the certainty and closure of the previous truth regime has indeed collapsed and what lies before us is the possibility of an open and thus uncertain future as well as an open and thus uncertain past.

What’s more, it strikes me that the evidence Bevernage marshals to “factually question” my claim can be turned to support it. Bevernage states that “many of the so-called post-truthers actually do not question the concept of Truth itself: Rather, they tend to posit their own Truth, which they often pack in a hyper-positivist or scientistic discourse. Instead of rejecting expertise or epistemic authority in general, they typically attack allegedly ‘mainstream’ academic expertise or epistemic authority and propose their own alternative experts and sources of authority.  ‘Do your own research,’ the slogan goes.” (Bevernage) As I wrote in my essay, whether good-faith or bad-faith, these accounts rely on the view that there is a correction, which presents the event as it happened. These actors’ commitment to the concept of “Truth” is not what is at issue, but rather the fact that each can hold their own independent truth, and it is indicative of the proliferation of possible truths that deactivates the possibility of a singular Truth.

Regazzoni picks up this thread to suggest: “It follows that not only the truth on which our system of knowledge is based would then reach its end-point, but history, too, in the dual sense of res gestae, that is, the ensemble of historical facts concluded and buried in the past, and historia rerum gestarum, that is, the episteme and narratives through which we grasp them.” In my view, truth and truth regimes are historically contingent and subject to change. The truth regime in question in this case is the modern scientific one. Regazzoni and Bevernage are both correct to infer that if the scientific truth regime that undergirds the modern disciplinary understanding of history were to fail, then history as we know would likewise fail. But does not Bevernage’s example above suggest that this is exactly what has happened?

I argue that it was a mistake to imagine history as beholden to scientific truth in the first place. This is to say that “the ensemble of historical facts concluded and buried in the past” were never based on “truth” at all but, as Benjamin suggests, based on knowledge. Such a view unburdens our relationship to the past (and the future) from the desire for a one-to-one correlation between the things done (res gestae) and the history of those things (historia rerum gestarum), thus opening the possibility of multiple and competing pasts and multiple and competing logics of history. Yes, it is the end of what Regazzoni calls “our system of knowledge,” if that means the hegemony of modern disciplinary history, but I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing. It is a different thing. History is so much more than its current disciplinary iteration, and one can look to alternative and past variations with an eye toward the future of history. What’s more, the longevity of the concept itself points to both the protean and stabilizing aspects that make history so important and its possibilities so powerful.

Of course, this still leaves the question as to whether the Surge or the new compass of history are adequate or even advisable alternatives to the current mode. Regazzoni and Bevernage are both skeptical and especially worried by the reintroduction of metaphysics into the analysis. Bevernage cautions that “we should be careful not to engage in a (re-)ontologizing of the haunting past and introduce metaphysical principles that are hard to defend or even have a mystical ring to them”. To my mind, historians are always in the business of “ontologizing,” at least in trying to convince others that something was “there” when they conjure the past. This is why, in my hauntological view, I claim that the past i̶s̶.  What I don’t understand is why a return to metaphysics or mysticism would be a problem here, unless the claim is that these views entail a return to unquestioned essentialism even more forceful than the current rationalist scientific mode. It strikes me that the real concern is with entering a new and different epistemological framework where the current argumentative strategies (for scholarship, for politics, for ethics) can no longer be taken for granted. To be sure, this is a new and unknown terrain, but I am no longer afraid of the metaphysical, or even the mystical. In the case of history, I think the fraying of the epistemological fabric should force one to reconsider the logical assumptions of the discipline that have prevailed for the last 150 years or so. To follow Paul Feyerabend in Against Method, it should be “rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives, each single theory, each fairy-tale, each myth, that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of consciousness.”  We can argue about what development means in this context, but the general point is to allow for alternative logics and epistemologies, the “non-rational” in the sense Bevernage is using the term, to enter the dialogue.

Regazzoni is concerned that the Surge enables the abdication of the historian’s responsibility who offloads the “moral imperative in the present and for the future” to the “indeterminate and out-of-control ‘Surge’”. This is likely why Bevernage sees the Surge as having potentially depoliticizing effects and Platt worries that “the considerations outlined here also venture to suggest that it should not be the historian’s task to give directions, but to accept different pasts”. I understand the criticism and realize it is in part because my articulation of the Surge was problematic in this iteration. I now see that the Surge is not the Total Other, but a site of mediation between the historian and the actor in the past, as well as the past that surges toward that actor or actors. I do not have the time to articulate the relation between Temporal Anarchy, the Surge, and what I call the vortex here, as it is beyond the scope of the current intervention.  What I can say is that the Surge is an anonymous and temporally dynamic force that can be taken up by the historian(s) or actor(s) in the present to their own end. Thus, in my view, it does not dictate or determine action, ethical or otherwise, though one could say that it calls for it and does so in myriad ways. It is a different way of encountering the past as dynamic and active. 

Platt nevertheless appears to agree with my attempt to disrupt historicist time: “With the concept of ‘the Surge,’ Kleinberg introduces a mode of history that makes it possible to look at the prolific possibilities of the present and to underline that not every present option follows a linear deduction from the past”. Platt, however, questions whether the compass of history should be the means by which to account for this temporally dynamic force. This concern is shared by Regazzoni and Bevernage. Platt contents: “With its intended ability to indicate a direction from the stream of events, the detector follows a more traditional view of historiography and the tasks ascribed to it. It is also worth noting that Kleinberg’s detector does not measure time, but identifies places: It ‘points to sites where the past surges into the present unexpectedly, touching us and connecting with our concerns, not only for the present but also the future.’” It is the prolificness that interests me, and not the stream of events or historical tasks. My contention is that the events of the past are more temporally dynamic and forceful than most paradigms allow for, and as such, require a mode of history attuned to this temporally anarchistic force. My emphasis is not on the multiplicity of possible paths (space), but on the temporal anarchy whereby new pasts can open different futures, and new futures can open different pasts. The compass is an intermingling of time and space pointing to other ways that the past can be and other ways that past, present, and future can swirl together. This is the force that can irrupt into and disrupt the present, altering the future. 

Platt presciently points out that in this iteration I do not “discuss in detail whether the ‘Surge detector’ can also detect places of discourse between the present and the future”, but this is a crucial aspect of the project. The new compass of history is not restrained by what has been, but attracted to what can be, pointing us toward the possibility of multiple pasts and multiple futures. Directionality is not predetermined, and what we consider to be our moral or ethical direction can change. Here, the future is not considered as a forward moment of progress, but a melee of movement in which the past intercedes into the present and the future itself can change the past. Crucially, the radically distinct ways of being and acting are not restricted to past events or actors, but also applied to the ways we organize time. This plurality of time and temporality forces us to question the currently axiomatic understanding of chronology as fused to temporality. 

The multiplicity of logics of history and the plurality of possible historians as well as historical actors leads me to reject the claim that “a compass of history threaten[s] to bring back the idea that some of us – some cultural or political avant-garde – have better compasses and are better navigators of the space of history than others, and thus can appropriate the privilege to say what are proper political or ethical concerns and what are not” (Bevernage). The compass instead points to sites of contestation, and it is up to us to enter into those conversations and to reconsider the coordinates we take to be axiomatic. It is a stepping back, not a stepping over. If we take the charge of elitism or presumed superiority off the table, Bevernage and I are likely much more closely aligned.

A crucial difference, however, remains as to whether an ontic-epistemological analysis such as mine restrains us from seeing or engaging with the socio-political aspects of our moment? Clearly, I don’t think it does, because in my view, such an analysis is enabling and energizing precisely because it offers something new. I would counter that some of the concerns voiced in the responses are themselves restraining us from such engagement because they look backwards for solutions and not forward. Bevernage’s reliance on Rorty could tumble quickly into a Habermasian public sphere argument, Regazzoni’s confidence in the incremental development of historical method necessarily (if unintentionally) remains caught in the trap of historicism and its seemingly unbreakable progressive teleology, and Platt’s articulation of the flow of time remains beholden to the historicist conception of time. Each are indicative of the way our current relation to the sociopolitical future is one where our commitments to history as it has been keeps us from changing our view of what history can be and what sort of future could follow. In short, I see them as referring back to established models to find a different ending while my intention is to look forward toward a new beginning.