Haunting pasts and “post-truth”: from objectivity to solidarity

Ethan Kleinberg has written a rich and inspiring essay, with much of which I wholeheartedly agree. Kleinberg and I share several intellectual and political interests. We are both interested in the implications of Derrida’s theory of spectrality for historiography and share a skepticism about the “realist” ontological commitments of many historians. Both Kleinberg and I search for approaches to history that are emancipatory and yet remain responsive to issues of historical justice. In that context, I also agree with his claim that we need to reconceptualize historical time. Moreover, I think he is right to point out that special attention should be paid to the relationship between conceptions of historical time and conceptualizations of the “we,” the “us,” and the “our”. A critical analysis of historicity must indeed be combined with one of sociability, since these two closely intertwine. I strongly support Kleinberg’s plea to “[let] go of all the coordinates by which we find ourselves privileged owners of history, to imagine and enact an ethical relation to the past and future.” I also share Kleinberg’s conviction that in order to do this, we have to think of the past (or rather I would say historical “pastness”) as a “dynamic site” which is never “ontologically given.”

Because I share most of Kleinberg’s intellectual-political concerns and aims, I will use this essay to think along with him and to raise some questions and propose some suggestions that I hope will contribute to his diagnosis of the problems he raises and help us advance towards our shared goals. I will focus, in particular, on the diagnosis of the phenomena of so-called post-truth and the haunting past. In line with many colleagues, Kleinberg seems to interpret “post-truth” as primarily an epistemic crisis. Others see the phenomenon primarily as a social crisis involving polarization and declining political trust. Kleinberg’s idea of the new (anachronic) compass of history fits well with the epistemic diagnosis and indeed seems most potent in relation to ills that are primarily epistemic in nature. Yet, the question can be raised whether the notion of a new compass is equally fruitful in relation to the broader social dynamics and ills that underpin the “post-truth” crisis. Are there alternative ways of conceptualizing, relating to, and dealing with the phenomena of “haunting pasts” and historiographical parallelism that could help us address these broader social issues, as well?

One issue of concern in the search for an alternative emancipatory-yet-responsible conceptualization of history is 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. Although certainly not a general feature of Kleinberg’s essay, some of the expressions about the Surge as an “active and unstable temporal force” and Total Other, I argue below, run the risk of facilitating such a problematic reading. Similarly, I sympathize with Kleinberg’s attempt to theoretically bolster a more moral relation to history. Yet, I also feel that describing the Surge as a Total Other and as the locus of a trans- or a-temporal moral call, potentially leads to a ‘divining’  of history that re-introduces what Marcel Gauchet describes as the key religious principles of (transcendental) heteronomy and alterity.  Such a theoretical move may be unconvincing to those who remain skeptical about the recent post-secular turn in theory.

Another issue of concern is that a rejection of historicist temporal logics is a risky move with high intellectual stakes. The problem with historicism is that it can have malign as well as benign effects and the key question is whether and how we can keep the latter while discarding the former. How, for example, to become critically post-historicist without lapsing into some naïve a-historical worldview? Kleinberg is well aware of these dilemmas, and he recognizes embracing a logic of “anachrony” or “the unfettered intermingling of past, present, and future” can be dangerous. His essay remains relatively succinct about risks and potential side-effects, however. It would be interesting if Kleinberg could further reflect on the intellectual, socio-cultural, and political advantages that could potentially be lost by rejecting a historicist temporal logic. Can any society function while embracing anachrony or breaking with any and all temporal logics? And is this a politically desirable and responsible option?

Given these issues of concern, it is worth asking whether Kleinberg’s rejection of historians’ “realist” ontological commitments and his aim to theoretically defend an alternative and more morally engaged relation to history necessitate a move so politically risky as embracing the idea of the Surge and the anachrony it entails. I don’t think this should be the case. Kleinberg’s project does not stand or fall on this point alone. Below, I argue that the work of Richard Rorty can be helpful for Kleinberg’s intellectual project because it enables a critical reconceptualization of temporal logic that no longer pretends to mirror objective history, but reconstitutes itself by embracing what Rorty has called the social logic of solidarity.

Kleinberg opens his essay with a post-histoire-style statement: “We have reached the end-time of truth.” This grand claim comes as something of a surprise given the style of reasoning Kleinberg typically defends, revolving around an openness to uncertainty and a rejection of narrative closure. It also strikes me as factually questionable since 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.

This also raises the question of who are the “we” that reached the end-time of truth. Where was that end-time reached? This is a pertinent issue given Kleinberg’s own plea to reflect on the discursive constitution of the “we.” In his essay “Where is the now,”  Dipesh Chakrabarty convincingly argued that any periodizing claim or claim about the “the present,” “the contemporary,” or “our time” is a socio-culturally and geo-politically situated claim. Where in the world, and in which social environment, is “post-truth” being experienced? Who is thus in need of a new compass of history? Who, moreover, has the luxury to discard the ideal of progress or even temporal logic as such?

As I mentioned earlier, Kleinberg’s diagnosis of the end-time of truth claim and his analysis of historiographical parallelism point primarily to epistemic causes. Kleinberg puts a lot of stress on this epistemological diagnosis, and he sees the epistemology (and ontology) of the historicist tradition as the main culprits: “both right-wing and left-wing tribalism, which characterizes ‘identity politics,’ are the result of a historical logic and method which came of age in the nineteenth century, designed to serve identitarian nationalism.” This (onto-)epistemic diagnosis is important, because only on such basis can Kleinberg’s solution be convincing. Only when post-truth and parallelism are caused by a historical logic can the rejection of that logic and an embracing of achronism seem constructive.

I am not entirely convinced by this onto-epistemic diagnosis. Undoubtedly something is happening on an epistemic level. Yet, rather than the cause of the crisis, this seems to me to be merely a symptom of a more profound problem. The deeper causes of historiographical parallelism and “post-truth,” I believe, are societal fragmentation, polarization, and loss of trust in public institutions and political leadership. Not an original idea, of course. Many express similar views. Henrik Enroth, for example, argues that “post-truth” results from a crisis of socio-political authority in the particular sense Hannah Arendt gave to that term.  Arendt differentiates authority from both coercion and persuasion. When a tyrannical leader uses brute force, it typically betrays a lack of authority. The hierarchical nature of authority also contrasts with the ideally egalitarian logic of rational persuasion. An enigmatic image thus results, in which authority becomes thoroughly relational and fragile. Leaders only have authority when this authority is recognized by followers. Authority can bind people to a leader and each other, but only to the extent that this leader convincingly presents him- or herself as the servant of, and thus as bound to, a higher principle, aspiration, or promise from which (s)he receives authority. Authority crumbles when the link to the common project or aspiration is loosened. This happens when promises are broken, or aspirations no longer seem convincing.

Enroth argues that the so-called post-truth condition is primarily caused by such a loss of authority. This loss of authority, and thus also the communal bond, in its turn results from a loss of trust in cultural institutions and political leaders due to broken promises and failed collective aspirations – most notably the promise of equality and redistribution once made by welfare states. Enroth’s political diagnosis also points to a political solution. “What is needed,” he argues, “is nothing less than a reconstitution of authority, which is to say, a compelling and tangible reconnection with the foundational [social, economic, legal, cultural etc.] promises on which established forms of authority rest […].” 

Enroth’s diagnosis and proposed remedy can be applied fruitfully to crises of regimes of historicity and the issue of historiographical parallelism. I have argued elsewhere that besides a decline of large collective projects aspiring to utopian futures, a crisis of the historicist notion of pastness can be observed in large parts of the world.  While once so seemingly self-evident that it hardly warranted reflection, the historicist axiom of the “pastness of the past” – in the sense of its otherness (its difference from the present) or its non-contemporaneity (its not-belonging-to-our-time) – is increasingly being challenged. Many observers note how the past has obtained a strong presence in a broad set of societal spheres. According to some, the haunting presence of the past has become so ubiquitous that it fundamentally threatens “proper” historical consciousness and indeed the historicist notion of pastness.  Many relate “present pasts” to an “over-valorization of affiliations”  and fractious identity politics whereby loyalties toward dead ancestors allegedly threaten social cohesion between the living.

While critics stress negative socio-political effects, I have pointed out elsewhere that they typically reproach those who challenge the pastness of the past in onto-epistemic terms rather than political ones.  They criticize victims’ groups for not “recognizing” the true nature of the pastness of the past (as if pastness belonged to the ontological nature of phenomena) or not knowing the difference between past and present (as if this were a matter of simple observation). This seems problematic on several levels. Mostly, however, this onto-epistemic analysis hinders our understanding of how the rejection of historicist pastness is thoroughly socio-political both in its causes and effects.

Clearly, there are significant differences between the views of the critics just discussed and those Kleinberg outlines in his essay. Kleinberg is certainly not nostalgic for a conventional historical consciousness that neatly divides past from present, and he positively values haunting pasts and the moral injunctions he ascribes to them. Notwithstanding these diametrically opposed views, however, Kleinberg seems to share the onto-epistemic diagnosis of the problem. Despite his own warnings not to treat the past as ontologically given, I think Kleinberg’s notion of the Surge still implies, or at least threatens to reintroduce, an ontologizing of the haunting past. At moments, the past is treated as an object that can return on its own strength and has an enigmatic agency that moves us to describe it in a particular way – even if rightly stressing “there is no singular or definitive way to do this.” Kleinberg “believe[s] historical constructions are ultimately ‘moved by the past’,” using Eelco Runia’s expression. Similarly, Kleinberg sometimes seems to be falling into the trap of what Keith Jenkins once called the fallacy of the “demanding past,” for example when he argues that “the past provides the call for a moral imperative in the present and for the future.”

Kleinberg’s argument is subtle, complex, and thought provoking. Yet, I fear that the metaphor of the “compass of history” is ultimately an infelicitous one because it can have depoliticizing effects. Kleinberg’s essay can be read as reinforcing the idea that the source of politics and morality is to be situated in some external – dare I say objective, albeit non-historicist – historical force and that proper politics must be based on a more sophisticated sensitivity to that history. This is how I read the plea for a new compass as “a Surge detector that identifies the sites of political and ethical intervention when issues from the past return in ways that connect to immediate concerns.” Who is to decide what are the most immediate concerns and what aspects of the past connect to, or are relevant to, those immediate concerns? Isn’t the heart of politics the struggle to define our immediate or most urgent concerns as well as the power to claim or reject connections between seemingly transtemporal concerns – or to posit transtemporal “chains of equivalence,” in Ernesto Laclau’s terminology?” 

To put it differently: Does not the idea of a compass of history threaten 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?

In order to reconceptualize historicist pastness as well as its rejection in a consistently non-ontologizing and non-metaphysical way as socio-political productions, we may take inspiration from Richard Rorty. According to Rorty, there are two different ways people make sense of reality and their place within it, which he describes as centered around “objectivity” versus “solidarity”:

“The first is by telling the story of their contribution to a community. This community may be the actual historical one in which they live, or another actual one, distant in time or place, or a quite imaginary one, consisting perhaps of a dozen heroes and heroines selected from history or fiction or both. The second way is to describe themselves as standing in immediate relation to a nonhuman reality. This relation is immediate in the sense that it does not derive from a relation between such a reality and their tribe, or their nation, or their imagined band of comrades. I shall say that stories of the former kind exemplify the desire for solidarity, and that stories of the latter kind exemplify the desire for objectivity.” 

The dominant Western epistemological tradition embodies a desire for objectivity. Partisans of objectivity – whom Rorty calls “realists” – are searching for a universal and ahistorical truth that transcends the socially and historically positioned beliefs of the members of particular communities. “Realists” conceive of Truth as correspondence to reality and need to start from specific metaphysical assumptions. As Rorty explains: “[…] [T]hey must construct a metaphysics that has room for a special relation between beliefs and objects which will differentiate true from false beliefs. They also must argue that there are procedures of justification of belief which are natural and not merely local.” 

Rorty is suspicious of such generalizing metaphysical and epistemological assumptions. He rejects the idea that Truth corresponds to, or mirrors, the objective nature of things, and he posits that “there is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification that a given society – ours – uses in one or another area of inquiry.” Rorty accepts that this view can be described as ethnocentric in a specific sense, since it starts out from socially and historically situated beliefs and justifications of members of concrete communities. Yet, he strongly rejects the realist criticism that sees pragmatism as an “anything goes”-relativism or as implying cultural solipsism or isolationism. This criticism misconceives pragmatism as based on a competing epistemology or metaphysical theory of Truth. This is mistaken because pragmatism, according to Rorty, has no positive metaphysical or epistemological theory of Truth – and thus certainly no relativist one – but simply starts out from the purely negative rejection of the correspondence theory of Truth and the traditional distinction between knowledge and opinion based on it. Rather than being grounded in metaphysics or epistemology, “[the pragmatist] account of the value of cooperative human inquiry has only an ethical base.”  Hence Rorty argues that pragmatist philosophers should best be described as partisans of “solidarity.” Partisans of solidarity, just like those of objectivity, favor concepts of truth, meaning, or justice that are as broadly valid as possible. Yet, in contrast to partisans of objectivity, they argue these concepts cannot by obtained by “escaping” or denying the limitations of one’s socio-cultural of historical situatedness – thus one’s embeddedness in “community”. Rather, such broadly valid concepts should be based on “the desire for as much intersubjective agreement as possible, the desire to extend the reference of ‘us’ as far as we can.”  As Rorty puts it elsewhere, partisans of solidary are driven by a desire for justice, not in the sense of some transhistorical or universal ideal, but in the sense of the largest possible loyalty. 

Rorty’s differentiation between objectivity and solidarity is a useful tool to critically rethink historical pastness, the notion of “the contemporary,” and the notion of the haunting past. A solidarity-based reconceptualization would certainly provincialize the now  because it rejects any universalist notions of the presence of the present and the pastness of the past. Any claims about of the pastness or contemporaneity of certain phenomena, cultural expressions, or social ideals are necessarily socio-culturally and historically situated. They are typically based on extrapolations or generalizations of relatively local observations or experiences of what is considered actual and unactual, or living and dead in a particular geographical or socio-cultural space. This also implies that generalizing statements about the pastness of the past are always potentially premature or pre-emptive. Since no full empirical description of the contemporary is feasible, and since the temporal delimitations of the present are always contestable, one always risks missing out on important historical continuities and prematurely declaring the pastness of the past. Recognizing this risk of what could be called pre-emptive historicization should help us take seriously, as Kleinberg definitely also aims to do, the claims of many activists and victims’ groups who, for example, speak about the “unfinished business of apartheid,” argue that “we are not decolonized yet,” or more generally, see contemporary inequalities as continuations of historic injustices.

Some may be disturbed by the “lonely provincialism”  that follows from a rejection of a universally valid notion of the historical present or of a clear dividing line between the historical past and present. Yet, it does not mean that we resign ourselves to accepting social fragmentation, historiographical parallelism, or cultural solipsism. Even though communities and cultures (or rather individuals within them) can have different temporal experiences, they are no isolated islands or hermeneutical monads. Moreover, as Rorty rightly remarks, the differences between members of different cultures are not necessarily larger than those among members of the same culture. Even people with radically different backgrounds can come to see themselves as sharing the same experiences of contemporaneity and senses of pastness – even if it is unlikely these experiences will ever be universally shared by humanity as a whole.

Shared senses of contemporaneity and pastness, or shared temporal logics or historical orientations matter and should not be discarded as meaningless. They enable people to engage in common projects for the future, or to mourn and come to terms with aspects of what has happened. Yet, rather than being objective or natural, notions of contemporaneity and historical pastness should be seen as factually under-determined and as at least partly resulting from constructive social imagination and affective investments. This does not render them arbitrary or changeable at will. The contemporaneity of the present and the pastness of the past are social constructions that can be experienced as very tangible, durable, or even “objective.” They can only be changed via repeated collective efforts, social negotiations, and counter-investments based on aspirations and promises that are convincing to as many different people as possible and that can serve as “acts of social faith”  on which to build shared regimes of historicity.

The advantage of reconceiving historical contemporaneity and pastness as well as the haunting of the past from the perspective of solidarity, rather than objectivity, is that it is not dependent on contestable metaphysical or epistemic assumptions. It has no need for metaphysics or for attributing past agency or the capacity to make its own moral demands. Neither do we need to assume that some people are better able to sense or be responsive to the moral claims of the past and their connection to present concerns because of a superior epistemology or more sophisticated compass for history that is better attuned to the claims raised by a surging past.

The plea to approach pastness and the haunting past through the concept of solidarity is based, firstly, on the purely negative point that conventional historicist metaphysics – which neatly separates past from present by positing the contemporaneity of the present and pastness of the past – are problematic and self-contradictory. Pointing out the contradictions within these historicist metaphysics, and more generally, any variations of so-called “metaphysics of presence,” is the strongest legacy of Derrida’s deconstructive work and of his notion of spectrality that Kleinberg and I have found so inspiring. Secondly, a solidarity-based reconceptualization simply remarks that the historicist idea of pastness fails to convince many individuals and communities around the world. This has the related advantage that we do not have to pathologize those who reject historicist pastness, or engage in historiographical parallelism, as irrational or as denying the allegedly objective dividing line between past and present. Rather, historiographical parallelism appears as a logical, yet not irreversible, result of a situation wherein social promises are broken and nobody has the authority to set up ambitious but convincing social projects working toward a common future.

The modernist regime of historicity, for which many seem nostalgic, may have been based on minorities’ tacit acceptance not to bring up their diverging historical experiences or historical grievances on account of some convincing utopian promises that made it acceptable to look forward and rally around the slogan “don’t mourn, organize.”  It may well be, however, that such a time never existed: that the great universalizing social promises were never convincing to all and that some groups always voiced their historical grievances, but that the modern regime of historicity was so dominant that it rendered those voices inaudible or even unintelligible. There is nothing so seemingly irrational from the perspective of the modern regime of historicity as rebelling against the clock. By seeing the pastness of the past and the contemporaneity of the present as primarily ethically driven, rather than as an onto-epistemological question, this irrationality disappears.

Since pastness, contemporaneity, and futurity are relational phenomena based on affective and existential investments, no temporal orientation is inherently emancipatory or oppressive. This should also give us some relief from some of the more alarmist observations on collapsing regimes of historicity and the decline of ‘proper’ historical consciousness. People can find emancipatory force, utopian energy, or, to the contrary, conservative comfort in futurity, contemporaneity, and pastness alike, just as radical alterity can be found in the past and the future, as well as the present. What matters is the concrete situation and the particular socio-cultural or historical context.