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Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination HISTORICISM, HISTORY, AND THE FIGURATIVE IMAGINATION HAYDEN V. WHITE Discussions of "historicism" sometimes proceed on the assumption that it consists of a discernible and unjustifiable distortion of a properly "historical" way of representing reality. Thus, for example, there are those who speak of the particularizing interest of the "historian" as against the generalizing in- terests of the "historicist." Again, the "historian" is supposed to be interested in elaborating points of view rather than in constructing theories, as the "his- toricist" wishes to do. Next, the "historian" is supposed to favor a narrativist, the "historicist" an analytical mode of representation. And finally, while the "historian" studies the past for its own sake or, as the phrase has it, "for itself alone," the "historicist" wants to use his knowledge of the past to illuminate the problems of his present or, worse, to predict the path of history's future development.' 1. This is Popper's view, of course. See Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London, 1961), 143-152. So too Georg Iggers draws a distinction between what he calls "a sense of history" and "historicism," the former having to do with "an aware- ness that the past is fundamentally different from the present," the latter with the attempt to comprehend "the past in its uniqueness" and with the rejection of the im- pulse "to measure the past by the norms of the Enlightenment." See his article "His- toricism" in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip W. Wiener (New York, 1973), II, 457. Here of course Iggers is concerned with the kind of "historicism" that Meinecke analyzed in his famous work, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich, 1936), that is to say, the "individualizing" as against the "generalizing" variety. For Meinecke, "Historismus" was not a distortion of "historical sense" but its consumma- tion. Insofar, however, as Meinecke elevated a general "historical sense" into a world view that included "intuitionism," "holism," "organicism," and so on, this would have constituted a lapse into that "historicism" in the derogatory sense of the term used by Popper, though of what Popper calls the "anti-naturalistic" variety. Maurice Mandelbaum, in what must now be regarded as the most comprehensive philosophical analysis of the term, defines "historicism" as a demand that "we reject the view that historical events have an individual character which can be grasped apart from viewing them as embedded within a pattern of development": History, Man, and Reason: Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore, 1971), 42-43. Mandel- baum denies, however, that historicism is either a Weltanschauung or an ideology, much less a philosophical position. Historicism is rather, he argues, a "methodological belief concerning explanation and evaluation," which holds that "an adequate under- This content downloaded from 129.133.6.95 on Mon, 16 Apr 2018 18:41:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HISTORICISM, HISTORY, AND FIGURATIVE IMAGINATION 49 As can readily be seen, these characterizations of the differences between a properly "historical" and a "historicist" approach to history correspond to those that are conventionally used to differentiate "historiography" from "phi- losophy of history." I have argued elsewhere that the conventional distinctions between "historiography" and "philosophy of history" obscure more than they illuminate of the true nature of historical representation. In this essay I will argue that the conventional distinctions between "history" and "histori- cism" are virtually worthless. I will suggest, on the contrary, that every "his- torical" representation - however particularizing, narrativist, self-consciously perspectival, and fixated on its subject matter "for its own sake" - contains most of the elements of what conventional theory calls "historicism." The historian shapes his materials, if not in accordance with what Popper calls (and criticizes as) a "framework of preconceived ideas,"3 then in response to the imperatives of narrative discourse in general. These imperatives are rhetorical in nature. In what follows I shall seek to show that in the very language that the historian uses to describe his object of study, prior to any effort he may make formally to explain or interpret it, he subjects that ob- ject of study to the kind of distortion that "historicists" impose upon their materials in a more explicit and formal way. To raise the question of the rhetoric of historical discourse is to raise the problem of the nature of description and analysis in fields of study which, like historiography, have not yet attained to the status of sciences in the way that physics, chemistry, and biology have done. I leave aside for the moment the point made by Claude Levi-Strauss to the effect that history has no method uniquely its own, nor indeed any unique subject matter; and that its fundamental technique, which consists of the arrangement of the events it would analyze in the serial order of their original occurrence, is simply a standing of the nature of any phenomenon and an adequate assessment of its value are to be gained by considering it in terms of the place it occupied and the role it played within a process of development" (ibid.). Historicism is thus, by Mandelbaum's lights, a theory of value linked with some version of geneticism. Nonetheless, his objections to it are substantially the same as Popper's. Historicists err by conceptualizing history as a "stream" of development, rather than as "a very complex web whose individual strands have separate though interlacing histories" (ibid.). 2. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), Introduction. 3. While objecting to a "framework of preconceived ideas," Popper has no objection to the historian's adopting a "preconceived selective point of view" as the basis for his narrative. See Popper, op. cit., 150. The difference seems to reside in the fact that the former leads to a twisting of the facts to fit a theory while the latter gives one perspec- tive on the facts. The former results in "theories" about history, the latter in "inter- pretations." The criterion for assessing contending interpretations contains considerations of the claims made for them (whether they are to be regarded as confirmed theories) and whether they are "interesting" and "fertile" in their "suggestiveness." Ibid., 143-145, 150-151. This content downloaded from 129.133.6.95 on Mon, 16 Apr 2018 18:41:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 50 HAYDEN V. WHITE preliminary phase of any analysis worthy of the designation "scientific."4 But I want to dwell momentarily on Levi-Strauss' contention that in history, as in any field of occurrence that we would submit to analysis, there is a paradoxical relationship between the amount of information that may be conveyed in any given account of that field and the kind of comprehension that we can have of it. Levi-Strauss suggests that "the historical field," the general object of the historian's interest, consists of a field of events which dissolves, at the micro- level, into a congeries of physico-chemical impulses and, at the macro-level into the tidal rhythms of the rise and fall of whole civilizations. In his schema, the micro and macro levels correspond to the limits of a set of explanatory strategies which range from the mere chronicling of particular events, on the one side, to the appeal to comprehensive cosmologies, on the other. The relation between the micro and the macro levels he characterizes in terms of a dyad: information-comprehension. And he states the relation between them in the form of a paradox: the more information we seek to register about any given field of occurrence, the less comprehension we can provide for that field; and the more comprehension we claim to offer of it, the less the information covered by the generalizations intended to explain it.5 It is obvious that here Levi-Strauss has extended to theory of knowledge his own version of the Structuralist concept of the bi-polarity of language: his information-explanation dyad corresponds to the terms used by Roman Jakobson and others to characterize the two axes of language, metonymic and metaphoric poles respectively.6 These two poles of language-use are identified with the axes of combination and selection of any meaningful speech act. This provides the basis for Levi-Strauss' characterization of the relationship between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic axes of any dis- course meant to represent a field of happening having the aspects of both process and structure, diachronicity and synchronicity simultaneously. Thus, at the lower (or micro) limit of the historical field, there is no similarity, only contiguity; at the upper (or macro) limit, there is no difference, only similarity. And so too in the discourse that we would construct in order to represent what we perceive to have happened in "the historical field": the historical discourse seeks to represent the unfolding along a temporal line of a structure whose parts are always something less than the totality which they comprise, and the totality of which is always something more than the sum of the parts or phases which make it up. I do not wish to dwell on this extension of the theory of language to the 4. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London, 1966), 257-262. 5. Ibid., 261. 6. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague, 1956), Chap. VI. This content downloaded from 129.133.6.95 on Mon, 16 Apr 2018 18:41:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HISTORICISM, HISTORY, AND FIGURATIVE IMAGINATION 51 theory of knowledge at this point. For the moment, I wish merely to note that for Levi-Strauss, all sciences (including the physical sciences) are con- stituted by arbitrary delineations of the domains that they will occupy be- tween the poles of mythic comprehensions of the totality of experience, on the one side, and the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of individual percep- tions, on the other.
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