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overview of the point of this blog.
In order to understand Postmodern historiography, it is necessary to understand the Postmodern notion of "theory." This is a pervasive academic form of the larger Postmodern hatred of epistemological standards and distinctions other than the ones they create. We have already seen this attitude expressed in the idea that the entire rich tapestry of human biodiversity and experience can be reduced to amorphous, undifferentiated discourse. Within the study of history, this manifests as a predictable rejection of disciplinary structures and standards of evidence.
Mob Quad, 13th and 14th centuries, Merton College, Oxford
The globalist charge that historical categories are "Eurocentric," may be a fault if you are an enemy of the European nations. Otherwise it is self-evident. Of course the university reflects European cultural ideas; both it, and the philosophical concept of epistemology itself, are European cultural inventions.
The deconstructionist charge of "arbitrariness" is irrelevant in a different way. Disciplines are limited abstract classification systems that require comprise judgments of plausibility. They are an inherently flawed necessity to bridge the vast breadth of human knowledge and the amount of information a single individual can master. Disciplinary structures should be regularly reexamined, but classification and curation are unavoidable. Postmodern theory proposes to replace traditional "biased and arbitrary" disciplines with a jumble of philosophy, history, sociology, psychology and the other social sciences, political science, literary criticism, cultural studies, linguistics, and other humanistic pursuits. If discourse is the sum total of human reality, theory is where discourse is presented and analyzed.
The amorphousness of theory helps us understand the constant push for that persistent buzzword "interdisciplinarity." The term is typical of Postmodern jargon in that it presents an appealing mask on dysfunctional reality. Who could oppose bringing together specialized knowledge from different disciplines to generate new, bigger insights? But to understand Postmodern "interdisciplinarity" (or "transdisciplinarity"), it must be recognized that what is actually being referred to is the replacement of disciplinary knowledge structures with theory and discourse. This book "accounts for experiments in research that overstep disciplinary boundaries by analysing the new fields and methodologies emerging in the contemporary globalised academic environment, which puts a strong premium on synergism and linkages."
Productive interdisciplinarity occurs when deeply knowledgeable individuals in different fields approach a common problem from different angles and combine their insights. Postmodern interdisciplinarity begins with theoretical discursive assumptions, then cherry-picks plug and play "examples" from wherever they can be found to prove the assumed conclusion. It is epistemologically dishonest in that the cherry-pickings are used with complete disregard for their understood significance within their disciplines, but it does allow for the production of "historical research" papers with virtually no historical knowledge. A common form involves the "theoretical application" of a poorly understood concept from one field to an inappropriate domain, with findings ranging from metaphor to non sequitor.
Because if there is one thing this century needs, it's more Foucault. The never-ending supply of works like this gem speaks to the enduring hold of Postmodernism. Foucault is a pivotal figure in Postmodern historiography, who, not coincidentally, wove incoherent "philosophy", incoherent "social science", and incoherent "history" into incoherent theory.
The terminology can be confusing, since "theory" in the scientific method refers to a hypothesis backed by empirical verification, and should be revised or rejected if the evidence contradicts it. Postmodern theory is very much the opposite. It presumes an anti-empirical, anti-Western bias then selectively misreads whatever subject it is addressing to reflect the conclusion. Theory, therefore, cannot evolve with new discoveries. It only changes through the theoretical "interventions" of other approved theorists, with the new "model" of history or whatever subject "problematizing" and/or "subverting" the old. The plausible verisimilitude of any of these to the actual evidence we have is irrelevant, as the role of evidence is merely to serve as props. In short, theory offers top-down assumptions as history, and to understand where this comes from, we need to revisit the idea of secular transcendence.
The greatest minds in the Western tradition had realized that the human intellect was limited and that transcendental matters lay outside its scope. Both Aristotle's Prime Mover and Newton's eschatological history recognize that ultimate reality, or the originating basis of existence, exists beyond direct apprehension by mortal means.
The Enlightenment was based on the opposite assumption: that human reason is sovereign and is capable of determining eternal, transcendental truth on its own. This didn't turn out so well.
Immanuel Kant is the most important philosopher of the post-medieval West and his contributions are far too vast for a blog post to sum up. His ideas on the relationship between cognition and reality had a profound influence on historiography and epistemology in general, and opened the way for both the Enlightenment faith in reason and the Romantic faith in emotion. To vastly oversimplify, Kant argued that what we experience as things or reality are actually subjective impressions, rather than objective knowledge of the things-in-themselves. For Kant, things-in-themselves can be understood as independent, external, real entities that exist independently of our knowledge of them.
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| According to Kant, things in our minds, or thoughts, are distinct from the appearance of things to our senses. The processes of perception and cognition translate the phenomenal world of appearance into mental constructs or ideas that we can use. The phenomenal world, or how things present to our senses, does not reveal things-in-themselves, or their true ontological essence. The Noumenal world, or pure being, is beyond direct human knowledge. The road to Postmodernism starts with the notion that reality as we know it is subjectively mediated. |
From the correct distance, his formation resembles the old Platonic distinction between experiential and "real" realities, only without the idealism of the Forms or the mystical hierarchies of the Neoplatonists. Kant re-established the notion that reality as we understand it is only a perceptual-mental construct, but did so in a manner comparable with Enlightenment rationalism. He made the case that these subjective personal "realities" can yield knowledge of reality-in-itself through thought processes that he called synthetic judgments. Since our mental worlds are built on sense impressions, and these impressions are based on external reality, relationships between the impression can indicate true - timeless, objective - knowledge. Newtonian physics would be an example of reaching a transcendental truth through purely subjective means.
Emil Doerstling, Immanuel Kant et and Friends at the Dinner Table, 1892-93, painting, Königsberg Museum
Kant appealed to Enlightenment rationalists because it showed that human cognition can discover transcendent truths.
Ironically, the path that seemed to empower human reason to surpass its limits was actually the way to Postmodern solipsism and nihilism. If you deconstruct the links between the Accessible, Phenomenal, and Noumenal worlds, our perception of reality is cut off from any external referent capable of giving it objective meaning. Subjectivity is all that is left.
Historically, it was the blood-soaked tyranny of the French Revolution, which had been founded on Enlightenment rationalism, that undermined the faith that reason is a path to transcendent values. This, of course, has not prevented countless subsequent ideologues from claiming that they have the recipe for ideal human existence.
La Fête de la Raison, 1793, engraving, 9.5 × 15 cm, Bibliothèque nationale de France
The Enlightenment jettisons Christian faith for the supremacy of human reason
In this engraving from the Revolutionary period, the personification of Reason is set up as an object of adoration.
This is an act of faith in something objectively verifiable
The Cult of the Supreme Being was an official attempt to restore public faith in a manner that was anti-Christian and consistent with Enlightenment "reason."
Fusillades de Nantes, 1793, watercolor, 18th/19th century, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
Kant likened his new philosophy to the revolutionary thought of Copernicus, who moved the sun to the center of the universe, transforming Western science. Ironically, Copernicus was closer to the truth than Ptolemy, but is still laughably wrong by contemporary standards. By incrementally improving our cosmological understanding, he belongs to an inductive chain of empirical refinements rather then a revelation of transcendent truth.
Bust of Aristotle, 2nd century AD Roman copy after original by Lysippos, circa 330 BC, Palazzo Altemps, Rome
Benozzo Gozzoli, The Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas (det.), 1471, tempera on panel, Louvre, Paris
Barrington Bramley after Godfrey Kneller, Portrait of Isaac Newton, 1992, oil on canvas, Institute for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge
Christian theology, another pillar of Western thought, has always been clear that true knowledge of transcendental reality is impossible for the flawed and limited understanding of fallen beings. This is why epistemologically, Scriptural revelation is known by faith rather than by human experience or reason. St. Paul's metaphor of seeing through a glass darkly sums up this inherent conceptual limitation. Since ultimate reality, in this case understood as the fullness of God's infinite being, can't be known directly, the only way to express it is obliquely, through analogy and association. Jesus spoke in parables, and over the centuries, Christian thinkers developed allegorical tools to express transcendence in written and visual ways. The only pathway to transcendence in this world is through mystical experience, and this is not brought on by the self, but through a willed act of God.
It fails the test
Atrocities like the Reign of Terror and this scene of genocide in the Vendée for Revolutionary "principles" speak for themselves.
Now What?
There are several ways that one could respond to this practical failure of philosophical faith in the power of human reason to build a utopian society. The authoritarian-minded blame the outcome on not implementing the top-down theories "correctly," The French Revolution didn't descend into barbarsim because of deficiencies in human reason, but because the revolutionaries were hypocrites engaged in irrational violence. The same argument has been repeated ad nauseum for Marxism's perfect failure rate. We've all heard the nonsense that the Soviet Union wasn't "true" Marxism, as if a "true" version of a non-supernatural materialist teleology were capable of existing. But it gets better. Based on the Kantian foundation of secular transcendence, if a "true" rationalism or Marxism did exist, finite humans would not be capable of conceiving the transcendent fullness of that concept-in-itself, and so couldn't implement it anyways.
Big fun in the Peoples's Paradise, Mongolia style. Skulls of victims of Marxist atrocities in the Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia
The Great Repression from 1937-39 was a Stalinist purge of Mongolian society that shattered its socio-cultural traditions and killed between 3-5% of the population. The usual leftist pattern of lies and atavism - show trials for "collaborators", mass executions - is on full display.
Is this what a Copernican Revolution looks like?
Andreas Cellarius, Scenographia Systematis Copernicani, from his Harmonia macrocosmica..., Amsterdam, 1708
Timeless certainty, historical or otherwise, is not accessible to human cognition. Humans are flawed and finite beings, and any attempt to implement a system based on "transcendent" truths generated by observation will flounder these limitations. Top-down historiographies like Marxism invariably fail because they are simplistic human constructs masquerading as the last word. Hamstrung by their own limited perspective, they have no way to foresee the future and no hope of accommodating the near-infinite complexities of reality. We don't even need transcendent knowledge to see that these theories don't conform to human behavior and dismiss them out of hand. It's the faith in obviously imaginary constructs over real human experience that results in failure and inevitable slaughter.
Lining up for milk in the Soviet Union. A consumer market is too large and fluid for a person to manage. Clearly the solution is more of the thinking that led here, only purer... It truly is a system designed by the sociopathic to manipulate the stupid. However...
The failure of reason to reveal noumenal truth is not surprising to anyone steeped in the Western tradition
Bust of Aristotle, 2nd century AD Roman copy after original by Lysippos, circa 330 BC, Palazzo Altemps, Rome
Benozzo Gozzoli, The Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas (det.), 1471, tempera on panel, Louvre, Paris
Barrington Bramley after Godfrey Kneller, Portrait of Isaac Newton, 1992, oil on canvas, Institute for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge
The greatest philosophical minds of the pre-modern period, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Newton, all concluded that true knowledge of ultimate reality is beyond us. Incidentally, Newton belongs here as well as at the head of the scientific line-up. Our organization of knowledge into disciplines obscures the extent to which a supreme intellect like his impacted the entirety of human thought.
Christian theology, another pillar of Western thought, has always been clear that true knowledge of transcendental reality is impossible for the flawed and limited understanding of fallen beings. This is why epistemologically, Scriptural revelation is known by faith rather than by human experience or reason. St. Paul's metaphor of seeing through a glass darkly sums up this inherent conceptual limitation. Since ultimate reality, in this case understood as the fullness of God's infinite being, can't be known directly, the only way to express it is obliquely, through analogy and association. Jesus spoke in parables, and over the centuries, Christian thinkers developed allegorical tools to express transcendence in written and visual ways. The only pathway to transcendence in this world is through mystical experience, and this is not brought on by the self, but through a willed act of God.
Let's return to the opening sentence of the failure of the French Revolution sequence: the Enlightenment jettisons Christian faith for the supremacy of human reason, and consider the possible responses.
But Kant and other eighteenth-century philosophers opened the possibility of a different interpretation. In his Critique of Judgment, he argued transcendentals can be transmitted intuitively by symbols, and so linked moral and aesthetic judgments. Romantic aesthetics recognized the limits of reason, but embraced the idea of the sublime, the category of aesthetic experience that leads to superrational awe. By this path, human emotion or feeling could open an almost mystical apprehension of transcendence.
Albert Bierstadt, King Lake, California, c. 1870-75, oil on canvas, 70.4 × 97.7 cm, Columbus Museum of Art
The style of painting known as the American Sublime captures the idea that our emotional response to natural wonders can open a path to transcendence.
So what does this have to do with history? The symbol is fundamentally historical in that it is an expression of something timeless within time. We perceive time as the localized movement or change represented in historical narrative, while ontological truth is by nature universal and unchanging. Combining them brings the transcendent into the historical world of human experience.
Doryphoros, Roman copy of 1st century BC - 1st century AD of original by Polykleitos of circa 450-44, Carrara marble 214 cm, National Archaeological Museum, Naples
Bertel Thorvaldsen, Jason with the Golden Fleece, 1803-28, marble, 242 cm, Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen
The idea emerged in the Enlightenment and lingered through the Romantic era that the art of ancient Greece represented an absolute standard of perfection. It was generally accepted at the time that art should aspire to ideal beauty, and that that ideal had been achieved by the Greeks.
Polykleitos recorded his ideas on art in his Canon, one of the earliest known treatises on art theory. In it, he laid out a set of ideal human proportions that were expressed in his Doryphoros, which is only known today through Roman copies like the somewhat clumsy statue on the left.
A statue like Thorwaldsen's was understood to be a reference to a certain moment in history (Polykleitos wrote his Canon in Classical Athens) and an embodiment of perfect beauty - at once temporal and eternal. this makes it "symbolic," to adapt Kantian terms. Of course, the work is actually a fictionalized recreation of the past.
Hegel's spirit of the age, the self-contradictory concept of teleological history, or human history with a supernatural pattern, is a philosophical version of the universal shining into the material world. We've seen how Marx incoherently claimed to reject any metaphysical transcendence, but still wanted history to have a teleological pattern and universal substructure. Even in the twentieth century, during his later, more mystical phase, Heidegger used Greek notions of art and truth to describe how his concept of transcendence (Being) opens into time.
This picture is surprisingly effective at visualizing the circular nature of our embodied consciousnesses, or the difficult reality of being a self-aware subject living in a vast world. The imagery "within" the eye shows what it sees: the internal, mental, subjective construction of reality that we all possess. The movie in our heads, so to speak. Yet the seeing eye is itself made up of the very reality that it subjectively perceives. The symbol assumes the two can have a stable relationship. They don't.
The danger in this Romantic, symbolic historiography is the same danger as in Neoplatonism: claims of absolute human knowledge or secular transcendence, without any tempering moral code, invariably lead to authoritarianism and usually slaughter. It is inevitable because these claims are necessarily false, which means that conflicts and discrepencies will open between the purported truth and reality that get worse over time. Marx' claims are absurdly stupid - an idiotic binary class structure based on poorly understood nineteenth-century socio-economics. Because this formation is factually wrong, any subsequent argument based on this false claim will be equally erroneous, until you reach the tower of lies that is the Marxist legacy. The beauty of Marxist analysis is in the simplicity. Almost any academic mediocrity can "critically" mischaracterize almost any time period by projecting an anachronistic, objectively incorrect oppressor/oppressed binary model of human relations, no knowledge of the historical record required.
Projection is an apt term because Marxists, like Postmodernists and other habitual liars, tend to project their own moral and intellectual shortcomings on others. Consider Walter Benjamin, a particularly loathsome early twentieth-century critic and ideosyncratic Marxist.
Anonymous photograph of Walter Benjamin in 1922, Walter Benjamin Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin
This darling of the later Postmodernists hid his spew of false faith and cultural toxin beneath a sympatheric melancholic poetic guise. Though too early historically to be considered Postmodern (this is an example of an arbitrary historical judgment based on periodization), Benjamin foreshadowed Postmodern historiography, and his popularity in academia is sufficient to make him something of an honorary member in that Liar's Club.
Benjamin's Marxism was unorthodox, but he was very much a materialist, and he explicitly rejected the Romantic idea of the symbol as a metaphysical impossibility. Instead, he offered up a new definition of allegory as representational objects or signifiers without any possible link to transcendent principles of any sort. Incidently, confusing new definitions of well-known words are a Postmodern favorite and a sure "intellectual" liar's tell. The Romantic symbol becomes a human expression, cut off even darkly from an eternal subject.
The notion that we express things without direct knowledge of transcendent truths is not bold, epochal, or paradigm shifting in the Western tradition, but Benjamin distorts the traditional understanding of allegory.
Over the Middle Ages, Christian theologians developed Classical allegory into a four-level system of Biblical interpretation. The literal meaning referred to the actual story, while the other three were allegorical. The typological meaning of a (generally Old Testament) passage relates it to the life of Christ, the tropological applies it to a moral lesson, while the anagogical finds information about the nature of heaven or other spiritual truths.
The quote from St. Thomas appears in the first part of the Summa Theologica, Question 1, Article 10. He adds that multiple levels of allegorical meaning do not sow confusion, since any argument must be based in the literal meaning first. Aquinas understood that flights of interpretative fancy must be bound to objective fact - in this case what is literally on the page.
Classical rhetoric addressed "non-literal" communication at the sentence level, focusing on the substitution of one term for another. Metaphor and metonymy are both figurative tropes but they work differently. Metaphor works through analogy by making you see an informative similarity in otherwise different things. Metonymy works through association and makes substitutions based on something the term and what it refers to have in common.
Synedoche is a subclass of metonymy, where the association is one of a part to a whole. Saying "lend a hand" when you need the whole person, for example. The Romantic symbol can be thought of as a metaphysical synedoche, where a tiny materialized transcendence (the symbol itself) expresses a sliver of the transcendental truth symbolized.
Benjamin rejects the idea of a metaphysical synecdoche on materialist grounds, but doesn't take up the rhetorical tradition of using allegory to speak of concepts beyond direct knowledge. He simply cherry-picks an aspect of allegorical signification (the two terms are different) and declares allegories to be meaningless fragments. It would be fair to call his notion of allegory a thin, misleading synecdoche of the real thing.
This concept of allegory is fundamental to Benjamin's historiography. To simplify, empirical historiography (the construction of evolving narratives from the surviving evidence) is "symbolic", because it perceives fixed or universal truth (certain knowledge of the past) in individual human representations. To him, the artifacts and sources of the historical record are allegories; disconnected "fragments", to use one of his favorite metaphors, of a long-lost context. History, therefore, isn't a narrative to be uncovered, but a pile of allegorical "ruins", to use another, with no meaningful information to offer about where they came from. (As an aside, "theory" loves dramatic terms with profound undertones, likely to compensate for the lack of truth.) They are what a deconstructionist would call free-floating signifiers. What we think of as history is just a fictional narrative composed of these allegorical fragments that reflect the ideology of the historian.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Vertumnus, 1591, oil on panel, 70 x 58 cm, Skokloster Castle, Sweden
Arcimboldo was unique for his figures made of plants, and other objects. In a way, Benjamin's allegorical history is similar in that it takes disconnected and decontextualized elements and refashions them into an original composition with little connection to their origins.
Benjamin uses the metaphor of the storyteller for the reassembly of the fragments of the past into new meanings. Superficially, this sounds respectful of historical tradition, but the past is understood as vaguely resonant fragments to be redeployed at the historian's will. From a sufficient distance, this is not different from Derrida's Trace, or the echo of an imaginary connotation that clings to an arbitrary signifier.
Undated photo of Jacques Derrida; Still from Disney's Pinocchio, 1940.
Benjamin's legacy lives on in the work of his notable successors
Benjamin provides a template for Postmodern history by reimagining it as a narrative fiction, and placing ultimate authority in the hands of the storyteller, rather than working empirically to refine the plausible verisimilitude of the account. Allegorical fragments cannot serve as evidence of something they have no connection to. But his late On the Concept of History (1940, unpublished in his lifetime) is unusually transparent in revealing Benjamin's motives and intellectual dishonesty.
This excerpt from On the Concept of History captures Benjamin's irritating blend of poetic allusiveness over mindless reiteration of Marxist cant. Here, he asserts the spiritual in the material in universal terms (the sky of history), while crediting his fellow deceivers with a "secret" heliotropism.
That this poseur is a darling of the left says as much about their intellectual and moral character as his.
Though unorthodox, his basic world view was Marxist, in that he held the absurd binary logic of class-based oppression as the universal substructure of reality. While he was rightly critical of Marx' rigidly teleological view of history, he retained the notion of moral historical progress in Marxist terms. This is an act of undeclared faith in an empirical falsehood. But professed faith in lies is only part of the Marxist toolkit; he also advocated prioritizing ideology over objectivity in writing history. After all, the facts are simply a pile of allegorical fragments.
This book helps understand why Benjamin had such a complex and idiosyncratic relation with contemporary Communism. The fact that he didn't fall in with Stalin is a reason for his popularity today. Most Marxists couldn't care less about the death tolls, but they are sensitive to optics. Benjamin's vaguely anti-Stalinist pose makes him a "good" Marxist - one step closer to the "True" Marxism no one ever seems able to establish.
While there are many sound reasons to dislike Benjamin as a person and thinker, it can't be denied that he was a fine writer and observer. His literary or poetic qualities are a big reason for his appeal. His diary from his two months in Moscow in 1922 show his disillusionment with the Soviet Union and train wreck of a personal life. It may well be that Benjamin's "complex" relation with Stalinist communism was the consequence of a failed, obsessive, dysfunctional relationship. It is also an outstanding picture of the city at that moment in time, if you are interested in that sort of thing and can stomach Benjamin as a guide.
His overtly propagandistic nature is also on full display as he reiterates, not for the first time, that history is written by the victors. Conveniently, his notion of allegory removes the possibility of empirical verification from the table. This dovetails with the concept of false consciousness promoted by his fellow travelers in the Frankfurt School, since what we are taught as factual history is merely a collection of stories composed of allegorical fragments by the oppressors to normalize their own social dominance. He goes on to stress the importance of "reading" history to conform to his binary class struggle fiction.
The projection is obvious. This liar denies the possibility of a partial historical understanding while advocating spinning fake histories after a false faith, but accuses empirical historians of constructing a false consciousness. How is this fundamentally different from "discourse"?
Postmodern historiography
Postmodern historiography is the stillborn offspring of the Enlightenment faith in human reason (atheism, top-down theorizing, faith in "Science!", universalism), and the Romantic faith in feeling (secular transcendence, subjectivity over fact, identity politics). That these are contradictory is the problem. The Postmodern lie of replacing grand narratives is really just the assertion of new, less objectively verifiable ones like discourse and oppression. Theory collapses faith and subjectivity into an incoherent, yet somehow dogmatic, top-down structure that supersedes individual human experience. This actually inverts epistemology by claiming certainty about things that can't be known by limited human intellects, while feigning uncertainty about the empirical facts that can.
This sort of revisionism is the outcome. A historical fact is cherry-picked (there were Berbers in Imperial service and therefore scattered throughout the empire), misrepresented with a bait and switch (Berbers are "African" and so are Sub-Saharans. They're the same!) and a distortion (Imperial service was somewhat multi-ethnic. Provincial citizenry was not). A fictional narrative is created that ignores the facts to serve an agenda imposed from the top-down by a polemicist.
In Postmodern hands, history becomes projected wish fulfillment for the enemies of the West. Something to remember when weighing educational options.
It may seem absurd to the honest reader that Kant's musings about things-in-themselves leads us to the dissolution of historical standards in Western institutions. To see this is to understand the influence of "serious" academic thought on policy, both through the formation of generations of students, and for the access that their "prestige" secures to influential circles. And what do they do with this influence? Well, for one thing, they deny that there are meaningful differences in level or type of discourse appropriate to different circumstances, while being highly attuned to subtle gradients in academic and social hierarchies in their own lives.
Perhaps the most cringeworthy examples of this collapse of discursive categories in the colleges are the academics who attempt to elevate pop culture drivel as worthy of "serious" critical analysis. This doesn't mean as evidence of cultural practices of the sort prized by historians, but credibility destroying moves like adding hip hop lyrics to the intro freshman English course in order to make university more diverse, a.k.a. less difficult. This book is founded on objectively false and incoherent myths about race, meaning the conclusions are fictional projections of the author's resentful animus. But in this fantasy world, syncopated violence and misogyny are authentic voices rather than a cultural cry for help.
However, one does not have to establish "philosophical" and "practical" language as ironclad deconstruction-proof ontological categories to realize that theoretical deliberations around Kant's distinction between our understanding of reality and things-in-themselves is irrelevant to our experience of the world. It is an intellectual thought exercise expressing a desire for a level of certainty that is not possible by human means. Whether you clearly grasp the ontological plenitude of a computer does not prevent you from reading the same sentence I'm typing right now. Just in a different time and place. But theory doesn't allow for distinctions between practical and philosophical discourse, for want of better terms, so Kant's inability to logically link the noumenal and available is presented as straightforward proof that reality as we understand it is meaningless.
Daniel Huntington, Philosophy and Christian Art, 1868, oil on canvas, 102.55 x 127.95 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
This picture shows Philosophy and Christian Art as personifications showing two modes of representing truth; one dialectical, the other rhetorical. Here's what Philosophy's text doesn't say: "Hey, Christian Art! Look! Kant's transcendental materialism doesn't hold up! Reality is a figment of our imagination! We'd better throw out all our accumulated cultural knowledge!"
Textbook learning and the Philosopher's Name combine to present philosophical abstractions and outright exotica as simple truths. Long after the content is forgotten, the underlying echoes - history is oppression, discourse is meaingless, etc. - linger.
This brings us around to Foucault, who we saw in an earlier post on the discursive construction of reality, and who has provided a continuing source of levity. But he was also an, perhaps the, archetypal peddler of "theory", meaning any analysis that limits itself to one discipline like epistemology can't to justice to the full scope of his vague ramblings-in-themselves. In fact Foucault may be the most directly influential figure on the development of Postmodern historiography.
Foucault on Discourse
If we recall, our knowledge is discourse, which expresses power. History is a form of knowledge, and therefore belongs to discourse. It is expressed through commentary and normalizes power.
As we have seen, there are two main problems that run through Foucault's work that are not unrelated. He is relatively unintelligent for a philosopher and is prone to making up huge categories then pretending his commentary provides universal rules for the multiplicity of things within them. Discourse is a good example of this: deciding a word just means "everything" and acting as if labeling is insight. Another example deserves a proper introduction of its own. Behold:
The episteme brings us to the second major problem with Postmodern historiography (the first being the impossibility of secular transcendence): mistaking representation for reality. It shares a cognate with epistemology - both words derive from the Greek word for knowledge - but the episteme refers to "knowledge" as a discursive construct in Foucauldian terms. It can be thought of as the total possible content of discourse at a particular moment in time, or everything that can be thought within a historical context. The adjective "epistemic" refers to observations about an episteme or epistemes.
Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus, 1602-3, oil on canvas, 141 cm × 196.2 cm, National Gallery, London
Frank Stella, Norisring (XVI-3x), 1983, mixed media on etched aluminium, 203 x 171.2 x 36.8 cm, Private Collection
Abstract art is one way to help conceptualize the episteme. Abstract painter Frank Stella was, by his own admission, profoundly influenced by Caravaggio's ability to suggest space that continues out into the real world. This inspired his own work to become fully three-dimensional. Yet Caravaggio couldn't conceive of Stella's work. Not for technical reasons; for someone with Caravaggio's skill with a paintbrush, Stella's abstract forms would be straightforward. But there is no way for Caravaggio to imagine a work of "art" with these qualities. It is so far outside the realm of possibility to his Baroque Italian mental world that he would not even have the words to describe it. It is epistemically inconceivable.
The episteme is extra incoherent, even by Foucault's lofty standards. Let's pretend that reality is a discursive construct, for the sake of discussion, and take a closer look at the epistemic content. Discourse is supposed to be a nearly infinite web of knowledge, customs, beliefs, representations, assumptions, etc., that are constantly shifting and changing with the countless unpredictable interactions that make up human existence. The episteme requires us to believe that this can somehow be frozen into an identifiable form and characterized with the declaration of a universal trait or two.
If the episteme were real, it would be far to vast and fluid to characterize. This is a BGP map of SNMP connections on the internet in 2016. Considering this is a tiny fraction of internet traffic, and that is a fraction of discourse, attempts to speak epistemically or define the spirit of the age just seem vain and silly.
Not only would Foucault have us believe that the episteme can be identified and characterized, he defines historical change as a transition from one episteme to the other. How is this even possible, considering how he himself defines discourse and knowledge? That's not a rhetorical question. Somehow the impossible tangle of discourse coalesces into neat epistemes, just awaiting Foucault's portentous discovery. And these epistemic shifts just happen to correspond to the divisions between traditional historical eras, like the rise of Enlightenment rationalism or its dissolution into what would be the Postmodern. In fact, the very idea of the episteme as an approximate characterization of an arbitrary slice of the timeline sounds suspiciously like an attempt to reject the need for that pesky empirical verification without having to attempt the impossible task of rethinking history from the ground up, which, if we think about it , is what any attempt at a truly subjective historiography would require.
The Band HQ copy of Foucault's seminal work, and a link to a newer edition of the same translation online for those in need of some irritation. He attempts "to bring to light... the episteme in which knowledge... manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility." Here he explicitly rejects the possibility of empirical progress (oddly phrased as "growing perfection") for what he identifies on his own authority as "the space of knowledge", where he determines what is believed. So the typical Postmodern power play where the author replaces objectivity with their authority.
He moves quickly to the reliable liar's tell of redefining common words, telling us "such an enterprise is not so much a history, in the traditional meaning of that word, as an ‘archaeology’." So long as "aechaeology" means cherry-pick and misread random old things. Curiously, his radical new archaeology seems to reflect traditional divisions in French history.
Foucault identifies two key epistemes in The Order of Things: the Classical Era, beginning around the mid-seventeenth century, and the Modern, starting in the early nineteenth. In other words, the absolutist system of cultural politics initiated by King Louis XIV and the Industrial Revolution/Romantic Era. Now we can't have gradual evolution within a web of discourse, because that implies empirical progress, and progress is bad for reasons that involve the cultural achievements of the West. So he makes up an archaeology of the spaces of knowledge where he can tell us what was possible to think.
Henri Testelin, Colbert Presenting the Members of the Royal Academy of Sciences to Louis XIV in 1667, circa 1675-80, oil on canvas, 348 x 590 cm, Palace of Versailles
Foucault's Classical episteme is little more than the absolutist cultural policy of the Sun King, Louis XIV.
In effect, what Foucault has done is create new periods based on traditional French historiography rather than the more common Anglo-American ones and repackaged them in a cloud of pretentious blather about rethinking history itself. Behind the squid ink of tortured nomenclature of archaeologies, perilous othernesses, and historical forms coherent with the density of their own past, we get periodization!
But not exactly.
To an empirical historian, a period is a fluid placeholder in a classification system that is subject to revision and subdivision as new information becomes available. It is intended to organize the vast breadth of human knowledge into manageable pieces, but has no significance in itself.
The Assisi frescoes are an art historical puzzle; innovative works of unknown authorship. The show signs of the spatial and psychological realism associated with the Florentine Renaissance about a century later, but have none of the classical references that movement is known for. A work like this compllicates the possibility of a straightforward Medieval to Renaissance epistemic shift by showing late medieval interest in the optics and the natural world. This is especially relevant to the Franciscans, given their interest in natural theology.
Traditional periods are absract representations, but they do gain an illusion of solidity from their use in defining subjects for research and general interest and determining academic hiring decisions. An ad for a "medievalist" or "modernist" gives these categories career and field-defining properties. Different periods go on to develop their own approaches and areas of interest, further reinforcing these distinctions. But epistemologically, these only "exist" through consensus, and should always be open to rethinking for factual, not ideological reasons. Epistemic periods of the sort Foucault proposes are different. They do not come to seem meaningful through repetition, they are the meaning; top-down impositions that disregard, yet claim to override the currents and countercurrents of what was actually going on.
We've already seen an example of external periods imposed on historical events in the thought of Joachim of Fiore, only he was honest enough to root his metaphysical certainty in faith. Foucault rejects supernatural forces, so how can he declare an episteme that doesn't conform to the historical record, then claim it is meaningful?
It's a funny thing that for all their supposed universality, epistemes aren't founded on much. When you cut through the squid ink of convoluted phrasings and outright gibberish, the historical basis for his grandiose claims are minimal. In fact, outside of a general French "sciences humaines" education, the depths of his erudition, both in range and significance of subject matter, is alarmingly shallow.
Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor), 1656 oil on canvas, 318 × 276 cm, Museo Nacional Del Prado, Madrid
Velazquez' masterpiece shows the artist's love of complex, and sometimes ambiguous, optical arrangements of gazes and mirrors. Foucault however, offers a convoluted set of reflections on the painting before declaring it representative of "Classical representation." This tells us nothing of substance about the painting or its time, but it is typical of Foucault's use of "evidence" as a prop for his various tales.
His interpretation of Bentham's Panopticon at the begninning of the Modern age is another example of a cherry-picked irem awarded some sort of representative status. This thought experiment attempted to apply Enlightenment clarity to a penal institute by developing a model of surveillance to ensure behavioral compliance. Foucault is not wrong to point out the dangers of the surveillance state, but goes off the rails when trying to parley this into a general historical mindset.
Willey Reveley, Elevation, section and plan of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon penitentiary, 1791, from The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. IV, 172-3, 1843
The Panopticon was based not on constant surveillance, but on the knowledge that you could be under surveillance at any time. Radial cells were open to the central observation point, but the inmates couldn't see when they we being watched. This is far more metaphorically appropriate to internet spying in a Facebook age than the actual socio-historical conditions of Bentham's time. But this insight actually requires that the "evidence" correspond with what was happening.
We have historical artifacts cut off from their context like Benjamin's allegories and used as evidence for historical conditions that didn't actually exist. Yet somehow these non-existent epistemes change in ways that happen to correspond with the traditional French history that he studied in school, despite issues like those raised by Bentham remaining more relevant than ever after two centuries. Where is the cogent argument for these claims? The evidence?
What is Foucault actually talking about?
Looking again at his use of "evidence" we can see that Benjamin's allegory is only part of the picture. It would be more accurate to describe his use of Las Meninas or the Panopticon in the language of the Romantic symbol, where a human creation manifests a higher truth in the world, only without the acknowledgement of transcendence.
Foucault's historical ignorance is apparent in his interpretations of artifacts like Las Meninas, which he rips out of context to use as a free-floating signifier like Benjamin's storyteller. But these fragments are then offered as representative manifestations of the "higher" reality of his imagining. Las Meninas embodies or epitomizes qualities that define the Classical episteme; a localized example, or synecdoche, that stands in for a universal by possessing a shared quality. A false faith, but one that makes the historian's job much easier. Anything can be interpreted epistemically without the endless effort needed to understand the historical record. This ease of plug-and-play "analysis" probably accounts for the appeal of all these top-down philosophies more than any intellectual qualities.
There's a Legacy
Foucault infests Postmodern historiography in a number of ways. The basis in power/oppression relations is a fundamental ingredient in all the identity-based histories of resentment that lard contemporary arts faculties.
As a nationalist voice, the Band is supportive of any nation celebrating its history and culture. But this Black history mural in a St. Louis non-profit is a collection of fraudulent media creations in the service of a racist, anti-American narrative. There is a cruel irony in showing an economically less fortunate group a vision of an idyllic community behind the smiling puppets of the very system responsible for their dysfunction.
Cherry-picking artifacts in the service of a narrative - the allegorical disregard of history and symbolic representation of historical fiction - is another common distortion. Because this misrepresentation uses pieces of actual history, it has an air of truthiness that can be compelling to those who are historically ignorant themselves.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Cafe House, Cairo, 1884 or earlier, oil on canvas, 54.6 x 62.9 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The ability to reject the epistemological legitimacy of historical periods, then postulate new decisions on your own authority that are totally legitimate because they aren't "periods" becomes a common Postmodern ploy. Baudrillard and Lyotard's theories fit this model. Even more outre figures like Deleuze and Slavoj Zizek postulate new historical patterns without seriously addressing the epistemological vacuity of "theory" itself.
In literary criticism, the "New Historicism" offered a return to historical contextualization as a tonic to deconstructive nihilism, but this was history understood as Foucault's episteme. Apparently one Philosopher's Name is needed to counter another. The author is still "dead", but now we can speak of Foucault's "author function", the mixture of epistemic forces, mainly unconscious, that shape a work of art of a text. This acknowledges the reality that writings are actually written by someone, without restoring agency or talent to a real person. When we consider the extent to which Postmodernists will go to deny the truth in front of their faces, a question takes form: is Postmodernism Satanic?