Como senala Certeau, la autoridad de la que se inviste el relato historiografico intenta «compens... more Como senala Certeau, la autoridad de la que se inviste el relato historiografico intenta «compensar lo real del cual esta exiliado (...) juega con lo que no tiene, y extrae su eficacia de prometer lo que no dara». Ante esta tension paradojica entre los presupuestos epistemologicos de la historiografia contemporanea y las exigencias disciplinares, que podria conducir a la autodisolucion del conocimiento historico, Keith Jenkins propone una nueva mirada, abre una posibilidad a este aparente callejon sin salida, siguiendo la mas escrupulosa logica historiografica: el saber historico tal y como lo conocemos es un producto de la institucionalizacion de la disciplina en el siglo XIX, es el resultado de un contexto historico especifico. Los cambios que se han operado desde la segunda mitad del siglo XX han provocado y estan provocando transformaciones en nuestra forma de entender y de aprehender el pasado. El fin de la historia que conocemos dara paso a nuevas formas de conciencia historica y esta promete nuevos e insospechados saberes.
In this article I try to answer the question posed by History and Theory's“call for papers”; ... more In this article I try to answer the question posed by History and Theory's“call for papers”; namely, “do historians as historians have an ethical responsibility, and if so to whom and to what?” To do this I draw mainly (but not exclusively and somewhat unevenly) on three texts: Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, J. F. Lyotard's The Differend, and Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual; Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty have a presence too, albeit a largely absent one. Together, I argue that these theorists (intellectuals) enable me to draw a portrait of an ethically responsible intellectual. I then consider whether historians qua historians have some kind of ethical responsibility—to somebody or to something—over and above that of the intellectual qua intellectual; I reply negatively. And this negative reply has implications for historians. For if historians are to be intellectuals of the type I outline here, then they must end their present practices insofar as they do not fulfill the criteria for the type of ethical responsibility I have argued for. Consequently, to be “ethical” in the way suggested perhaps signals—as the subtitle of my paper suggests—the possible end of a history “of a certain kind” and, as the inevitable corollary, the end of a historian “of a certain kind” too.
... Keith Jenkins I ... Los postmodernistas aceptan un futuro postmoderno sin mostrar en ningun m... more ... Keith Jenkins I ... Los postmodernistas aceptan un futuro postmoderno sin mostrar en ningun momento esa conciencia aterrada, fatidica, llena de angustia que, de manera comprensible, exhiben Zagorin et al., dado que hemos llegado al fin de su modernidad "representacionista" ...
versity of Paris (Nanterre) and Visiting Professor at various American universities, Jean Baudril... more versity of Paris (Nanterre) and Visiting Professor at various American universities, Jean Baudrillard is famous, or infamous, worldwide. A sometime columnist for the French daily Libération, a television personality, an acclaimed conference speaker, a web-site guru, the subject (object) of dozens of features in ‘trendy’ magazines (Figaro Magazine, Les Inrockuptibles, The Face ...) Baudrillard has all the trappings and attracts all the hype of a media star. Within academia he escapes easy categorisation as he ranges across vast swathes of intellectual territory: sociology, philosophy, literature, history, politics, architecture, etc. The author of numerous books (for instance Sym bolic Exchange & Death (1976), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Fatal Strategies (1983), America (1988), Seduction (1990), The Illusion of the End (1992), The Transparency of Evil(1993), Cool Memories(1995), The Perfect Crime (1995) ...) Baudrillard violates, in his ceaseless ‘border crossings’, the neat disciplinary boxes of scholarship to the discomfort, and sometimes to the disgust, of those firmly tucked-up inside them. Accordingly, such an irritating transgressor is easy to characterise, and then dismiss, as a scholarly lightweight, a gadfly lacking propriety, seriousness and rigour; a joker, a charlatan, ‘The Walt Disney of contemporary metaphysics’, a representative of postmodernism at its emptiest and wackiest, a hyper-relativist who, according to Christopher Norris, ‘is lost in the funhouse’! It is not my intention here to ‘correct’ these possible misreadings which seem to pepper the Baudrillardian literature. Besides, as Baudrillard himself comments, such corrective ambitions are always ultimately impossible. For
This conversation deals with basic issues of historical knowledge, such as the nature of historic... more This conversation deals with basic issues of historical knowledge, such as the nature of historical reality, the distinction between fact and event, the social function of historical knowledge, and the utility of 'methodology' in the study of history, as understood by Hayden White. It also ...
Introduction 1. What history is 2. On some questions and some answers 3. Doing history in the pos... more Introduction 1. What history is 2. On some questions and some answers 3. Doing history in the post-modern world
In this paper the author argues that there never has been, and there never will be, any entailed ... more In this paper the author argues that there never has been, and there never will be, any entailed connection between history and ethics and that this is a ‘good thing’. This is not to say that, in practice, history is not governed throughout by ‘values’ (politics, ideology, etc.) and that ethics are not always ‘historical’ and similarly ‘governed’, but that there is no ‘formal connection’. It is argued that it is this ‘break’ that enables just any kind of contingent connection to be made and that, like it or not, this condition—of ethical relativism—is what we have to live with and make the ‘best of’ … and we can.
Sande Cohen, School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts, is not – but he deserv... more Sande Cohen, School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts, is not – but he deserves to be – on every reading list of every university history course where the nature/location/function of ‘history today’ are examined. In a series of books (Historical Culture 1986; Academia and the Luster of Capital 1993; Passive Nihilism 1998 and History Out of Joint 2006), in various joint-edited texts, in numerous chapters, articles and papers stretching back to the 1970s (having previously undertaken a PhD with Hayden White), Cohen has ranged across contemporary cultural productions (history, art, aesthetics, literary and political theory, linguistics, philosophy, critical theory . . .), has dug deep into some of the more vital intellectual movements of the last few decades (let us collect these for convenience under the umbrella of postmodernism) and has ventured into areas occupied, not least, by such figures as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, de Man, Deleuze, et al. His ‘position’ – self-consciously located on the existential left tinctured by anarchism (opposition to all forms of authority) – has given his analyses of various manifestations of passive/reactive/ affirmative culture wherever he has found them (not least in contemporary capital), and the place of history therein, a power and prescience few
In this paper, a general introduction to the work of Sande Cohen based (primarily) on his book-le... more In this paper, a general introduction to the work of Sande Cohen based (primarily) on his book-length treatments of historical culture in (especially) Western capitalist social formations, the significance and relevance of Cohen is argued for by way of his indexicality with such social formations in ways suggesting that his analyses cannot be avoided by all those who genuinely aspire to understand history and historical culture today unflinchingly.
No one can accuse Sande Cohen and Frank Ankersmit of writing easy books. Indeed, it may well be t... more No one can accuse Sande Cohen and Frank Ankersmit of writing easy books. Indeed, it may well be that the difficulty of their texts has had the affect of lessening their impact on students of history in general (construed here as all of those who produce, or intend to produce, historical works), rather than increasing it; certainly few professional/academic historians or their progeny have the taste or constitution for theorization at this level. But there are doubtless other reasons too, the most important probably being the fact that their specific theorizations make uncomfortable reading for those who populate the more traditional highways and byways of contemporary ‘history culture’, threatening it with ruin. Taken seriously, Cohen’s and Ankersmit’s texts raise critical perspectives on both the ideological functions of our history culture and the inevitable shortfall of those empirical/epistemological strivings that overwhelmingly characterize the work(s) of those who live within it. No surprise, then, that they should be relatively ignored or, if and when they are actually ‘known’, be somewhat disavowed. But as someone who is also critical of ‘traditional’ history producers and their continued allegiance to a reductive empirical/epistemological mind-set despite the intellectual/methodological bankruptcy of such a position being, by now, abundantly clear, and who reads all historical productions (including his own) as wall-to-wall theorizations governed by ideological positionings, then Cohen and Ankersmit are vital. With regard to Ankersmit, I have long been influenced by his notions of, for example, narrative logic and narrative substance, by his relatively early and relatively unequivocal championing of postmodern approaches to ‘history’, by his valorization of the aesthetic nature of history texts and to his work on intertextuality, representation, metaphor and so on: Apart from Hayden White, few others have made me stop and think, take stock of and take in, Rethinking History Vol. 12, No. 4, December 2008, 537–555
Arguing that modernist ‘epistemologically striving’ histories are constituted by what they disavo... more Arguing that modernist ‘epistemologically striving’ histories are constituted by what they disavow—that as a genre of literature history is necessarily, and primarily, the product of rhetorical figures and devices—Jean François Lyotard's work is used here in order to remind historians of both the failure of the empirical/epistemological and the actual aesthetic construct that all histories are…and always have been. It is argued, further, that developing Lyotard's idea of the immemorial, a way of considering ‘the before now’ as a kind of history—as if it were a history—opens up historical discourse to things it could be but has not yet been.
Como senala Certeau, la autoridad de la que se inviste el relato historiografico intenta «compens... more Como senala Certeau, la autoridad de la que se inviste el relato historiografico intenta «compensar lo real del cual esta exiliado (...) juega con lo que no tiene, y extrae su eficacia de prometer lo que no dara». Ante esta tension paradojica entre los presupuestos epistemologicos de la historiografia contemporanea y las exigencias disciplinares, que podria conducir a la autodisolucion del conocimiento historico, Keith Jenkins propone una nueva mirada, abre una posibilidad a este aparente callejon sin salida, siguiendo la mas escrupulosa logica historiografica: el saber historico tal y como lo conocemos es un producto de la institucionalizacion de la disciplina en el siglo XIX, es el resultado de un contexto historico especifico. Los cambios que se han operado desde la segunda mitad del siglo XX han provocado y estan provocando transformaciones en nuestra forma de entender y de aprehender el pasado. El fin de la historia que conocemos dara paso a nuevas formas de conciencia historica y esta promete nuevos e insospechados saberes.
In this article I try to answer the question posed by History and Theory's“call for papers”; ... more In this article I try to answer the question posed by History and Theory's“call for papers”; namely, “do historians as historians have an ethical responsibility, and if so to whom and to what?” To do this I draw mainly (but not exclusively and somewhat unevenly) on three texts: Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, J. F. Lyotard's The Differend, and Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual; Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty have a presence too, albeit a largely absent one. Together, I argue that these theorists (intellectuals) enable me to draw a portrait of an ethically responsible intellectual. I then consider whether historians qua historians have some kind of ethical responsibility—to somebody or to something—over and above that of the intellectual qua intellectual; I reply negatively. And this negative reply has implications for historians. For if historians are to be intellectuals of the type I outline here, then they must end their present practices insofar as they do not fulfill the criteria for the type of ethical responsibility I have argued for. Consequently, to be “ethical” in the way suggested perhaps signals—as the subtitle of my paper suggests—the possible end of a history “of a certain kind” and, as the inevitable corollary, the end of a historian “of a certain kind” too.
... Keith Jenkins I ... Los postmodernistas aceptan un futuro postmoderno sin mostrar en ningun m... more ... Keith Jenkins I ... Los postmodernistas aceptan un futuro postmoderno sin mostrar en ningun momento esa conciencia aterrada, fatidica, llena de angustia que, de manera comprensible, exhiben Zagorin et al., dado que hemos llegado al fin de su modernidad "representacionista" ...
versity of Paris (Nanterre) and Visiting Professor at various American universities, Jean Baudril... more versity of Paris (Nanterre) and Visiting Professor at various American universities, Jean Baudrillard is famous, or infamous, worldwide. A sometime columnist for the French daily Libération, a television personality, an acclaimed conference speaker, a web-site guru, the subject (object) of dozens of features in ‘trendy’ magazines (Figaro Magazine, Les Inrockuptibles, The Face ...) Baudrillard has all the trappings and attracts all the hype of a media star. Within academia he escapes easy categorisation as he ranges across vast swathes of intellectual territory: sociology, philosophy, literature, history, politics, architecture, etc. The author of numerous books (for instance Sym bolic Exchange & Death (1976), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Fatal Strategies (1983), America (1988), Seduction (1990), The Illusion of the End (1992), The Transparency of Evil(1993), Cool Memories(1995), The Perfect Crime (1995) ...) Baudrillard violates, in his ceaseless ‘border crossings’, the neat disciplinary boxes of scholarship to the discomfort, and sometimes to the disgust, of those firmly tucked-up inside them. Accordingly, such an irritating transgressor is easy to characterise, and then dismiss, as a scholarly lightweight, a gadfly lacking propriety, seriousness and rigour; a joker, a charlatan, ‘The Walt Disney of contemporary metaphysics’, a representative of postmodernism at its emptiest and wackiest, a hyper-relativist who, according to Christopher Norris, ‘is lost in the funhouse’! It is not my intention here to ‘correct’ these possible misreadings which seem to pepper the Baudrillardian literature. Besides, as Baudrillard himself comments, such corrective ambitions are always ultimately impossible. For
This conversation deals with basic issues of historical knowledge, such as the nature of historic... more This conversation deals with basic issues of historical knowledge, such as the nature of historical reality, the distinction between fact and event, the social function of historical knowledge, and the utility of 'methodology' in the study of history, as understood by Hayden White. It also ...
Introduction 1. What history is 2. On some questions and some answers 3. Doing history in the pos... more Introduction 1. What history is 2. On some questions and some answers 3. Doing history in the post-modern world
In this paper the author argues that there never has been, and there never will be, any entailed ... more In this paper the author argues that there never has been, and there never will be, any entailed connection between history and ethics and that this is a ‘good thing’. This is not to say that, in practice, history is not governed throughout by ‘values’ (politics, ideology, etc.) and that ethics are not always ‘historical’ and similarly ‘governed’, but that there is no ‘formal connection’. It is argued that it is this ‘break’ that enables just any kind of contingent connection to be made and that, like it or not, this condition—of ethical relativism—is what we have to live with and make the ‘best of’ … and we can.
Sande Cohen, School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts, is not – but he deserv... more Sande Cohen, School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts, is not – but he deserves to be – on every reading list of every university history course where the nature/location/function of ‘history today’ are examined. In a series of books (Historical Culture 1986; Academia and the Luster of Capital 1993; Passive Nihilism 1998 and History Out of Joint 2006), in various joint-edited texts, in numerous chapters, articles and papers stretching back to the 1970s (having previously undertaken a PhD with Hayden White), Cohen has ranged across contemporary cultural productions (history, art, aesthetics, literary and political theory, linguistics, philosophy, critical theory . . .), has dug deep into some of the more vital intellectual movements of the last few decades (let us collect these for convenience under the umbrella of postmodernism) and has ventured into areas occupied, not least, by such figures as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, de Man, Deleuze, et al. His ‘position’ – self-consciously located on the existential left tinctured by anarchism (opposition to all forms of authority) – has given his analyses of various manifestations of passive/reactive/ affirmative culture wherever he has found them (not least in contemporary capital), and the place of history therein, a power and prescience few
In this paper, a general introduction to the work of Sande Cohen based (primarily) on his book-le... more In this paper, a general introduction to the work of Sande Cohen based (primarily) on his book-length treatments of historical culture in (especially) Western capitalist social formations, the significance and relevance of Cohen is argued for by way of his indexicality with such social formations in ways suggesting that his analyses cannot be avoided by all those who genuinely aspire to understand history and historical culture today unflinchingly.
No one can accuse Sande Cohen and Frank Ankersmit of writing easy books. Indeed, it may well be t... more No one can accuse Sande Cohen and Frank Ankersmit of writing easy books. Indeed, it may well be that the difficulty of their texts has had the affect of lessening their impact on students of history in general (construed here as all of those who produce, or intend to produce, historical works), rather than increasing it; certainly few professional/academic historians or their progeny have the taste or constitution for theorization at this level. But there are doubtless other reasons too, the most important probably being the fact that their specific theorizations make uncomfortable reading for those who populate the more traditional highways and byways of contemporary ‘history culture’, threatening it with ruin. Taken seriously, Cohen’s and Ankersmit’s texts raise critical perspectives on both the ideological functions of our history culture and the inevitable shortfall of those empirical/epistemological strivings that overwhelmingly characterize the work(s) of those who live within it. No surprise, then, that they should be relatively ignored or, if and when they are actually ‘known’, be somewhat disavowed. But as someone who is also critical of ‘traditional’ history producers and their continued allegiance to a reductive empirical/epistemological mind-set despite the intellectual/methodological bankruptcy of such a position being, by now, abundantly clear, and who reads all historical productions (including his own) as wall-to-wall theorizations governed by ideological positionings, then Cohen and Ankersmit are vital. With regard to Ankersmit, I have long been influenced by his notions of, for example, narrative logic and narrative substance, by his relatively early and relatively unequivocal championing of postmodern approaches to ‘history’, by his valorization of the aesthetic nature of history texts and to his work on intertextuality, representation, metaphor and so on: Apart from Hayden White, few others have made me stop and think, take stock of and take in, Rethinking History Vol. 12, No. 4, December 2008, 537–555
Arguing that modernist ‘epistemologically striving’ histories are constituted by what they disavo... more Arguing that modernist ‘epistemologically striving’ histories are constituted by what they disavow—that as a genre of literature history is necessarily, and primarily, the product of rhetorical figures and devices—Jean François Lyotard's work is used here in order to remind historians of both the failure of the empirical/epistemological and the actual aesthetic construct that all histories are…and always have been. It is argued, further, that developing Lyotard's idea of the immemorial, a way of considering ‘the before now’ as a kind of history—as if it were a history—opens up historical discourse to things it could be but has not yet been.
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