History Bump

Preface, xxv-xxvii

"The Writing of History is the study of writing as historical practice." Certeau offers a "'modern' history of writing," beginning in the sixteenth century. Although the book treats identifiable historical periods, he does not organize it according to a "fiction of a linearity of time." Instead he focuses on the situation in which he is writing; the constraints placed upon him by the field in which he is writing; and the methodological alternatives available to him (xxvi). Nor does he employ the "fiction of a metalanguage unifying the whole work." He investigates the "alliance" between writing and history (xxvii).

Introduction: "Writings and Histories," 1-16

Historians insert the dead, who can no longer speak for themselves, into texts (1-2). The "phantasm of historiography" involves a "quest for the Other," and Certeau wishes to make that Other less foreign (2). It is through "a relation with the other" that intelligibility is established in historiography (3). History rejects the myths of tradition (2-6), necessarily separating present from past (2), discourse from the social body. Exercising a "'will to dominate' the body" (6), it endeavors to decipher and decode the other, the object, the body (3). Historians separate themselves not only from tradition but also from their society (6). Western interpretation occurs in the present; assumes a break with the past; and selects that which is to be remembered (4). "[P]rogress is its motto" (5). That which has been repressed, however, still persists, appearing in syntactic lapses (4). Historians' struggles to differentiate the living from the dead are themselves a form of death, and it is writing that both mythically symbolizes and ritually performs this act (5). Writing and thus historiography create systems that legitimate and are supported by political power (6-7). Since the sixteenth century, historians are no longer charged with deciphering sacred, eternal truths, but with creating truth. Hence the historian fictively assumes the position of the subject of action—of the prince, whose objective is to 'make history'" (7). In fact, however, historians are technicians involved in "the making of history"; they do not themselves make history (8). "Archives make up the world of this technical game, a world in which complexity is found, but sifted through and miniaturized, therefore made capable of being formalized." Power pursues objectives, whereas historians analyze situations (9), manufacturing the past as a "fiction of the present" (10). The interplay of subject (historian) and object (the real) is part of the fiction created by historical writing (11). Historiography regards a documents as "the symptom of whatever produced it"; hence production serves as a principle of historical explanation (11). History must fill gaps and establish order (12). Certeau turns to Marx for insights on production. Although production is often discussed abstractly, particular production occurs to satisfy needs, under conditions conducive to that objective, and it is deemed "productive" only when it produces capital. Marx consigns discourse to "improductive labor" (14), but Certeau disagrees: "Discourse is doubtless a form of capital, invested in symbols; it can be transmitted, displaced, accrued, or lost" (13). Certeau endorses and extends Foucault's archaeological methodology (14).