The Practical Legacy of Hayden White

Hayden Whites praktisches Erbe

 

Abstract: Two months ago the controversial and highly influential historical theorist Hayden White passed away. White’s theories about the literary nature of historical discourse challenged historians to reconsider the relationship between history and fiction. Throughout his career he championed the idea that historical writing was a form of poetic discourse, something it shared with literary writing, and other categories of artistic prose discourses.[1] While his work has principally been debated in historical theory circles, his final work suggests ‘practical’ possibilities for public history.
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2018-11994.
Languages: English, Deutsch


Two months ago the controversial and highly influential historical theorist Hayden White passed away. White’s theories about the literary nature of historical discourse challenged historians to reconsider the relationship between history and fiction. Throughout his career he championed the idea that historical writing was a form of poetic discourse, something it shared with literary writing, and other categories of artistic prose discourses.[1] While his work has principally been debated in historical theory circles, his final work suggests ‘practical’ possibilities for public history.

Hayden White’s Challenge

In his most famous work, “Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Ninteenth-Century Europe”, White claimed that historians routinely perform an essentially poetic act, selecting specific conceptual strategies to explain or represent the data they gather. He argued that the historical narrative was an historian’s attempt to mediate between “the historical field, the unprocessed historical record, other historical accounts, and an audience”.[2] For White, when a historian starts to write an historical narrative, they are predisposed to organise their insights into specific modes, derived from and limited in choice by, what he believed to be the tropic deep structure of historical consciousness.[3] At this early point in his oeuvre, White arguably made no specific claim for the ontological reality to which historical narratives refer. Rather, he argued that the historical past was always mediated by textual forms, [4] or more precisely, that the historian ultimately relies on aesthetic and ethical/political criteria as “grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another”.[5] Decades later, Roger Chartier would still be reflecting the history profession’s uneasiness about the extent to which White ignored questions about the history text’s “reliability as witness”, but celebrating White’s work as a force that liberated the discipline from its insensitivity to “the modalities and figures of discourse”.[6]

The Postmodernist’s Structuralist

White’s argument that historical narratives are artefacts of an interpretive act constituted by an historian’s use of particular rhetorical, tropological, narratological, and ideological strategies, made him one of the most significant figures in the movement that became known as ‘narrative impositionalism’,[7] an intellectual movement that included scholars such as Roland Barthes, Louis Mink, and later Frank Ankersmit. For narrative impositionalists, the history text was a literary artefact, and writing history involved a process of transforming the traces of the past into a narrative form. Through this process, history becomes unavoidably “the texted past”.[8] It is perhaps this position that is largely responsible for White often being labelled a postmodernist,[9] despite Ankersmit’s declaration that White was actually an “unrepentant structuralist”,[10] and White revealing in an interview with Ewa Domańska that he saw himself as a structuralist and formalist.[11] Historically speaking, by concentrating on the form of the historical text, rather than the academic processes that produced it, White’s work would resonate with the claim that became a hallmark of postmodernist scholarship and made Derrida famous: “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”.[12] In his focus upon the historical imagination, and his criticism that historians “neglect to historicize history” and “do not historicize their own operations”,[13] there is also something that resonates with the German hermeneutic tradition, in what we might call White’s complex ‘historiosophy’.[14]

The Practical Past and Public History

White saw the professionalisation of History into an academic discipline, as an anti-radical move,[15] “carried out in the modern period in service of political values and regimes that were in general anti-revolutionary and conservative”,[16] and aimed at “providing an antidote” to the use of history in the service of “socially transformative ideologies,”[17] which it achieved by distancing itself from theory. In seeking to produce dispassionate narratives of the past, in the interests of transforming professional history into a science, White argued that the discipline gave up on any claim to a “usable past”.[18] In his final work, White articulated a distinction between “the historical past” (that arises out of professional historian’s socially authorized investigations of the past) and “the practical past” (the many ways in which: people in everyday life; practitioners of other disciplines, such as the philosophy of history, memory studies, narratology; and authors of the past such as historical novelists and filmmakers, seek to use ‘the past’ as a resource for making decisions about what actions to take in the present).[19] If we accept White’s distinction, then what he is calling “the practical past” is a truly public form of history, characterised by history-making for the practical purpose, in a Nietzschean sense, for living a better life, or at least a life of one’s own choosing. With White’s passing we may have lost one of our times’ great explorers of the nature of history. However, his work will undoubtedly find its way into new discussions of the historical past, and in his exploration of “the practical past” offer promising possibilities for theorizing and investigating the public’s uses of history, and thus public history itself.

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Further Reading

  • Doran, Robert. Philosophy of History after Hayden White. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
  • White, Hayden. The Practical Past. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2014.
  • White, Hayden. “The burden of history”. In Topics of Discourse edited by Hayden White, 27-50. London: John Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Web Resources

  • Genzlinger, Neil, “Hayden White, who explored how history is made, dies at 89”. The New York Times March 9, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/obituaries/ (last accessed: May 7, 2018).
  • Hayden White and Ethan Kleinberg, “A Conversation at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities. Wesleyan” October 11, 2013. www.youtube.com (last accessed: May 7, 2018).
  • Ethan Kleinberg and Hayden White, “On the Practical Past”, Part 1, History and Theory January 18, 2018. www.youtube.com (last accessed: May 7, 2018).

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[1] Hayden White, The Practical Past (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2014).
[2] Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Ninteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1973), 5.
[3] Ibidem.
[4] Michael S. Roth, “Cultural criticism and political theory: Hayden White’s rhetorics of history” In The Ironist’s cage: Memory, trauma, and the construction of history, ed. Michael S. Roth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 137-147.
[5] Keith Jenkins, “Nobody does it better: Radical history and Hayden White”, Rethinking History, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2008): 70.
[6] Roger Chartier, On the edge of the cliff: History, language, and practices (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 38.
[7] Kalle Pihlainen, “Narrative objectivity versus fiction: on the ontology of historical narratives” Rethinking History, Vol. 2, No.1 (1998): 7-22.
[8] Greg Dening, Performances (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996).
[9] Keith Jenkins, On “What is history?”: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (London: Routledge, 1995).
[10] Frank R. Ankersmit, “Hayden White’s appeal to the historians”, History and Theory, Vol. 37, Issue: 2 (1998): 185.
[11] Ewa Domańska, Encounters: Philosophy of history after postmodernism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 19,27.
[12] Translated as “There is nothing outside the text”, or more correctly “There is no outside text”, from: Jacques Derrida, Of grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), p, 158.
[13] Hayden White cited in Ewa Domanska, “A conversation with Hayden Whit”e, Rethinking History , Vol. 12, No.1 (2008): 16.
[14] Here, after the fashion of Hayden White himself, I coin a neologism to stand in for “Historical Philosophy” that I would hope he would have liked.
[15] Oliver Daddow, “Exploding history: Hayden White on disciplinization”. Rethinking History, Vol. 12, No.1 (2008): 41-58.
[16] Hayden White, The content of the form: Narrative discourse and historical representation (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 60.
[17] Hayden White, “The public relevance of historical studies: A reply to Dirk Moses”, History and Theory, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2005), p. 334.
[18] Hayden White, The Practical Past.
[19] Ibidem.

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Image Credits

Hayden White © Ewa Domańska. Thanks to the courtesy of Prof. Ewa Domańska.

Recommended Citation

Parkes, Robert: The Practical Legacy of Hayden White. In: Public History Weekly 6 (2018) 17, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2018-11994.

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Categories: 6 (2018) 17
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2018-11994

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