History and Theory 45 (October 2006), 328-336

Wesleyan University 2006 ISSN: 0018-2656

FORUM: ON PRESENCE
3. PRESENCE AND MYTH
F. R. AnKersmit
aBstract

There are no dictionary meanings or authoritative discussions of presence that fix the significance of this word in a way that ought to be accepted by anybody using it. So we are in the welcome possession of great freedom to maneuver when using the term. In fact, the only feasible requirement for its use is that it should maximally contribute to our understanding of the humanities. When trying to satisfy this requirement I shall relate presence to representation. Then Ifocus on a variant of representation in which the past is allowed to travel to the present as a kind of stowaway (Runia), so that the past is literally present in historical representation. I appeal to Runias notion of so-called parallel processes for an analysis of this variant of historical representation.
I. Introduction

Representation literally means making something present again. Let me begin with a comment on the word again. Making something present again suggests the absence of what is made present by representation. Similarly, one can only show something again if it is not on display right now. So if we add this to our definition, representation then means to make present again something that is absent right now. It follows from this that the notions of representation and of presence are closely and indissolubly linked: the notion of presence is part of the meaning of the word representation. All of this is in agreement with how we actually use the word representation. For think of such paradigmatic uses of representation as pictorial representation or political representation. The portrait of a person P makes P somehow present again, even though P himself or herself may be on some other continent or may even have been dead for centuries; in the case of political representation, the peoples representatives represent in our parliaments or legislatures the people in its absence. What was said just now about representation is even more dramatically true of a third paradigmatic us of representation, historical representation. We have historical writing in order to compensate for the absence of the past. So whereas in the cases of pictorial and political representation the represented has a logical priority to its representation, in the case of historical representation the reverse is the case, namely, that the representedthat is, the pastdepends for its (onto-) logical status on its representation. No representation, no past. Of course, there always is a past in the sense of certain events temporally preceding the present

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and the future; but not always is this indubitable fact interpreted to mean that these earlier events are categorically different from the present (and the future) and, hence, are of a past in the real sense of the word. The past may, indeed, evaporate into an eternal presentwhich is the case when a civilization feels no need for written or oral representations of the past. All this shows that the past is more of a cultural construction than is the sitter for a portrait or the electorate represented in our parliaments. Now, much of contemporary philosophy of history has dwelled at length on this notion of historical representation and on how a historical text can properly be said to represent part of the past. As was to be expected, most of these discussions have taken the form of an epistemological analysis of how the historians text is related to the past. Philosophy of history was thus understood to be the counterpart of the philosophy of science in which one focused on the question of the validity and truth of scientific theories. However, in this short essay I wish to suggest that the notion of historical representation can be interpreted in a different way. Epistemological discussions of (historical) representation can also focus on how a text may make the past present again in the sense of being a substitute or replacement for this absent past. This is why philosophers of history such as Hans Georg Gadamer, Arthur Danto, and I have typically relied on the so-called substitution theory of representation in order to explain historical writing. But one may also ask whether the past can actually be carried into the present by historical representation, in much the same way that one may carry a souvenir from a foreign country into ones own. Under such circumstances, the past would be made present in the present in the most literal sense of the word. The historical text is then not merely a textual substitute for the absent pastnay, the past then travels into the present as a kind of stowaway, in Eelco Runias memorable metaphor.1 How this can occur is the topic of this essay. In order to clarify this most peculiar way of representing the past, of making it present again, I shall indeed rely on an argument that has recently been proposed by Runia in an essay that was published in October 2004 in this journal and that will undoubtedly become a classic in the history of historical theory (though I hasten to add that my account of presence may well differ from Runias use of it). Having done this I shall conclude by showing that my argument about presence may shed some new light on the notion of myth, and, more specifically, that myth may well be more present in contemporary professionalized historical writing than we now believe.
II. Runia on parallel processes

In the essay referred to a moment ago Runia introduces the notion of so-called parallel processes. As Runia points out, this notion
ultimately derives from Freud, who theorized that what is not adequately remembered may be repeated in the therapeutic situation through unconscious enactment. In a groundbreaking article, Harold Searles, elaborating on Freuds idea, stated that enactments are not the

. Eelco Runia, Spots of Time, History and Theory 45 (October 2006), 315.

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prerogatives of patients, but occur within the supervision (that is, in the interaction between therapist and supervisor) as well.2

The idea is that the problems that send patients to their psychiatrists may not only be re-enacted by the patients interaction with their psychiatrists, but may also come to shape the interaction between these psychiatrists and their supervisors. The picture one gets is that of a false coin that can unproblematically be passed on from one person to another as long as nobody carefully scrutinizes it. Only if scrutiny takes place (preferably, of course, by the patient her or himself), can the chain be broken. In his essay Runia transposes this notion to the domain of history, and as the very term re-enactment already suggests, after having done so he compares parallel processes to Collingwoods renactment theory. He argues that parallel processes differ in two ways from the Collingwoodian reenactments: they do not refer to in vitro representations, but to realin vivo interactions; second, they are not the intended result of a conscious effort but the unintended ripple of subconscious processes.3 As an example of how this may actually work in history Runia refers to Arthur Mitzmans claim that Michelet had re-enacted in his own life parts of the history of the French Revolution:
In order to narrate the fall from grace of Danton, Michelet orchestrated his own falling from grace. According to Mitzman, Michelet subconsciously brought himself to a position in which he could be fired from the Collge de France, dismissed as the head of the Archives, and sent into exile to Nanteswhere he subsequently wrote the famous Danton pages of the Histoire de la Rvolution Franaise.4

In this way the historian, Michelet, reproduced in his own life the structure of the historical event he was studying. The Michelet example certainly is quite suggestive, but we will need a more substantial analysis in order to grant credibility to parallel processes in the practice of history. This is precisely what Runia provides in his discussion of the tragedy of the Srebrenica massacres (where 7,500 Muslims were slaughtered by the Serbs under the nose of a Dutch UN batallion), and of the way Dutch politicians reacted to their involvement in the greatest mass-murder in Europe since the Nazi regime. The issue here is what happens when a nation that believes as a matter of course in its moral supremacy (and could afford to do so thanks to its political insignificance) suddenly has to recognize that it has heaped on itself all the dirt a nation may gather upon its immersion in grand politics. Surprisingly, although perhaps not so surprisingly, simply nothing happened right at the beginning. The responsible politicians behaved as if the Srebrenica drama had taken place in a wholly different galaxy without any ties to their own cozy little world; they behaved as persons regressing to the innocence of childhood in reaction to the irruption of an overwhelming reality. Mechanisms of repression and dissociation worked at top speed. It was arguably also a
. Eelco Runia, Forget about It: Parallel Processing in the Srebrenica Report, History and Theory 43 (October 2004), 299. . Ibid., 298-299. . Ibid., 309.

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mechanism of dissociation that made them take the drama out of an unbearable present, to relegate it to history by trying to transform it into something of the past demanding a historical rather than a political analysis. So instead of an unsparing and relentless political investigation immediately after the drama, the whole thing was handed over to the historians of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD). Historians were now asked to do what politicians could not and would not handle themselves. But, as Runia observes, this would not be the end of it. For to a truly amazing extent the historians of the NIOD copied the behavior of the politicians and of the military authorities at Srebrenica. This is why the report written by the NIOD historians may count as a striking example in historical writing of parallel processing. I refer the reader to Runias essay for an enumeration of all the parallels that can be discerned in this case, restricting myself to the following. The main aim of Dutchbat in Srebrenica was to deter by presenceyes, you read me correctly: by presence. The idea was that the sheer presence of a mere two hundred lightly armed Dutch soldiers would be enough to keep the Muslims in and the Serbs out. This proved to be the military miscalculation of the decade. Now, as Runia most perceptively argues, deterrence by presence was also the subconscious aim of the NIOD Report. For on the one hand this Report, comprising with its enclosures more than 7,000 densely printed pages, registered almost anything that could be registered with regard to the tragedy, but on the other hand presented this vast ocean of data in such a way that it was virtually impossible for the reader to make sense of it. The report consisted, essentially, of a series of individual studies of individual aspects of the tragedy, and though in a final chapter some conclusions were offered, this chapter had the character of being just one more essay rather than of being a judicious synopsis of the results of these 7,000 pages of historical research. So here again the NIOD Report scrupulously copied real life. For by its size and structure it transformed Srebrenica into a topic unfit for public debate; it effectively barred any further discussion. So, this time, at least, deterrence by presence was successful.5
III. Representation and presence

I remind the reader that I started this essay by discussing (historical) representation. So we might well ask ourselves what lessons about presence and representation we may learn from Runias analysis of the NIOD Report. Most saliently, we cannot fail to observe that Runias parallel processes are the very ne plus ultra of representation. For if representation is always a making present again, then the copying of past occurrences involved in parallel processing seems to provide all that representation might ever hope for! Normally, in the case of painting or of historical representation, a representation and the real thing represented by it are by no means identical. But here we really get the real thing twice: the NIOD
. Though the weapons of historical theory proved to be equal to the challenge. Think, first, of Runias essay discussed here; then see Het drama Srebrenica: Geschiedtheoretische Beschouwingen over het NIOD-rapport, ed. F. R. Ankersmit et al., special issue of Tijdschrift van Geschiedenis 116 (2003), 185-328.

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researchers behavior really was the same as that of their principals. Is that not the best that representation could ever give us? As we may infer from the foregoing, we should distinguish between two conceptions of representation. On the one hand, there is the more common variant of representationassociated with paintings, sculptures, historical representation, Aristotles notion of mimesiswhere representations and what they represent are categorically different. On the other hand, there is the kind of representation of which Runia has made us aware where the representation truly is a repetition or reenactment of a previous action, or perhaps more generally, of an already existing human artifact. This is the kind of representation to be associated with presence, for here the past is presented again, literally being carried into the present. But there is a complication here. For even though the NIOD researchers reproduced in their Report that which they studied, they did not explicitly present this in their Report. So the two notions of representation are most intricately entangled with each other. This raises the question of how to distinguish clearly between these two kinds of representation. When addressing this question, it must strike us that the former kind relates to human artifactsa painting, sculpture, historical text, and so onwhereas the other seems to have to do with human actions: the NIOD repeated, in various ways, the actions of the Dutch government when getting itself entangled in the Bosnian vespiary. This is a suggestion that can fruitfully be elaborated. I would like to remind the reader of Meyer Schapiros well-known argument about picture frames.6 His argument was that the magic of picture frames consists in making us aware that we are entering an alternative reality when looking at a painting: the semantic function of the picture frame is firmly to set apart the two-dimensional world of the painting from the three-dimensional world of its observers. In this way the picture frame co-determines how we interpret what we see in the painting, and, hence, what the paintings meaning is. But all this is different with the second kind of representation. In this case we typically miss the picture frame whose crucial semantic significance was so much emphasized by Schapiro. That is to say, in the second kind of representation there is a continuum between the representation and what is represented; the representation and its represented are part of one and the same reality. This is what was so strikingly the case with the NIOD Report: though the NIOD historians believed themselves to be the independent and objective investigators of what had taken place in 1995 in Srebrenica, they did, in fact, copy all the tactics of repression and dissociation that had so strikingly characterized the behavior of their political principals and whose actions they represented in their text. So what we see here truly is the very opposite of what Schapiro had in mind: instead of firmly demarcating the domains of the represented and of its representation, both domains now flowed over into each other like two lakes that suddenly become united into one after an earthquake or some other catastrophic event has removed the soil hitherto separating them.
. Meyer Schapiro, On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in ImageSigns, Semiotica 1 (1969), 225. Derrida parasitized this (as he was always so much in the habit of doing) in Jacques Derrida, La vrit en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978).

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A significant fact about this unity of the represented and its representation is that those involved in it are blind to it: the NIOD researchers were completely unaware of their parallel processing and of how they had unwittingly managed to copy in their historical writing, to a truly amazing extent, the naive innocence of their principals. To put it provocatively, the NIOD researchers had historicized everything that could be historicized about the Srebrenica drama, except the umbilical cord that tied them to their principals. And, more generally, the lesson to be learned from the NIOD Report is that there is often, perhaps even always, a limit to what we succeed in historicizing, and that what we do not succeed in historicizing is what we are compelled to repeat. As is so well expressed in the old adage, whoever is not capable of learning the lessons of the past is compelled to repeat it and to go on doing so until one is finally prepared to learn these lessons.
IV. Presence and myth

At this final stage of my analysis I want to relate presence to myth. Myth always brings us up to the limits of what can be historicized: for myth informs us how history, the ever-changing historical reality in which we are living now, arose out of what did not change, of what was still part of nature, in the dramatic sense of that term, and out of what did not have a history. Myth brings us back to the beginning of historical time, to that sublime moment when history came into being. Myth is our link to nature, that is, to what transcends history and time. Put differently, myth demarcates history from nature; it can, in this sense, be compared to Schapiros picture frames separating the domain of represented reality from the domain of representation. The mere fact that we can so easily translate Schapiros claim to the issue of how myth and history are related already suggests that myth must be far more omnipresent than we think in what we know as professionalized historical writinghowever unmythical it may seem at first sight. According to Schapiro the picture frame is a part of the painting that, even though it is nonmimetic, nonetheless contributes to the paintings meaning. In this way the picture frame is both part and not part of the painting. We are ordinarily blind to the semantic role played by the picture frame; similarly, we tend to forget about the mythical framework enclosing historical representation. But in both cases the framework really is there. Precisely this makes Runias argument about the parallel processes in the NIOD Report of so much interest. For Runias story about the NIOD Report is, so to speak, an empirical confirmation of my claim about the presence of the mythical framework in history. In Runias story, the picture frame that ordinarily separates the past and its representation gives way to a unification between the past itself and its representation; precisely this may, paradoxically, make us aware of the existence of this framework. Paradoxically, for it is the absence of this framework in the NIOD Report that makes us recognize that it is normally present. I mean, normally we forget about the framework of myth because it is thereand then it is no less effective and no less successful in making us forget about it than the picture frame. For it really needed the genius of Schapiro to make us recognize the semantic contribution of the picture frame to the paintings meaning.

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In the NIOD Report the framework that ordinarily separates the past from its representation fell away, and myth could then freely invade the domain of representation. Myth now no longer merely contributed to historical meaning, it no longer was merely a framework around historical representation, but it entered into the representation itself. It did so by making the historians of the NIOD repeat the behavior of the responsible politicians, and in both cases this behavior was inspired by a myth of what the Dutch and the Dutch nation fundamentally is like: decent, nice, cooperative, and without prejudice against Jews, Muslims, or whatever theological or racial denominations you may have. But, of course, the appalling indifference of Dutchbat to the fate of the Muslims of Srebrenica tells a quite different story. Soa myth it surely is! But this is, probably, too brutal a way to put it. The authors of the NIOD Report have, I think, been no less open to the moral impasses in which the Dutch government and Dutchbat involved themselves in Srebrenica than anybody else. These historians were not offering a bland apology for the involvement of Dutchbat in this major catastrophe. These people were not kindly glossing over the terrible mistakes made by the Dutch government and the responsible military authorities: after all, the cabinet presided over by Wim Kok resigned all of a sudden a week after the publication of the NIOD Report (though, characteristically again, avoiding by this overhasty reaction a discussion of the Report in parliament). No, what the NIOD researchers were blind to is not all that happened in Srebrenicathey knew about this better than anybody else will ever (care to) know. The issue is, rather, that their copying of the behavior of the government demonstrated that there was a limit to what they succeeded in historicizing. For what the Report ultimately and unintentionally did was to try to perpetuate the myth of the Dutch as a sensible, decent, and fundamentally well-intentioned nation. That was the action performed by the NIOD researchers that they copied from their principals in a parallel process. The NIOD Report historicized everything that could be historicized about the Srebrenica drama except this, except this myth. In his Geburt der Tragdie Nietzsche presented a most penetrating insight into this relationship between myth and the resistence to historicization:
What else could modern cultures insatiable hunger for history, its restless gathering together of other cultures and its all-consuming thirst for knowledge signify, but the loss of myth, the loss of a mythical home, of a mythical mothers lap? One may well ask oneself whether this feverish and so uncanny fidgeting of modern culture is anything else but the greedy snapping and searching-for-food of the famishedand who would still wish to give anything to such aculture that cannot be satisfied by whatever it devours, and which succeeds in transforming even the most strenghtening and nourishing food into History and Criticism?

Or, as I have expressed it myself elsewhere, when the urge to historicize is high est, when we truly wish to get to the bottom of things by historicization, when

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Benjamins storms from paradise have achieved their greatest strengths, when we really get to the eye of the hurricane of historicization, we will find ourselves in a pre- or transhistorical myth. This, then, also demonstrates why myth is to be found at the end, as well as at the beginning, of all historical writing (it is present at its beginning, no doubt about that!). Myth manifests itself when historicization has, finally, reached it limits, and these limits dimly and surreptitiously begin to announce their existence; myth then begins to leak into representation, and the continuum between nature and history emerges in which representation turns into a copying of the past. Once again the parallel process, as expounded by Runia, is illuminating here. For, as we just saw, the most sustained effort at historical objectivity motivated the historians of the NIOD to sublimate objectivity into an actual copying of the past they investigated. Indeed, in a certain sense this truly is the ne plus ultra of objectivity: here the past is impersonated in the way that an actor may impersonate Napoleon or Louis XIV, hoping to do so in a way that makes the actual Napoleon or Louis XIV and himself as indiscernible as Warhols Brillo Box is from a real Brillo Box. In the NIOD and similar cases the representation of action was effectively transformed into the action of representation. But precisely this transformation makes us aware of the blind spot of the NIOD Report: its authors started to behave in the same way as their principals but without being aware of it, and of what made them copy their principals. We had best characterize this blind spot as the reports myth: for we have to do with myth when the past determines our actions while, at the same time, we cannot objectify what makes us do so. The blind spot is the myth lying at the origin of the subconscious beliefs and convictions of a civilization, a nation, or an institution. It is the cold heart, as I once called it, of a civilization, nation, or institution. Finally, in all of this myth is closely related to presence (the term myth is taken here not in the traditional sense of that word, but understood rather as what a civilization, nation, or institution never succeeds in properly objectifying when thinking about itself and its past). Because of this, myth incarnates the parallel processes of civilizations, nations, and so forth, and is the place where actions represented will continuously repeat themselves in the action of representation. Presence is an appropriate term for referring to this stubborn persistence of the past in which it remains a presence in the present. In this way myth can also give meaning to presence, that is to say, suggest where we may expect to find presence in a civilizations cultural repertoire.
. There is a painting by Klee entitled Angelus Novus. It depicts an angel looking as if it wanted to move away from something on which its gaze is firmly fixed. Its eyes are distended, its mouth is wide open, and it wings are spread out. This is what the Angel of History must look like. It has turned its face to the past. Where we may see a chain of events, it perceives just one huge catastrophe, incessantly heaping ruins upon ruins and which are thrown down before its feet. It seems to wish to remain on the spot, to awaken there the dead and to restore what was torn apart. But a storm is blowing from paradise which has caught the Angels wings and is so strong that it can no longer close these together. This storm continuously pushes the Angel towards the future, to which the Angel has turned its back, and while the pile of ruins in front of it grows into the skies. See W. Benjamin, Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen, IX). . See my Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 365, 368. . Ibid., 367, 368.

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Note that when speaking about the meaning of presence, I have in mind the meaning of the notion; I do not wish to imply by this that presence itselfas a concrete historical or cultural phenomenoncan have a meaning itself. For getting hold of this meaning is just as impossible as jumping over ones own shadow; its meaning always successfully evades our grasp. That is its sublimity. So I wholly agree with H. U. Gumbrecht who says that presence may give us what meaning cannot convey.10 Nevertheless, the urge to get hold of this meaning is irresistibleand this is why we can easily get caught by this loop of presence, so that it may remain with us indefinitely. Indeed, this is, again, another meaning we may give to presence.
V. Conclusion

Presence is a new word in theoretical reflection on the humanities. It does not have a meaning that we can all be required to accept, if we wish to be admitted to the arena of theoretical debate. Nobody can dictate to us what meaning we should give to the term. It is a typically democratic term in the sense that anybody may do with it what he or she likes. Decisive is only whether ones use of the term is useful and fruitful, and whether it may offer new prospects in philosophy and in reflection about the humanities. Looking at it from this perspective, I am convinced that this really is the kind of notion we now need more than anything else. For the lingualism of the philosophy of language, of hermeneutics, of deconstructivism, of tropology, of semiotics, and so on has become by now an obstacle to, rather than a promoter of, useful and fruitful insights. The mantras of this now so oppressive and suffocating lingualism have become a serious threat to the intellectual health of our discipline. The notion of presence may help us to enter a new phase in theoretical reflection about the humanities and to address a set of wholly new and fascinating questions. This essay has been an attempt to substantiate this claim and to show that the notion of presence may add to our understanding of all the intricacies of how we represent the past, and more specifically, of how basic myth really is to how we conceptualize the past. Myth should not be relegated to some primitive and ancient phase in our interaction with the past: it is also to be found at the vanishing point of all contemporary professionalized historical writinga characterization, I should not hesitate to add, that is meant as a compliment rather than as a criticism of it. Groningen University

10. Obviously, I am referring here to H. U. Gumbrecht, Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).