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 I focus 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 liter-
ally “present” in historical representation. I appeal to Runia’s 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 people’s 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 represented—that is, the past—depends 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
 “presence” and Myth 329
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 present—which 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 historian’s 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 one’s 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 past—nay, the past then travels
into the present as a kind of “stowaway,” in Eelco Runia’s memorable metaphor.
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 Runia’s 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 Freud’s idea, stated that enactments are not the

. Eelco Runia, “Spots of Time,” History and Theory 45 (October 2006), 315.
330 f. r. ankersmit

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

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 Collingwood’s renactment theory. He
argues that parallel processes differ “in two ways from the Collingwoodian re-
enactments: they do not refer to in vitro representations, but to real—in vivo—
interactions; second, they are not the intended result of a conscious effort but the
unintended ripple of subconscious processes.”
As an example of how this may actually work in history Runia refers to Arthur
Mitzman’s 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 Collège de France, dismissed as the head of the Archives,
and sent into exile to Nantes—where he subsequently wrote the famous Danton pages of
the Histoire de la Révolution Française.

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.
 “presence” and Myth 331
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 Runia’s 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 presence”—yes, 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.

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 Runia’s analysis of the NIOD Report. Most saliently, we
cannot fail to observe that Runia’s 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
Runia’s 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.
332 f. r. ankersmit

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 representation—associated with paintings, sculptures, historical representation,
Aristotle’s notion of mimesis—where 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 re-
enactment 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 artifacts—a painting, sculpture,
historical text, and so on—whereas 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 Schapiro’s well-known argument about picture frames. 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 painting’s 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 Image-
Signs, Semiotica 1 (1969), 225. Derrida parasitized this (as he was always so much in the habit of
doing) in Jacques Derrida, La vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978).
 “presence” and Myth 333
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 Schapiro’s picture frames separating the domain of represented reality from the
domain of representation. The mere fact that we can so easily translate Schapiro’s
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 writing—however unmythical it may seem at first sight. According to
Schapiro the picture frame is a part of the painting that, even though it is non-
mimetic, nonetheless contributes to the painting’s 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 Runia’s argument about the parallel processes in the NIOD
Report of so much interest. For Runia’s 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 Runia’s 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 there—and 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 painting’s meaning.
334 f. r. ankersmit

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. So—a 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
Srebrenica—they 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 Tragödie Nietzsche presented a most penetrating insight into
this relationship between myth and the resistence to historicization:
What else could modern culture’s insatiable hunger for history, its restless gathering to-
gether 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 mother’s 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 famished—and who would still wish to
give anything to such a culture 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
 “presence” and Myth 335
Benjamin’s 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 lim-
its, 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 histori-
ans 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 Warhol’s Brillo Box is from a real Brillo Box.
In the NIOD and similar cases the representation of action was effectively trans-
formed 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 with-
out being aware of it, and of what made them copy their principals. We had best
characterize this blind spot as the report’s 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 subcon-
scious 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 pres-
ence in a civilization’s 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, inces-
santly 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 Angel’s 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, Geschichtsphiloso-
phische Thesen, IX).
. See my Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 365, 368.
. Ibid., 367, 368.
336 f. r. ankersmit

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 itself—as a
concrete historical or cultural phenomenon—can have a meaning itself. For get-
ting hold of this meaning is just as impossible as jumping over one’s own shad-
ow; 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
irresistible—and 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 one’s 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 decon-
structivism, 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 in-
tellectual 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 writing—a characterization,
I should not hesitate to add, that is meant as a compliment rather than as a criti-
cism of it.

Groningen University

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