Writing and History

Annotated paragraphs on the first medium of history.

1. History Has To Defy History

History has to defy history. Spoken reports — unless recorded — are not enough. The events
of history have to be recorded in a durable and explicit medium, and a narrative medium at that. A
non-narrative medium can provide evidence of events but only a narrative medium is explicit enough
for the purposes of history. And just as important as durability, and partner to it as far as history is
concerned, is the capacity for accurate replication of records. Whatever is being copied has to last long
enough to be accurately copied; and copying is a way of making information last and spread. All this
sounds quite Darwinian: before writing, reports of events could not be replicated with the fidelity
required to ensure that their truth, or at least their consistency with the original, was preserved. Oral
reports, told and retold, fail to preserve such fidelity unless they are memorable, and the memorability
of the details of an oral report is much less likely to be a trait of an accurate report of actual events
than it is of a good story. In an oral culture the virtue of being a so-called good story, the mnemonic
devices of prosody, the discipline of rhetoric, and probably other features confer memorability on a
narrative. In an oral culture what we might as well dub cultural selection favours the memorable
narrative. Myth prevails, and myth’s good stories are typically limited to plots and events of peculiar
social interest: kinship, power, stages of life, morality, birth, death, loving, killing, place, food, water,
nature, marvels, metaphysics — my culture’s words for pan-cultural interests of long standing. In
written and printed culture an accurate or at least original report can be accurately copied giving such
copies a selection advantage where inquiry demands truth, or, at least, consistency with the original.
This is historical inquiry.
For history to happen something like writing, which combines durability and replicability,
narrative and specific denotation, had to be invented. Of course it’s not just writing as such (pace
Derrida) that is needed, but recorded language, whether it’s in the visual text we call print or the audio
‘text’ of a voice recording. Speech alone is not a record, or at least it’s only a fleeting record written
on air. I expect the evolution of media will continue to change the media of history. Nearly all the
advantages of writing — not only its duration but also its capacity to be searched and indexed, which
it has by virtue of its spatial rather than temporal lay-out, will be taken up by the once evanescent,
time-traumatised ‘writings’ of audio and video. Maybe new media will drive history into obsolescence
and leave us with something more dazzling and post-historical. The past isn’t much to go on, but it
took quite a while after the invention of writing for history to appear. It took a long time to work out
all that writing was good for. Socrates was still floundering with this in Phaidros — he was more
concerned that it was bad for the memory than good for anything else — and we are still working it
out. Anyway, for two thousand years now writing has filled the bill for history. And now film and
audio and video recording do too, each in its digital incarnations, each in its own several ways.

(Note: A few questions:

First: If there were no writing could there be voice recording and/or film? Perhaps writing and the
science it makes possible are important or even necessary preconditions for the invention of voice recording or
film. These questions are about the way particular things are caused and unfold historically. They demonstrate
the contingency of historical processes. An historical process consists of a particular sequence of particular
events; if just one of those events or the order of events is different, the same kind of result may be impossible.
Secondly: If there were no writing and only silent film, could there be history? Film is a durable,
reliably copied narrative medium. It can be used to record and communicate what a viewer can see as events, but
does language, in a durable form such as audio recording or writing, remain a precondition for film used as
history? Film can show events but language is probably also needed to specify which events are being shown.
For with language we can index the events to a time and place whereas without it we may not be able to identify
the events.
Furthermore: Is it only because we are linguistic animals that we see events actually as events? Or is it
only because we use the (admittedly slapdash) logical notation of natural language that we, as logicians might
say, quantify over events? Is it only because we are linguistic that we can place a film in the context of a system
of linguistic truth claims upon which the logical articulation and disambiguation and thus the truth of the film
depend?

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 These questions are about what an event is and how we individuate and identify events. They seem to
demand an analysis of the grammar of events, an analysis that considers questions about truth and logic not only
in language but also in film. Perhaps an historical inquiry would be useful too, because perhaps we need a
natural history of the grammar of events for us linguistic, filmic animals. See Kicking Stones, Acts, Processes
and Other Events and History, The Movie.)

2. Explaining History Historically

Notice that we have wandered in to a very summary history of history. It is not unusual for a
theory of history to default into a history of history. Trustworthy or not, history is now second nature
as a mode of inquiry and as a way of accounting for things. Narrative of some sort probably always
was and now history is the type of scientific narrative.

(Note: The habit of explaining something by giving its history can become a bit slipshod, histories
being narratives, and narratives being what they are (There is too much to say here about what they are so see
Truth and Historical Narrative). Someone explains the contemporary wearing of the hijab by telling a story
about the reaction against Nasser’s secularism after The Six Day War, adds a paragraph on the adoption of the
hijab as a revolutionary gesture in Iran, and goes back to a story from the life of Mohammed to explain the
origin, intent and subsequent interpretations of verses on the hijab in the Qur’an. History may proffer such
stories as explanations but they explain only so far as the temporal situation of an event and how it unfolded after
other events may be said to explain it. They are descriptions of how something happened rather than of why
something happened. One thing implicit in such explanation is the contingency of what is being explained. If
event E had not happened then F would not or at least might not have happened; E might have caused F; things
might have been otherwise. Contingency is one thing; explicit causal explanation is a stronger kind of
explanation than narratives need resort to.)

Small wonder then that history gets used to explain, among other things, itself. This reflexive
disposition is well typified by Hegel. Not only notorious for turning thought, inquiry and experience
back on themselves — to great and lasting philosophical effect — Hegel is a great-grandfather of our
present inclination for understanding all things according to their historical character.

(Note: In The Philosophy of History Hegel described, dated and reflected on what he called ‘reflective
history’ and, by the motion of thought reflecting-on-reflective-history-itself-and-thereby-superseding it, moved
on from ‘reflective history’ to ‘philosophical history’. Hegel was nothing if not reflexive — excessively,
convolutedly, relentlessly, ridiculously, inadequately, brilliantly, trivially — depending on your take. Personally
I think Hegel was on to something. Whether it occurs as self-objectification, reflection, self-consciousness, auto-
poiesis, self-perpetuation, algorithmic recursion, or just feedback, he squeezed it for every drop of philosophical
pathos he could. The Philosophy of History is, to put it in the reflexive, convoluted way Hegelian thought can tie
you up in, a philosophical history of history-as-philosophical and philosophy-as-historical. 1 )

In The Philosophy of History, he gave an explanation of why the word ‘history’ (his word was
Geschicte) should unite two meanings: the story of what has happened; and the events themselves. In
English it unites five or six or seven meanings: the story of what has happened as well as the inquiry
that reconstructs the story and the intellectual discipline the function of which is that inquiry; and the
events themselves as well as the times in which they happened, and sometimes even the passing of
time; and sometimes even that which stands opposed to nature, i.e. culture. This essay’s opening line
about history having to defy history uses ‘history’ in its first instance to mean the story of events and
in its second to mean time’s passing. With six meanings (at present count) it is quite common to find
‘history’ used with more than one meaning in the same sentence. The danger of such meaningfulness
is ambiguity; use can become abuse. Given as it is to conceptual analysis, philosophy could hardly
avoid discerning and trying to account for the different meanings of the word.
As Hegel would and did characteristically put it, the combination of two meanings in
Geschicte is more than ‘mere outward accident’.

We must suppose historical narrations to have appeared contemporaneously with historical deeds and
events. It is an internal vital principle common to both that produces them synchronously. 2

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 (Note: Notice that this translation of Hegel says ‘we must suppose’. If he is actually telling a history
here, it is a history whose events are supposed, or, to put it charitably, inferred from evidence. It is speculative
history. As we see in philosophers like Bacon and the philosophers of the Enlightenment, the modernizing and
progressive impulse in thought has typically used a simple historical narrative to distinguish itself from the past.
More emphatically, and especially since Hegel, many have philosophized by historicizing. The modern road to
philosophical reflection often approaches through a history of ideas or a history of philosophy, typically of a
speculative kind. Consider just Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses On The Concept Of History’, Hannah Arendt’s The
Human Condition or Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Note also that just when Hegel conceives of history as
historical he also proposes two events whose historical relation is curiously detemporalised by ‘an internal vital
principle common to both that produces them synchronously’. For all his insight Hegel was not able to get too
far ahead of his time and conceive of the historical development of history with the same eye for the detail and
order of historical evolution or co-evolution as say Darwin or Nietzsche.)

We must assume, wrote Hegel, that the narration of history appears, historically, at the same time as
the emergence of the State. The State is the condition and also the result of making a permanent record
of its acts and events.

(Note: the Hegelian feedback loop here and in what follows, and how Hegel manages to tease out what
he would have called the ‘moments’ of the process of the historical development of writing, the state and history.
He uses this concept of ‘moments’ to put some history (i.e. in this case passing of time) back into history (i.e. in
this case the events themselves, namely those of the co-evolution of historical narration, the state and history,
which in this case are the events that may be understood as properly historical.)

‘It is the State which first presents subject matter that is not only adapted to the prose of history, but
involves the production of such history in the very progress of its own being.’ For its own purpose of
lasting, the state must make lasting records.

Instead of merely subjective mandates on the part of government — sufficing for the needs of the
moment — a community that is acquiring a stable existence, and exalting itself into a State, requires
formal commands and laws — comprehensive and universally binding prescriptions; and thus produces
a record as well as an interest concerned with intelligent, definite — and, in their results — lasting
transactions and occurrences.

3. Words Are Deeds

Notice that the events Hegel referred to are linguistic acts in which we do something by saying
or writing something. Commands, laws and prescriptions belong to a special class of linguistic acts
that typically describe and enact themselves all at once, in the same words and in the same statement.
The class includes proclamations (of laws), declarations (of war, treaties, rights, obligations, and
privileges), promises, vows, apologies, agreements and denials. All are social acts, fundamental to the
binding of one to another and a state and its citizens. Well known to twentieth philosophers of
language, J. L. Austin called such acts performative 3 linguistic acts.

(Note: A digression on Primary and Secondary Sources. Austin’s word for statements, or more strictly
utterances, that just describe something was constative. In contrast, those that describe and enact themselves at
the same time he called performative. (Way back in the mid 50s Austin, who was a stickler for and investigator
of ordinary language, apologised for using what he called ‘a new word and an ugly word’. Novelty and ugliness
have since turned out to make it quite popular in the jargon of the theories of art and culture, although
performative appears to have lost the distinct meaning Austin coined it for. Since Jean-Paul Lyotard used it in
The Postmodern Condition, it has grown older and more boring. Many now seem to use it as a would-be
impressive adjective suggesting of the noun it qualifies merely that it has something to do with performance
whether that is performance in art or of one’s social or economic functions.) When someone says ‘I promise to
serve the people’ they are not simply talking about the action of promising, they are actually performing the
action of promising. To resort to some more of Austin’s awkward terminology: a performative utterance is not
just a locutionary act, which is an act of saying something about such and such, it is an illocutionary act, which
is an act performed in saying something. Linguistic acts are not only about things in the world, they themselves
are things. They don’t only describe historical deeds, they are historical deeds. And when they are written and
perform themselves by describing and recording themselves, they make up a kind that is of the utmost historical

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importance. Lord Acton said ‘The chronicle is a mixture of memory, imagination and design. The charter is
reality itself’. Quoting Acton, John Burrows said of the distinction between primary and secondary sources: ‘it is
that between a document by which something was done, like an order, a commission, a charter or a contract, and
a commentary or narrative’ 4 . This is not the usual definition of primary and secondary sources. A common way
of drawing this distinction is to use the term primary source to refer to ‘a document or record or other source of
information that was created at the time under study, usually by a source with direct personal knowledge of the
events being described. It serves as an original source of information about the topic.’ A secondary source
‘relates or discusses information originally presented elsewhere’. It’s an important distinction, but it fails to pay
heed to a key evidentiary distinction that Burrow’s definition does make, a distinction between certain kinds of
events that is crucial to empirical inquiry, therefore crucial not only for historical inquiry but for the law,
philosophy and everyday life, (See ‘Acts, Processes and Other Events’). It distinguishes linguistic acts that
report, and are to that extent evidence of, other no-longer empirically observable events, from linguistic acts that
manage to survive as empirically observable historical events not only in themselves but also about themselves.

We talk about ‘making history’. Of the two meanings of history, the first kind of history is
made by those who tell the deeds and events, the second is made by those who do the deeds and act in
the events. As it is embodied in the person of a leader declaring a policy or, let’s say, in the collective
agency of a parliament passing a bill, or even an electorate voting for a parliament, the state combines
the two meanings of making history in the same way that the speaker of a performative combines self-
description and enactment in the same linguistic act.
The combination of the two meanings of history was no accident. Hegel was right about this,
but not just because the state, as the condition and the result of the permanent record of history, united
the two meanings in the historical self-consciousness of its constitution. Natural language already
united them in the combination of enactment and description in everyday illocutionary acts. And
although the state is a major subject for and player in history, the events of other social systems join
the state in the field of historical inquiry. As Hegel said, the state, for its own purpose of lasting must
make lasting records; however all events in the field of historical inquiry, not just the events of the
state, share the feature that they or their results or their products have lasted. All social systems and
institutions— the economy, the law, the sciences (including history and philosophy) the arts, religion,
education, even the family, as well as the state — had, in writing, the technology for a lasting record
and for performing linguistic deeds with lasting social results. With writing, durable artefacts could
speak, and language could become a durable artefact. Speech dies in an instant, lingers imperfectly in
memory, is only reproducible with low fidelity and typically only in mutable paraphrase or at best in
disciplined prosodic performance. Writing not only lasts, it can be copied with high fidelity. It
survives, it reproduces, it is made to survive.
The state, with its wars and leaders, has occupied primary position as the proper subject matter
of history (some would say rightly). Perhaps this inclined Hegel to give the state primacy in his
explanatory history of history. But an historical theory of history must look beyond the state, and also
past the other social systems and institutions to the technology they all came to have at their disposal.
As a history of survival, the history of history is a Darwinian rather than a Hegelian one.

4. History In Prose
‘History is prose,’ said Hegel, ‘and myths fall short of history.’ In the absence of writing,
history comes out as myth. A story’s versions form a lineage of Chinese whispers, at risk of variation
at each retelling. A story’s survival is only achieved by its adaptation to the practical circumstance of
the retelling, the entertainment and instruction of the audience, a circumstance, that encourages
editing, embellishment, and thus variation.
History is prose because writing let’s it be prose. Myths — ancient, folk or urban — must be
memorable. Memorability is the outstanding feature that fits oral stories for high fidelity reproduction
and survival. But the outstanding feature of history is truth, truth down to the finest detail.

(Note: I know about the abuses of this principle, but that’s what they are: abuses. History is full of lies. They
damage histories, but not history as such, and certainly not truth as such.)

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Prose is forgettable and writing overcame the problem. History could hardly not be prose if it was to
render truth down to the details, however refractory. It is hard to polish truth into verse and a mythic
plot without polishing away some of the rough-edged truths that make history. Prose allows plots that
myth could mostly only dream about but wouldn’t dream about, not just the plots of histories but as it
turned out those of prose fiction too.
Like history, the novel requires prose and strives to make a virtue of it. No one writes a novel
that is quite like a history or a biography though. Even a novel whose pretext is historical account is
plotted and peopled like a novel. Aristotle commented on the generic differences between history and
the narrative art of his day. Biography was too episodic; being given by history it was too hard to
schematise a generic plot from. Epic and drama were about the universal; history was about the
particular. Novels have characters and plots. As Janet Malcolm said ‘Real people seem relatively
uninteresting in comparison, because they are so much more complex, ambiguous, unpredictable, and
particular than people in novels.’ 5 History has people and ‘one damn thing after another’ or too much
detail. As Lytton Strachey said ‘The history of the Victorian age will never be written. We know too
much about it’. Seldom entirely avoiding genre, the art of the novel has consisted in the struggle to
defy it. Typically it does so by showing lived experience in the image of the genres by which we seek
inadequately to understand it. Although we may try to understand our lived experience according to
the forms supplied by genre, and so plot our experience and construct ourselves as our lives unfold,
what happens to us and history could almost be defined as what defies such plotting. Novels are prose
because history is prosaic. Only because history is more prosaic can it be stranger than fiction.

1
See the introduction to The Philosophy of History, G.W.F. Hegel, translated by J. Sibree, Kitchener Ontario,
Batoche Books, 2001, 14-22
2
Introduction to The Philosophy of History. This and the following quotes are from pages 76-7
3
See ‘Performative Utterances’ in J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, second edition edited by J.O. Urmson &
G.J. Warnock, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970, 233-252. The discussion here refers to that paper,
originally delivered on BBC radio in 1956 and published in 1961. For more detailed version of Austin’s theory
of speech acts see his 1962 How To Do Things With Words, edited by J. O. Urmson & Marina Sbisà. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
4
In John Burrow’s A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and
Thucydides to the Twentieth Century, London, Allen Lane, Penguin, 2007, 463.
5
Janet Malcolm, a persistent inquirer into these matters, said this in The Journalist and the Murderer, 122.