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The Empir(icists) strike backClive GlaserPublished online: 22 Feb 2011.

To cite this article: Clive Glaser (1999) The Empir(icists) strike back, EnglishAcademy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies, 16:1, 8-21, DOI:10.1080/10131759985310041

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The Empir(icists) Strike Back

In Defence of History, by Richard Evans (London: Granta Books, 1997) The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are

Murdering Our Past, by Keith Windschuttle (London: The Free Press, 1997) On History, by'Eric Hobsbawm (London: Abacus, 1997)

Clive Glaser

Waves of fashion always seem to arrive late in South Africa. While the hippie era was trailing off in the early 1970s, bell-bottoms and beads and peace signs flourished in South Africa. In the academic world, we had our structural Marxist phase in the 1970s, and radical social history in the 1980s. So it comes as no surprise that post-modernism is cresting in South Africa in the late 1990s while it is already beginning to ebb in the United States and Europe. Be that as it may, post-modernism is now high fashion in South Africa, and it is having a profound impact on file writing of history. Needless to say, it is unsettling to my generation of historians, we who learnt our trade during the 1980s, when social history was still hip. Though most of us have tried, at least partially, to retool, we still have lingering anxieties that we're not quite making it. So it came as a relief to stumble acloss two newish books in tile local market (as usual a little late in South Africa, especially since the hardcover versions are outlandishly expensive) written by old-style historians trying to grapple with the clmllenges of post-modernism.

During the mid .1990s, Richard Evans and Keith Windschuttle, two accomplished practising historians, one British, one Australian, felt the practice of history to be under sufficient tlu'eat from the forces of post-modernism to provoke a temporary redeployment from their relatively safe archives into the murky battlefield of lfistorical theory. The result was two books, both published in 1997, vigorously defending history and, more specifically, the empirical method traditionally associated with it. While extraordinarily erudite and tightly reasoned, In Defence of History and The Killing of History are impassioned and highly readable books. They are combative, clearly written, and packed with fascinating examples to back up their claims.

Windschuttle is more conservative than Evans. As the title of his book suggests, he is suspicious of a whole range of social theories and methodologies--from orthodox Marxism through to hermeneutics and post-sttucturali-~m--which have influenced historicalpractice in recent times. He rejects the use of rigid, preconceived theoretical models, wlfich, he argues, inevitably run roughshod over historical evidence. Evans, by contrast, is open to theoretical innovation. What he fears most in post-modernismIand this is where he and Windschuttle are in complete agreement--is its r~idical relativism, its denial of the possibility of objective knowledge. He also argues that post-modernist commentators have tended to underestimate the critical and self-reflective nature of the social history tradition. $

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THE EMPIR(ICIST)S STRIKE BACK

Windschuttle's opening chapter, 'Paris Labels and Designer Concepts', identifies, and attempts to classify, the enemy, in Australian academic circles it seems to ride under the broad banner of 'The New Humanities'. This, as described by a like-minded historian, is where 'literary studies has linked up with aspects of linguistics, usually called semiotics, and together they have explored the social relations of culture, bringing in aspects of philosophy, psychology and history' (Windschuttle 1997:9). Though disparate, what holds tile New Humanities together for Windschuttle are a powerful anti-humanism, cultural (and moral) relativism, the privileging of language (or discourse), and 'a similar set of views about file concept of knowledge, truth and science' (12). Empirical research, the basis of human and natural sciences, can never be conclusive or objective; knowledge, inevitably implicated in social power relations, can never be value-free. The New Humanities are explicitly dismissive of an 'old-fashioned concept' of history which involves describing 'what really happened in tile past'. It also insists that the boundaries between intellectual disciplines are artificial and inappropriate. The fastest growing wing of the New Humanities is Cultural Studies, an interdisciplinary field (fuelled, he argues, by a disillusionment with Marxism) which brings together media criticism, gender studies, etlmography, education and history. Though a relatively new field, 'it is attempting to stake out for itself a terrain that includes the study of just about everything il~ human society' (14). History, Windschuttle fears, will get swallowed up in this interdisciplinary mishmash, and its distinctive method will be lost.

In a very useful conceptual introduction, he makes a valiant attempt to outline the various components of this anlorphous intellectual movement that is Ioaown as post-modernism: at the centre is Derrida's deconstructionism and Foueault's power/knowledge axis. Linked to these is the critique of grand narratives of progress, especially the Enlightenment, its evil offspring, 'modemity', and Marxism. To this we can add New Historicism, which subjects all historical writing mad sources to literary criticism, and which ultimately collapses the distinction between fiction and the practice of history, and 'postcolonialism', which argues that Western culture over the last tlu'ee hundred years 'has been moulded by the fact of European world dominance and settlement' (32). Windschuttle, unconvinced by these new trends, defends a kind of intuitive empiricism, 'looking at the records of tile past, accumulating facts, and then using these facts to construct an explanation of what happened and why' (22). In one chapter Windschuttle attempts to defend his atheoretical methodology philosophically, but ultimately he is far more convincing when he is dealing with concrete examples of historical practice.

By the end of the first chapter some readers may have dismissed Windschuttle as an out- of-touch fuddy-duddy, which would be a pity, because the strongesl--and most enjoyable~ sections of tile book follow. He dissects several specific contemporary historical debates, and in each case-study demonstrates that empirical approaches have produced more convincing interpretations than their post-modern counterparts. His most telling examples deal with early contact between European explorers/colonists and native people. It is worth going into some detail on the chapter devoted to the Spanish colonial victory over the Mexica, not only because it is a compelling story, but also because it epitomizes Windschuttle's approach.

Between 1519 and 1521 Hernando Cortes, with a band of about 500 soldiers, conquered Tenochtitlan (occupying the same space as modern Mexico City), a city of some 200,000

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people, with a vast tributary empire. By the 1500s the Mexica of Tenochtitlan dominated most of the other Aztec groups of the central plains of Mexico. The city was one of the greatest in the wodd at the time, with sophisticated aqueducts and causeways, a massive market-place, and temples which dwarfed contemporary European cathedrals. The Spanish victory was a decisive moment in the colonial advance into the Americas. How this conquest was possible remains one of the most intriguing problems of early colonial American history. Decades of cumulative empirical research, Windschuttle argues, can now offer three broad material explanations. First, the colonists' military technology was much more advanced; most strikingly, the use of cavalry, muskets and cannon were alien to the Mexica. Second, Tenoehtitlan, through its harsh system of tributary exaction and often brutal repression of surrounding nations, had made many enemies. Cones was able to incorporate thousands of Aztecs, eager to topple the Mexica regime, into his own army. Ultimately the city was not destroyed by a small band of Spanish soldiers alone, but by a substantial army which included thousands of local recruits. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Mexica had little resistance against foreign disease, especially smallpox, which had been introduced to the continent by the Spanish soldiers (and the spread of disease was exacerbated by Cortes's tactic of cutting off the city's fresh water-supply through destroying its major aqueduct). Far more died from smallpox than at the hands of the invading army. These conclusions are based on careful readings of missionary and colonial records, archaeological evidence and oral tradition.

Windschuttle then looks at the post-modem laistorical critique, concentrating on the work of Tzvetan Todorov (1985). Todorov argues that these material explanations are inadequate, that the key to the problem lies rather in understanding the culture and communication system of the opposing camps. The Aztecs, as a non-literate society, had a highly ritualized culture based on an inflexible cosmology rather than cumulative knowledge. Cones was initially treated as a god (historians agree that he was initially welcomed in 1519, and it was only several months later that hostilities deepened). His arrival could be explained in tenns of the Aztec cosmology, but, once war broke out, their belief in Spanish divinity was paralysing. The Mexica response was fatalistic rather than adaptive. Even their fighting techniques were ritualized and utterly inappropriate against a well-organized army attempting to kill, as opposed to capturing, the enemy. Cones, by contrast, epitomized European culture. His first instinct was to gather knowledge, he was adaptable, he communicated effectively and he was goal-oriented. Todorov's central argument, according to Windschuttle, 'is that it was European culture that triumphed in Mexico, thanks to its superiority in the art o f semiotics" (48). Windschuttle's critique is damning. He claims that Todorov's argument is neither original nor based on reliable evidence. Ironically, the post-modem version dovetails With an orthodox colonial account of 1840 which concentrated on the 'superstitious', 'irrational' nature of native society, and asserted the cultural superiority of the Europeans! The notion of Spanish divinity is drawn from an uncritical reading of Christian missionary records. Sixteenth-century Spanish monks, it appears, were the inventors of the Cortes god myth. 'In other words it was European culture that was predisposed to the belief that the natives regarded the strangers as gods, not the other way around' (50). Moreover, there is substantial evidence that Mexica society changed through time, that it was not locked in a cultural or

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teclmological time-warp. The architectural and engineering achievements of Tenochtitlan alone are evidence enough of that. And it is also clear that the Mexiea did begin to learn and adapt militarily as the siege of the city persisted. Windschuttle concludes that the post-modem interpretation has added little to our understanding of Spanish colonial penetration. In the following chapter he uses a similar approach to discredit file accounts ofMarshaU Sahlins and Greg Dening in the debate (remarkably similar in its patterns to the Cortes one) over Captain Cook's encounter with the natives of Hawaii.

In one bruising chapter, Windschuttle confronts Foueault head-on. He outlines Foucault's key philosophical and historical assertions, and then attempts to assess his contribution as a lfistorian. Although Foucault is scornful of the concept of objective historical knowledge, and dismisses the use of footnotes as a mere rhetorical device to make truth claims more authoritative, Windschuttle insists that Foucault can, and should, be challenged on empirical grounds:

Whatever view one takes about the ability of historians to free themselves from the perspective of their times, it remains nonetheless true that Foucault's own work and that of his critics is constructed through the use of empirical data and information: the number of inmates in asylums, the dates of penal reforms, the words of the texts of reformers of medical and disciplinary regimes.... What decides these issues is actually the empirical data that is being deployed, and appealed to, by both sides.

054)

Drawing on a number of critical works, Windschuttle demonstrates the serious inaccuracies in Foucault's histories. His periodization, for instance, of 'the great confinement' and penal reform are up to a hundred years out. He also appears to have overlooked vital internal debates and contradictions within these movements. This is not mere pedantry; these are, after all, key moments for Foueault in the defining of his epistemes. These empirical issues have a direct bearing on the character of the Enlightenment. And Foucault's virtual refusal to cite sources makes it impossible to interrogate his interpretation of data.

For historians, Foucault is a frustrating figure to deal with. His empirical research is desperately sloppy, and many of his observations are, therefore, inaccurate. His epistemes are incorrectly periodized, and his denial of continuities between them is absurd. His concept of power is maddeningly vague. Yet what Windschuttle fails to acknowledge is that he asks wonderful historical questions. Like Marx, Foucault's answers are mostly wrong (or very crude), but his questions cannot be ignored. He has, for instance, inspired new areas of inquiry into the complicated relationship between power and "knowledge, the workings of institutions, mechanisms of surveillance, and the construction of 'normality'.

Similarly, in Windschuttle's case-studies, Sahlins, Dening and Todorov may have massaged the evidence to suit their dogmatic theoretical frameworks, and they may have hugely undervalued material explanations, but for many their work will remain compelling because they do ask intriguing questions about cultures and semiotic systems. While Windschutlle is probably correct to reject their collclusions, he may be too hasty in dismissing their lines of inquiry.

This is where Evans and Windschuttle diverge. Whereas both insist on the constraint of II

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empirical evidence, Evans w61comes new perspectives and techniques into history. 'Drawing the disciplinary drawbridge,' he argues, 'has never been a good idea for historians. For centuries they have profited immeasurably from the invasion of neighbouring disciplines....Why not influences from literary criticism and linguistic analysis as well?' (8). The challenge for Evans is to enter into constructive dialogue with post-modernism, to expose those elements which undermine the basic integrity of the historians' trade, and embrace those that are useful.

Much of the first third of In Defence examines internal debates within the history profession. Conlrary to popular belief within the post-modernist movement, historians have constantly grappled with the limits of objectivity. Only the most extreme (and almost entirely discredited) positivist faction has suggested that reaiity can be read offneatly from documents, or that historians earl dissociate' themselves from contemporary polities or discourse. Most h~storians accept E.H. Cart 's insistence that facts are partial and provisional. And, from Ranke onwards, historians have been taught to interrogate and eontextualize historical sources, even to search for the silences and be sensitive to modes of expression. 'Reading against the grain,' Evans argues, 'has been the stock-in-trade of the profession for a very long time' (1997:81). Geoffrey Elton's view 'that there is only one legitimate way to read a document' was marginalizod within the profession long before the post-modern critique. For Evans, 'it is obvious that our way of reading a source d~rives principally from our present-day concerns and from questions that present-day theories and ideas lead us to formulate. Nor is there anything wrong with this' (84). Historians can adopt radically different theoretical approaches, but they are united in the belief that interpretations need to be tested against available ewdence. 'The first prerequisite of the serious historical researcher must be the ability to jettison dearly-herd interpretations in the face of the recalcitrance of the evidence' (120).

There is a general recognition that the surviving documentary record is fragmentary, and that what survives is very often ideologically and politically determined. Yet this does not invalidate the labour of assembling whatever sources are" available, reading them critically, and balancing them off against one another to patch together a c6herent narrative, albeit incomplete and open to contestation. While the meaning of texts may be difficult to pin down exactly, Evans insists that it can be contained within certain parameters:

As historians, we clearly cannot recover a single, unalterably 'true' meaning of a dispatch simply by reading it; on the oth~r hand, we cannot impose any meaning we wish to on such a text either. We are ,;!~ited by tile words it contains, words which are not, 'contrary to what the post-modernists sugg~.st, capable zf an infinity of meaning. And the limits which the language of the text imposes on the possibilities of interpretation are set ~o a large extent by the or'ginal author.

006)

'Interpretations,' he goes on to argue, 'really can be tested and confirmed or thlsified by an appeal to the evid~,,ace; and some of the time at least, it really is possible to prove that one side is right and the other is wrong' (120).

In line with their attachment to evidence, most historians will defend the separation of primary and secondary sources, even ff they accept a certain blurring at the edges. Texts

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"17-1E EMI'IR(ICIST)S STRIKE 13,4 CK

cannot be treated as undifferentiated, as eqnally unreliable in telling us what happened. They do have to be assessed according Io their distance, in time and space, from real events. And this process of assessing evidence has to be made as transparent as possible to the reader. Historians add footnotes not merely to create a 'reality effect' but to open their use of sources to scrutiny, to allow readers to follow up sources and contest their interpretations. Footnotes do make historical writing more authoritative--for good reason. (It would be wonderfully liberating, of course, to invent sources to use simply as rhetorical garnish. But other historians, boringly thorough as they tend to be, often read and follow up footnotes, so the practice would be extremely risky.)

According to the Foucaultian notion of epistemes, a dominant discourse prevails in society which limits disagreement. Texts are merely 'ideological products' of the dominant discourse. In the case of history, the dominant version of the past is determined purely by power, and has nothing to do with the evidence or accuracy of research. The profession of history has in fact been one of the central whipping-boys of the post-modem critique. The profession is seen as an integral part of the modernist project. Whether consciously or unconsciously, historians, it has been argued, reinforce the ideology of the powerful with their insistence on empirical ('scientific') method, obscuring their ideological underpinnings with their claims to objectivity. (Some post-modem historians would go so far as to insist that the only legitimate history is historiography, in other words, a self-referential exercise in which the historian becomes the subject-matter). Historians are apparently hugely powerful within the institution of the university, which in rum is seen to be the key manufacturer of knowledge in society, at the very heart of the power/knowledge axis. Evans finds this line of attack baffling:

[P]ublic knowledge of the past--public memory, in other wordsIhaS always been structured by influences other than professional historians, from folksong, myth and tradition to pulp fiction, broadsheets and the popular press. The thrust of professional history has more often been towards puncturing the cliches of popular historical myth than towards sustaining them. Moreover, from the outset, professional historians have usually addressed themselves to an educated minority. To regard university-trained professional historians as simple one-way producers of historical knowledge which structures public perceptions of the past is to overestimate their public influence several times over.

(207)

Historians, especially since the 1980s, have, at best, been sniping from the sidelines. They have little social prestige, and command very low salaries on the professional scale. Their work is only very selectively (and rarely with any sense of the nuances of contestation) used in school textbooks. Organs of the State rarely look at, let alone take seriously, their analyses of society. 'To regard them.., as some kind ofhegemonic 61ite,' Evans observes wryly, 'is sadly inaccurate' (209). They have to fight to be heard. Unless, of course, they happen to be saying something those in power want to hear.

Historians are as likely to challenge as reinforce the dominant order. Whereas much--but by no means a l l I o f t h e history of the first half of the twentieth century was 61itist in its focus, the influential (some would argue hegemonic) social history tradition, especially since the 1960s, has focused precisely on those elements of society who lack access to power, who

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have been left out of 61itist history. Social history aims to assert their everyday experience into the mainstream of history and expose the social inequalities (whether racial, class, gendered, generational, etc.) that have marginalized them. 'When a post-modernist historian argues in the mid-1990s for a "rediscovery of history's losers",' an exasperated Evans comments, 'one wonders what planet he has been living on for the last thirty years' (213). Perhaps the most important point of all is that historians are by no means homogenous. They vary widely in terms of political sympathies, methodologies, styles, interpretations. Their disagreements can be fundamental and passionate. Perhaps some are immersed in the dominant discourse (if, in fact, it is possible to identify one). Certainly many are part of an oppositional or subversive discourse. And a great many would be difficult to place within any discursive mainstream at all.

Social historians, damned if they do and damned if they don't, have been attacked from another post-modem angle: they have illegitimately usurped the voices of the powerless for their own ends. How can middle-class intellectuals (usually wlfite and male) presume to speak on behalf of the 'subaltern'? The logic of identity politics dictates that an historian can only write about her own community or identity formation. Of course, there are ethical and methodological complications in researching 'the Other', but it becomes difficult to imagine how history would ever get written if these rules were strictly, adhered to. After all, by becoming an educated intellectual, even with a working-class background, the historian is automatically distanced from subordinate groups. And personal identities are so complicated and overlapping that an individual historian is unlikely ever to fit neatly into any group of people. As Evans puts it: 'In the end, no history would be possible, only autobiography' (213). Surely it is better for 'history from below' to be written by cultural aliens than not at all? Certainly there are advantages to being culturally familiar with the historical subjects, but there are also potential pitfalls. Distance can be useful in gaining a broader pictm'e or in analysing commonly held myths. The best historians are culturally sensitive, and, however imperfectly, try to imagine themselves in the context of their historical subjects. For Evans, 'History is as much about the obviously other as it is about the seemingly familiar' (214). We accept either this imperfect situation'or professional paralysis.

Windsehuttle's and Evans's 1997 counter-offensive was reinforced by the publication in the same year of Eric Hobsbawrn's collection of methodological essays, On History. Hobsbawm, One of the longest surviving heavyweight historians of the post-war era, also recognizes, though perhaps somewhat more calmly, the threat of post-modem relativism. Though most of the twenty-odd essays in the collection are rather dated, two grapple directly with post-modernism. 'Post-modernism in the Forest' and 'Identity History Is Not Enough' (originally published in 1990 and 1994 respectively) echo many of Wiudschuttle's and Evans's concerns, especially on issues of cultural relativism and empirical verification.

The 1990 piece is a review article of Richard Price's Alabi's World, a study of an independent runaway slave community in Surinam. Hobsbawm, though impressed with this "splendid effort to recover the past' of an historically marginalized people, is exasperated by the presentation of the book. Believing that Western categories and narrative techniques inevitably colonize the history of its subjects, Price pretends to avoid authorial intrusion. He assembles a polyphony of apparently unmediated voices, his authorial voice merely one

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THE EMP1R('ICIST)S STRIKE BACK

amongst the others. Then, in a notes and appendices section as long as the book itself, he offers historical background, analysis and empirical detail. For Hobsbawm this is nothing but sleight of hand. Ultimately, in the way sources are arranged and juxtaposed, Price is firmly in control of the narrative, anyway. And, Hobsbawm argues, people interested in the history of Maroon communities would find the notes section far more valuable than the body of the book! As far as he is concerned, it is the job of the historian to pull together a narrative analysis based on a variety of sources. There ought to be no shame in authorial authority.

In the 1994 article Hobsbawm asks the question: are all historical perspectives e , ' la l? His answer is a resounding no. Like Evans, he refuses to accept that, in the most extreme case, Holocaust denial should be given equal status to the story of the ttolocaust. Why? Because the evidence is overwhelming for the latter. Empirical evidence is the ultmmte arbiter, ttistorians are influenced by theories and politics, but 'the difference between historical fact and falsehood is not ideological' (359). What historians write about, and how they arrange their narratives, are without doubt culturally and politically influenced. But 'what we eannot do without ceasing to be historians is to abandon the criteria of our profession. We cannot say what we can show to be untrue. In this we differ from those whose discourse is not so constrained' (365).

So how should historians deal with the post-modern onslaught? Windschuttle is clearly a bittereinder, but Evans is quite willing to negotiate. (Hobsbawm's position, though less explicit, is probably similar to Evans's). While his tongue can be sharp, Evans's approach to post-modernism is subtle and conciliatory. The movement, he argues, is not universally hostile to the practice of history. ' I f some post-modernists.., embrace an extreme scepticism which denies the possibility of historical knowledge altogether, others adopt a more moderate position in which the writing of history is still at least a possibility' (243). Moreover, he acknowledges many achievements of the movement:

They have opened up possibilities of self-renewal for the historical discipline, suggesting a way out of the historical impasse into which social determinism, above all in its Marxist variants, had run by the beginning of the 1990s. That is not to say that post-modernist history is necessarily always as novel as it frequently takes itself to be, but it has both extended the range of historical writing and breathed new life into some old and rather tired subjects like .. the history of ideas. Historical writing on that great and problematic phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nationalism, for example, can only benefit from a shift of focus from the social bases of nationalist movements to the sources and determinants of changing senses and meanings of national identity. A concern with gender and ethnicity, as aspects of social inequality which depend at least as much on discursive construction: identity as they do on... identifiable physical characteristics, can only enrich a social history impoverished by a restrictive concentration on class.

(243-244)

And he goes on to observe: "Post-modernism in its more constructive modes has encouraged historians to look more closely at documents, to take their surface patina more seriously, and to think about texts and narratives in new ways' (248). For Evans, then, it is only the radica', relativist element which obstructs constructive dialogue. H ~. is happy to negotiate a settlement

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with post-modernism as long as the extremists are disarmed.

II

Meanwhile, the South African social history tradition, highly influential in the English- speaking historiography between tile late 1970s and the early 1990s, is facing a major challenge from post-modernism. While the movement was gathering force overseas, social history was initially shielded by the radical intelligentsia's preoccupation with tile anti- apartheid struggle. Once apartheid collapsed, social history was fully exposed to a frantic new search for ideas. Although, broadly, post-modem work on South Africa, in terms of publications, is relatively thin, the balance of power has clearly shifted. While a theoretical critique of social history has bombarded its flank, the post-modem influence has become increasingly noticeable in the writing of history.

So far, the criticism is far more vigorous than the alternative history itself. Two broad sets of criticism have been levelled at the South African social history school during the 1990s. The first set deals with its apparent lack of innovation and 'reflexivity' in methodology; the second (related) set views social history as bound to a teleological, modernist grand narrative. (See, for example, Minldey and Rassool 1998, and Robinson 1994.)

Methodologically, the accusations are familiar: 'under-theorization', or an unsophisticated 'reading off' of objective reality from source material; a refusal to incorporate deconstmctionist techniques in dealing with written and oral sources; a failure to treat ideas and discourses as powerful autonomous historical forces. As in other regional historiographies, post-modernists have hugely underestimated social historians' sophistication in dealing with sources and problems of objectivity. South African social historians have never laid claim to incontestable truth. Nevertheless, some of these accusations need to be taken seriously. Social historians have often allowed theh" theoretical assumptions to remain implicit; few have invested in learning the difficult language and method of deconstruction; they have tended to overplay the material at the expense of the ideological. As suggestions about how historians might improve their techniques or widen their horizons, post-modernist criticisms are useful. But as long as we accept that there is an extra-textual reality, they are merely points of emphasis; they do not demand a fundamental reorientation. Deconstructioh might add to our analytic armoury, but it is surely not the only valid way to interpret a source. And, while a heightened interest in ideology and patterns of discourse can only be a good thing, it would be counter-productive if it displaced materialist analysis. These are debates about how we do history rather than whether we do history.

The second set of criticisms are expressed most typically by Minldey and Rassool (1998). They. argue that social history in the 1980s uncritically reinforced one of two 'parallel and compatible resistance narratives', the one class-based and the other nationalist. 'People's history' was self-consciously seen as a weapon of empowerment, and 'both-narratives drew on the notion of the community as metaphor for everyday experience, as the place for locating divergent strands of political consciousness' (92-93). Oral history, they argue, was the key tool of social historians, designed to raise the authentic voice of the oppressed masses. 'We wish to suggest that social history in South Africa brought together modernist appropriations

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of oral discourses with nationalist and eulturalist teleologies of resistance to generate a grand narrative of experience, read as a "history from below"' (94). In this interpretation the voices of the powerless were usurped and used as mere 'allegories' to justify a particular political practice. They suggest that 'the ironic consequence of many previous attempts to place categories of people "hidden from history" at the centre of historical studies "from below" was that these studies had deepened their marginalization and perpetuated their special status' (98).

While the social history tradition in the 1980s, like all traditions, had its hacks, it was far more diverse and critical than this picture suggests. It is true that social historians were usually politically committed individuals who were concerned to expose the evils of apartheid, but very few adhered comfortably to either the Marxist or nationalist narrative. Nor were the two narratives easily compatible. The left-inclined were suspicious of African nationalism, and constantly warned about the dangers of a new black 61ite replacing the white one. Social historians were often very critical of a simplistic stnlggle narrative, adding nuance to notions of 'collaboration' (see especially Marks 1986), and revealing often paralysing disunities within so-called communities. Social historians were in fact amongst the first to challenge the uncritical concept of community. Though often concentrating on episodes of resistance, they were not afraid to focus on acquiescence. Themes of interual disunity, quietude and collaboration were obvious to any observer of the regular History Workshop conferences (see Bozzoli 1987, Bonner et al. 1989, and Bonner et al. 1993). Most social historians were deeply critical of class essentialism; they rejected rigid Mode of Produclion models (Kccgan 1986, Beinart et al. 1986), and asked searching questions abont class identity (or the lack of it). As Norman Etherington has pointed out, 'You will search in vain for Marxist meta-narratives m their books and articles.' In fact, if anything, they tended towards a 'Radical pessimism' (Etherington 1996:12). In the early 1980s they were admiltedly slow to take ethnicity seriously as a social identity because of the way it was manipulated by apartheid governments. But this attitude shifted in the second half of the decade(see Marks and Trapido 1987, and Delius's chapter in Bonnet el al. 1989). And they pioneerhd gender and generation as autonomous concepts of analysis in Sou/h Africa. (For good examples on gender see Walker 1990, Bozzoli 1991, and on generatiou see Beinart 1982, Delius 1983, Delius 1996, van Onselen 1996). The idea of complex personal identity, usually associated with post-, modernism, was certainly part of the social history mainstream by the mid 1980s.

The problem with grand narrative theory is that it is too cfl,~e. Intellectual movements, like human identities, are messy and slippery. They cannot be contained in neat discursive straitjackets. Post-modernists, who see themselves as the great opponents oil essentialism, are often remarkably inflexible when it comes to their narrative and epistemic categories.

The contention that experiments in 'history from below' have deepened marginalization is absurd. Historians all have their personal and political agendas, but if in the process they highlight social inequality and place subaltern groups into the mainstream of history, how can it possibly deepen marginalization? How, for instance, can opening up the history of oppression and violence in the household possibly marginalize women further'? Of course, politicians will try to manipulate these voices to their own ends, hut even so it can only benetit

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oppressed groups to be recognized as co~ stituencies with potential political .clout. And having a history might just help to give some people more of a sense of common identity and more confidence to tackle the inequalities they face. What are the alternatives for historians? Is it preferable to fall into the contradictory trap of polyphony that H0bsbawm identifies? Or should we content ourselves with. deconstructing the voices of the marginalized and identifying the power relations embedded within their discourses? Is this. any less of a usurpation? Or should we abandon attempts to democratize history altogether and go back to the history of 61ites?

In terms of published output, the South'-~ican social history school has continued to outstrip the emergent post-modern history throughout the .1990s. Many of the best known social historians have produced highly, acclaimed books in the last few years. By contrast, only three distinctively post-modem books on South African history spring to mind: Adam Ashforth's The .Politics of Official Discourse (1990), CliRon Crais's The Making of the Colonial Order (1992), and Aletta Norval's Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse (1996). Using Foficaultian insights into the power/knowledge axis and the nature of modernist science, Ashforth carefully analyses the discourse of crucial government commissions in South Africa from the Native Affairs Commission (1903-1905) to the Riekert and Wiehahn Commissions (1977-1981). This book undoubtedly makes a valuable contribution to South African historiography, but it is quite modest in its in:entions..Rather than' attempting to shiR paradigms, it offers new insights into government ideology..Crais?s work on the Easter Cape frontier has much Foucaultian. and post-modern packaging, but ultimately builds only very incrementally on a substantial body of radical frontier historiography..Though he emphasizes 'structures of thought' and the nature of modernity, thel'e is nothing strikingly new in the book. His central argument that Cape liberalism was 'Janus-faced'~ that racism was extended and

, * ' t 7 ° . .

institutionalized under the modermzmg regime of the Bntlsh, was pre-empted by the Marxist revisionists of the 1970s, who constantly alerted us to the fact that the British armies dispossessed indigenous people, that passes and group areas acts were ~ invention of British colonialism, etc. The revisionist periodization may have'been slightly different, but they were always highly sceptical of the humanitarian claims of liberalism. Norval, probably, the most authentically post-modem of the three, asserts the importance of discourse in trying to understand, the phenomenon of apartheid. Though she does not dismiss materialist expianations, she insists that discourses matter profoundly, that they, too, shape history. Apa/theid was only one possible response to material conditions, and a careful, discursive analysis is necessary to explain why it established hegeniony over other contesting discourses. For Norval, apartheid managed to maifitain a 'horizon of intelligibility' for a large section of white South Africa. Once the discourse lost its intelligibility, or its inter al coherence, its hegemony was plunged into crisis. Although Norva. does make vast claims for the autonomous power of ideas, even she accepts that the material is important, that it is possible to reconstruct a tentative picture of what really happened. Some may argue that Ashforth, Crais and Norval overstate the power of ideas, but they are not destructive in intent. They acknowledge the important work of other historians, and add to, rather than rupture, our understanding Of the South African past. There is no reason why social" historians, historians generally, should feel threatened by them.

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1 HE EMPIR(ICIST)S 8TR1KE BACK

Given that it is at least a decade since post-modem philosophy burst into the mainstream of South African studies, and given the influence it now has in English-speaking South African universities, it is surprising how little distinctively post-modem output there has been in tile field of history. Perhaps it is because, as Etherington argues, 'post-modem scepticism about the possibilities of knowledge of the past makes it at best an uncolnfortable bedfellow of historical scholarship' (1996:12). Post-modem historians generally prefer to stand outside of historiography, to critique historical narratives rather than to produce new ones. They are well positioned to comment on public history (for a good example, see Nuttall and Coetzee 1998), rather than to participate in its production. The influence of post-modernism on history writing has been subtle. Social historians, ,,vithout fundamentally changing their methodology or narrative techniques, have quietly incorporated some post-modern ideas which they find helpful. There has also been a general resurgence in the history of ideas and institutions (see, for example, Posel 1991 and Dubow 1995). Writers like Isabel Hofineyr (1993) and Carolyn Hamilton (1998) have successfully straddled both traditions, simultaneously presenting carefidly researched narratives about what happened in the past and exploring the construction of historical discourses.

In South African studies, then, the post-modern threat to history is exaggerated. It is important to differentiate, as Evans does, between those strands of post-modernism which are interpretively and methodologically innovative, and those which are radicaJly relativist (which resist that tnlth is determined by power alone, that we are able to study nothing but language structure and c~micsti~lg discourses, wilich deny the value of empirical verific~tion). The moderate post-modernists cau potentially enrich history, especially in the way they attempt to correct the imbalance between material explanations and the discursive/ideological. Undoubtedly, many 'traditional' historians will challenge their claims vigorously, or simply be uninterested in their specialized concerns. But at least they are entering the fray, submitting themselves to historical debate, accepting that there are certain intellectual rules by which those ideas can be judged. The kind of negotiation that Evans calls for is already beginning to happen. But as most social historians are lowering the drawbridge and learning to accept change, the post-modernists will have to meet them halfway. Some of their cruder historical categories, such as the monolith of modernity, will have to be used with more nuance (and perhaps less moralizing) to become convincing. And if discourse theorists are going to movc beyond a dialogue with themselves they are going to have to learn to commtmicate more accessibly (they are not going to win over too many sceptics by claiming that obscurity of language, or that deliberate slippage of meaning, is desirable). On the whole, there is no reason why this exchange of ideas should not be fruitful.

Though it may be losing some ground to a potentially amorphous Cultural Studies, the most serious threat to history in South Africa doesn't come from post-modernism. Far more alarming is the decline of public interest in history since tl'e collapse of apartheid. Whichever way we look at it, the fight against apartheid was a spectacular historical ne.rrative, and it sucked politicized young people into the discipline. Understandably, the post-apartheid generation of students wants degrees that will give them jobs. "Ihere is little enthusiasm for the past. Politicians trot out certain crude historical narratives which suit their purpo:,es, largely

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ignoring the complexities and discordances raised by the social historians of the 1980s. The interest in history ma~ swing back, especially as social problems deepen. In the meantime, all of us interested in a complex understanding of the past, empiricist and po-mo alike, have an uphill struggle to convince the South African public that our work is still important.

References.

Ashforth, Adam. 1990. The' Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Beinart, William. 1982. The Political Economy of Pondoland 1860-1930. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. , Peter Ddius and Stanley Trapido (eds). 1986 Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and

Dispossession m South Africa 1850-1930. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Bormer, Phil, Isabel Hofmeyr, Deborah James and Tom Lodge (eds). 1989. Holding Their Ground. Class,

Locality and Culture in 19 'h and 20 th Century South Africa. Johannesburg: Ravan Press and Witwatersrand University Press.

• Peter Delius and Deborah Posel (eds). 1983. Apartheid's Genesis 1935-1962 Johannesburg: Ravan Press and Witwatersrand University Press.

Bozzoli, Belinda (ed.). 1987. Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

with Mmantho Nkotsoe. 1991. Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strdtegy, and Migrancy m South Africa 1900-1983. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

Crais, Clifton. 1992. The Making of the Colonial Order: White Supremacy and Black Resistance in the, Eastern Cape, 1770-1865. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Delius, Peter. 1983. The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Pohty, The Boers and the British in the Nineteenth Century Transvaal. Johannesburg: Ravan Press

• 1996. A Lion amongst the Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance #l the Northern Tran.,'vaal. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

Dubow, Saul. 1995. Illicit Uffion: Scientific Racism m Modern South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni~/ersity Press.

Etherington, Norman. 1996. Pc-too and SA History. Southern African Review of Books. July/August. 10-12. Hamilton, Carolyn. 1998. Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical

Invention. Cape Town: David Philip. Hofmeyr, Isabel. 1993. 'We spend our years as a tale that is toM': Oral Historical Narrative m a South

African Chiefdom Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Keegan, Tim. 1986. Rural Transformations in htdustrializing South Africa: The Southern HighveM to 1914.

Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Marks, Shula. 1986. The Ambigttities oj Dependence in Southern Africa: Class, Nationalism and the State m

Twentieth-Century Natal. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. - - and Stanley Trapido (eds). 1987. The Politics of Roce, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century

South Africa. Harlow: Longman. Minkley, Gary and Ciraj Rassool. 1998. Orality, Memory and Social History in South Africa. In Sarah Nuttall.

and Carli Coetzee (eds). Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory m South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. 89-99.

Norval, Aletta J. 1996. Deconstructing ApartheM Discourse. London: Verso. Nuttall, Sarah and Carli Coetzee (eds). 1998. Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory m South Africa.

Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Posel, Deborah. 1991. The ~laking of ApartheM 1948-1961: Conflict and Compromise. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

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Robinson, Jennifer. 1994. (Dis)locating Historical Narrative: Writing, Space and Gender in South African Social History. South African Historical Journal 30 (May): 143-157.

Van Onselen, Charles. 1996. 7he SeedlsMine: The Life of KasMame. Cape Town: David Philip. Walker, Cheryl (ed). 1990. Women and Gender in South Africa to 1945. Cape Town: David Philip

Will iam Bedford Clark

Nothing Personal *

Today the dossiers sit at the head Of tile long table where the Chair convenes Our meeting: ' What we say must not be said Outside this room.' We adopt this strict means Against litigation. Bile and rumour Move among us as silent witnesses, While we debate journals, imprints, ardour In the classroom, what a reviewer says.

"Six years, up or out! Nothing personal...' But the grim stakes are higher still, for we Are in the dock; each candidate's record Serves as rebuke or vindication. All Here must judge themselve s too and secretly Cower in what peace tenure may afford.

* Reprinted by pennisslon of Tral|saclion Publishers from Academic Questions I I(I), Wmler 1997-98 Copyright 1997 by I rm~sattmn Publishers, all rights reserved.

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