It's History

All of us are regularly asked to engage with the past in some way. The world is saturated by history.

But, then, a simple question: What is history? Ask fifty people and you'll get, typically, fifty shades of the same answer: History is something about a past. Whether as myth or memory, narrative or science, or found in gradients in between each, the most common denominator is a starting place in an ambiguous past, a “before now,” which is given meaning only insofar as it is connected to other things either similarly before now or, sometimes even more strangely, to things happening “now” or “later.” Obviously, this is a plain observation, an easy, even trite, simplification of the facts at hand; for those not entertained by simple linguistic reductions, however, an interesting bit comes into play when we ask a follow-up question: What is the use of history?

Nietzsche wrote, “The question of the degree to which life requires the service of history at all, however, is one of the supreme questions and concerns in regard to the health of a man, a people or a culture.” The question of history's usefulness is an old one. One answer, coming from Foucault, paraphrasing Nietzsche, is that genealogy (history's less stuffy, more freewheeling younger sibling) ought to be put to the task of untangling the binds that restrict history to domination, and exclusion. In this sense, history—as the “before now”—isn't so much “for itself” but exists only insofar as it is able to deconstruct a repressive narrative and illuminate the parts of the story that were otherwise missing. Ultimately, to White, paraphrasing Foucault (still paraphrasing Nietzsche), this project hopes to “return consciousness to an apprehension of the world as it might have existed before human consciousness appeared in the world, a world… which is neither orderly nor disorderly.”

Of course, astute readers will at once notice what I am doing, I am paraphrasing the paraphrases of paraphrasers. As some will notice, I